In the long list of things that Nigel Tufnel was right about, “there’s a fine line between stupid and clever” is right up near the top. Which side of that line Paranormal Activity falls on has been bedeviling me since I (finally) saw it Halloween afternoon. Just by way of a for instance, while we chatted about the film in the lobby, I complained to the folks I saw it with about the demonologist who never barked. If the filmmakers were never going to actually put him in the movie, why introduce the concept in the first place? It left me with this weird sensation that either a chunk of the movie had gone missing, or the filmmakers just didn’t have that much of a grasp on what they were doing. But then my wife theorized that maybe that truncated feeling was the point–the movie gets you believing that this demonologist will show up “in a few days,” so when the end comes and he’s still nowhere in sight, it’s all the more shocking. Which got me to thinking about how I’d spent most of the movie believing the climax would come on the night of October 31st, only for the proceedings to stop short several weeks before then. Then there was my brother’s paranormal-buff fiancee, who “explained” that this kind of haunting had to be “a demonic” rather than the work of a (formerly) human entity, so they needed to address this (the psychic telling them to hire a demonologist) without actually allowing it to fix the problem (Micah puts off calling him, and when Katie finally does, he’s out of town). You could probably go back and forth about all the other loose ends–the house fire, Katie’s sister, the haunting of Diane back in the ’60s–in a similar fashion.
Ditto the believability of the two main characters. I found Micah’s desire to get to the bottom of the haunting rather than wave the white flag, even when this ran counter to Katie’s express wishes, a totally credible trait; amusingly, my wife found his behavior so dickish as to shatter her suspension of disbelief. On the flip side, I thought the seams really showed on Katie’s performance during scenes where she was obviously required to express a certain sentiment or say a certain line; The Missus found her compelling and her story sad. That part we agree on, at least, which is why this post analogizing the story arc of Paranormal Activity to domestic violence has lodged itself in my head the way it has. Overall, again, it’s difficult to say whether the shortcomings of the characters are simply the fault of them as characters or the result of poor choices by the filmmakers.
And the scares? As I alluded to the other day, the film shares with The Hurt Locker a structural advantage: The second you’re placed in a certain environment (a mission/bedtime), you in the audience are prepped to have the shit scared out of you (by an explosion/by the haunting). Both films smartly let you do most of the work for them, letting you sit there, hearing the pounding of the blood in your ears, straining toward the screen to see what happens yet pushing back in your chair dreading it as well. Paranormal has the added advantage of doing for bedrooms what Psycho did for showers and Jaws did for beaches, transforming a familiar environment into a locus of horror–how much of the “scariest movie ever” buzz simply stems from people not being able to avoid their own bedrooms and therefore recalling the movie whether they want to or not? Ditto how deftly it works with the uncomfortable idea of being watched while you sleep–by a camera, by some malevolent entity, and (we’ll get to this again later) even by someone you love.
The difference between the two set-ups, of course, is that Kathryn Bigelow pretty much delivers something memorable every time, from world-class action sequences to gorgeous scenery to those haunting extreme close-ups of falling shells or shockwaves. Director Oren Peli, on the other hand, can really only show you a static shot of a bedroom or a shakicam shot of a living room, in night vision; at times, the “action” disappears into the darkness where you’re vaguely aware there’s something going on–the tug of war between Micah and the demon after it drags Katie out of bed is the best example–but can’t make it out. Once again, is this a deft use of parametric filmmaking or amateur hour?
With all these unsettled questions, there’d be no way I’d feel comfortable proclaiming this “the scariest movie ever made” even if I were inclined in that direction to begin with. Which (the moment you’ve been waiting for!) I’m not. With a couple of exceptions, there was nothing here you couldn’t get out of a particularly well done episode of A Haunting; in fact I can think of a moment from that series that scared me and The Missus worse than anything here. Because of the film’s abrupt ending, the sense of relentless pacing and crescendoing terror that characterizes (here it comes) The Blair Witch Project is absent. With it goes the gut-wrenching grinding down of the protagonists–Katie can collapse and cry on the floor all she wants, there’s still nothing here that approaches that desperate conversation between Heather and Mike as they droolingly rattle off their favorite foods, knowing they’ll probably never taste them again. There’s no sense that Micah and Katie have been driven to that desperate a strait, even after the thing yanks her out of bed and bites her.
A big part of the problem is that just like Micah (and Katie, prior to her final under-the-influence decision to stay), we in the audience can’t help but associate the haunting with the house. That’s what a million haunted-house movies and stories have taught us to do since time immemorial. Even ones that aren’t predicated on the location still tend to make tremendous use of it–cf. The Exorcist and how inseparable your memories of it are from that freezing cold, harshly illuminated bedroom. Paranormal Activity is similar: It does such a good job of violating domestic tranquility and transforming the bedroom, a place of comfort and refuge, into a horrorshow, that you can’t help but want to scream at them “Check into a hotel and hang out in the lobby overnight! Go to a Walgreen’s!” As hard as the movie works to establish that there’s no escape, it also never shows them trying and failing to do so (budget limitations, perhaps?), so we’re left wondering what-if and letting the air out of the scare. Heather, Josh, and Mike are lost in the woods; Micah and Katie could go grocery shopping or visit his mom or catch a flight to Hawaii if they wanted.
But all of this just keeps the movie from being an awesome stone-cold classic. I think it’s still a fine film, and largely for the same reasons it’s not a great one. All that ambiguity about the characters, the loose plot threads, whether or not they could have escaped–that’s still very interesting, even if you can’t nail it all down as a point in the film’s favor for certain. I find myself thinking “What if he’d done this? What if she’d tried that?” It’s giving me something to chew on.
