Paranormal Activity: The Buzz review

I was too aftraid to see this film so I sent Caroline White along to get the skinny on this horror phenomenon

The creation of Paranormal Activity is a celluloid Cinderella story. The Blair Witch-style horror flick was made for $10,000 by video games designer Oren Peli, who used his own home as the set and two unknown actors in the lead roles, yet it has reached number 1 at the US box office and earned $90 million in the process.

As you may have read in Kevin Maher’s piece, the film benefitted from a clever marketing campaign that targeted college students, but the film’s real genius is in the simple principle that a plot is more scary if the audience can relate to it.

Katie Featherston, a student and Micah Sloat, a trader (the characters share the actors’ real names) are a young couple living in an airy modern house in San Diego. The film consists of supposedly “found footage” recorded by Micah on a video camera, which he bought to ascertain the cause of the strange sounds Katie hears at night. He sets the camera up in the corner of their bedroom, and over the course of a week, we see what goes bump in the night while they sleep.

There is no gore and few special effects, yet because the footage is shot through a home video-camera – which we expect to represent the world truthfully – a door closing and opening a couple of inches, becomes truly chilling.

This property of home-video footage made the The Blair Witch Project a hit, but Peli’s movie is arguably more chilling.

Where the hysterical cast of The Blair Witch Project dashed around some distant woods and met their ends in an evil crone’s hovel, Katie or Micah could be you (assuming you’re in the films target young professional demographic), that flat could be yours and everyone has heard creaks in the night that they couldn’t explain.

The film solidifies that occasional frisson of fear you dismiss at four o’clock in the morning, and says, “actually, perhaps you should worry about that”.

It works horribly well. See it on the big screen, but you might want to pitch a tent in the garden for when you get home, because as Peli knows all too well, at some point tonight, you too will have to go to sleep.