Charles Rivington
Shot over seven days with a budget of only $15, 000, Paranormal Activity has made over $100 million and 
arrives on British screens already holding the title of most profitable film ever made (beating genre grandmother The Blair Witch Project). It is also being heralded, perhaps more interestingly and certainly less incontrovertibly, as the scariest film ever made, but does it really deserve this title?
The answer to this question is a resounding, ‘quite possibly’. Paranormal Activity is bloody terrifying, not a bit creepy, not a little jumpy, but flat out balls to the wall, cry, scream and throw-up scary. It’s the sort of film that grabs you and shakes you around for ninety minutes before dropping you to the ground as a jumpy, sleep-deprived shadow of your former self. The premise is very simple, if not particularly original: a young couple (Katie Featherston and Micah Stoat) buy a video camera to film a paranormal apparition which is haunting them in their home. The genius of this set up is that not only does it dispense with any unnecessary expository scenes set before the haunting but it also confines all of the action to the couple’s house giving the film a sense of unbearable claustrophobia.
The film is separated in to two types of scene: day scenes in which the couple talk about their experiences and try to figure out what the hell is going on, and night scenes which are shot almost entirely by the static camera which the couple places in their bedroom in order to film them sleeping. This structure gives the film a sense of nauseating momentum as the audience lurches from relatively placid day time scenes to the steadily increasing horrors of the thing that goes bump in the night. By the third or fifth night time scene you will be begging for daytime to come, much like the couple themselves.
Katie Featherston is fantastic as Katie (both of the lead actors used their real names) and is never anything but utterly believable, embodying a character that we genuinely care about. Micah Sloat is also very good, playing the world’s most insensitive boyfriend and providing many of the films early laughs. However, as the film progresses it becomes increasingly obvious that his character is little more than a plot device to keep the film going and his frustrating reluctance to switch off the camera even when it becomes obvious that filming the situation is only making things worse makes it very hard to care what happens to him.
This is nitpicking however, as the film really is an exceptional example of a genre which has become increasingly stale in recent years. By stripping away the clichés and excesses of horror, Oren Peli has replaced mutilating clowns and masked killers with things that we are genuinely scared of like a door slamming in the night, a gust of wind that catches you off guard and the fear of the unknown in our own homes.