And while nothing here genuinely freaked me out once I was in the comfort of my own home–something Blair Witch, The Exorcist, The Shining, and The Ring all managed to pull off, just to name a few–nor really traumatized me during the viewing–all those movies, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Birds, Psycho, Hostel, The Descent, Hellraiser, Hellbound, etc etc–I can say that there were a few world-class horror images in here. Not the grunts and footprings, not the mysterious photograph, not the ouija board, not the shattered photograph, at least not for me. What got me were two things. For some reason, the lights being flipped on and off really got me. They weren’t flickering–something was walking around turning lights on and off. Not only was something else present in the house, it was basically using the house the way we would–only it was nothing like us in nature or intent. I dunno, that creeped me out pretty bad.
But best/worst of all were the two scenes where somnambulist Katie got out of bed, turned to face it, and just…stood there, for hours and hours. That’s pure automaton Freudian uncanny, of course, and a monumental horror-image par excellence. And it’s reminiscent of the original-edit ending of Blair Witch to boot–to this day the scariest thing I’ve ever seen in a movie–because there’s just no reason for it to be happening. It hits all my buttons, hard, as does the resolution of that first scene, where she walks away and Micah finally wakes up, following her down and out into the backyard, where she’s just swinging in a swing. These are actions that really have no inherent emotional or psychological content whatsoever. They’re purely neutral. But when you have no idea why someone’s doing them, even totally neutral actions can become sinister, almost intolerable. That much I’m sure about.
I thought this was a clever movie, though not “the most” or “the best” anything. I do think the idea behind relationship storyline is sharp (even though the execution doesn’t quite follow-through): Katie and Micah move in together without Katie ever telling him about this fairly major issue she’s had all her life. There’s a bit of satire in the way Micah responds: he’s going to solve her problem, by himself, and it will involve buying a lot of A/V equipment. Which is why it makes sense that the demonologist doesn’t show up: Micah isn’t going to let some professional purveyor of mumbo-jumbo deal with a problem that’s happening in his house. I think that kind of reaction on his part is natural and understandable (and, it should be said, is close to the kinds of reactions I’ve had in similar situations), but, at the same time, possessive and lacking in sympathy.
Agreed. My problem was knowing how much credit to give them for things like that when aspects of it just weren’t tight enough.
I wonder if we’re meant to feel like Katie didn’t do enough to assert herself and take charge of the situation? I mean, if we’re going to analogize this to relationship issues, let’s take my wife’s eating disorder (please!): Her family and our doctors/therapists always used to give me a lot of credit for literally saving her life by forcing the issue, coordinating an intervention, and getting her into a treatment facility, and that’s nice, but whenever I look back on that period I’m always simply amazed at her fortitude for checking in and staying there and doing the literally years of work afterwards until now she’s recovered. A nice simple illustration is that the night before she was supposed to check in was the night of the big East Coast blackout, so I ended up stranded at a coworker’s apartment in Brooklyn, and she drove there, in the total dark, to pick me up so I could drive her down to the treatment facility and drop her off the next day. She had the perfect opportunity to wiggle out of it but didn’t. That’s all on her. So if we’re looking at the demonic haunting as analogous to that sort of thing, then of course the movie has the ending it does, because Katie didn’t deal with it enough on her own. Right?
I think that’s a good question: we’re supposed to see it as a mistake when she caves in about not contacting the demonologist. But is that about her not being asserive or having misplaced faith in Micah? I think that this becomes a case where conversaton becomes a bit murky because the movie isn’t really well-made enough to support a coherent, deep reading (a la BWP or The Exorcist).
I think it’s rather clever of Peli to get the audience to do most of his work for him, but it does mean that – as an object of analysis – the movie is half-baked.
I would say that the film doesn’t show her having much faith in him at all–at best, his antics and attempts at solving the mystery garner bemusement from her. She’s never like “yeah, good idea.” So I’d have to lean toward “not assertive enough.” But of course, you’re absolutely right, you can’t pin this down because the scripting (or whatever) just isn’t tight enough to bear the scrutiny.
I wonder how you’d feel about the original ending (or at least the ending that was on the screener) – it is quite different from the theatrical version and employs a lot of the unsettling elements you found most effective in the film. In fact, I’d guess that version might have made this an even bigger hit with you, despite the flimsy story.
You know, I like the ending they had in the theater just fine. I know it kind of goes for the “look out!” scare in much the same way that the final cut of Blair Witch did as opposed to the original version that I saw did, but I thought it was fine.
But I did read about the ending you’re talking about, and I like the sound of it a lot, of course. One description I read pointed out a little detail that is sticking with me more than almost anything in the movie I actually saw!
Sounds to me, based on what I’ve read about the alternatives, like the theatrical ending was the way to go–it shared DNA with the dragging scene, and a moment that kickass deserved a callback. That final beat, though, that really felt like a betrayal. People tell me I’m wrong about this but I coulda sworn she ate the camera in the style of the Colbert eagle.
Something I find interesting is the relative innocence of Katie compared to Micah whom I feel demonstrated traits of the seven deadly sins throughout the film.
As for Katie not mentioning her predictament, if you recall she mentions it comes and goes. At film’s start, it’s said that the problem had returned shortly after moving in together. I got the impression the problem tends to arise when Katie is not alone, such as the first time when she was haunted while she bunked with her sister.