I'll just get right to it: I fucking loved Paranormal Activity. I expected to hate it and avoided it for weeks, but I finally relented. If you are on the fence as I was, I implore you to get over yourself and see it. I thought it was effective, a fantastic use of resources, and a brilliant marriage of an old standard (the haunted house) and newly active subgenre (POV horror, which I wish I could call a new subgenre for the sake of conciseness, but Cannibal Holocaust disallows that). And like the best marriages, each party strengthens the other - the ghost story gets reinvigorated with rawness and POV horror gets a new vitality to the story it's telling. While the story lines of most entries in the POV horror subgenre could be conveyed in a more traditional, detached filming style (making the first-person hand-held thing is ultimately a gimmick, to whatever degree), Paranormal Activity simply could not. Central characters Katie and Micah record themselves as they sleep to get a grasp on what's going on at night in their suspected haunted house, so their camera just as vital to their
understanding as it is ours. The medium is the message to themselves.
Paranormal Activity's cleverness is astounding. From very early on, Katie worries that the camera will agitate the demon that lives among them. Whether the camera's presence does this directly isn't fully explained (this demon is fond of grunts, door slams, guttural name reciting and other forms of vague communication), but it is central to the couple's inevitable downfall. (If it hasn't struck you yet, if you care about spoilers, now would be a good time to stop reading, although I'm not going to be too specific.) The more Micah finds out about their haunting by reviewing footage taped at night, the more he wants to know. This leads him to engage with the demon verbally and via a Ouija board, despite being warned not to do so by a psychic who visits the couple's home early in the film. Micah is not characterized by stupidity or irrational decisions to move along the plot -- he's a rational person in a situation that defies logic. He's alternately curious, amazed, frightened and angry. His struck me as a wholly human response, maybe because it's much like how I regarded the film. I didn't jump or cry a la Katie (even though the movie is full of potential jump scares, depending on how scary you think small movements, flickering lights and thuds are). Instead, I was more nervously intrigued like Micah. I can't say for sure, but I wonder if predicting two potential and very different audience reactions via his two characters was a goal of director Oren Peli.
I wouldn't be surprised if that were the case. There's an awareness here that goes beyond typical horror fare to cover major plot holes. This movie seems to have an answer for everything. If you wonder how this found footage can escalate in tension to work as a conventional story arc (complete with climax!), well, the answer is that the demon feeds on negativity. It grows stronger and scarier and so it keeps pushing things forward. (Also, Micah's probing causes strife with the perpetually terrified Katie, which in turn causes more negativity, which means more probing, and because it's all bound together, the film is just as much about a crumbling relationship as a haunting.) If you wonder why they don't just pick up and move, the answer is that the problem is not with the house, but Katie, who's been experiencing some sort of paranormal activity since age 8. If you wonder why they don't just shut up in an effort to reduce this haunting to the creeking level it once existed at, the answer is that once you open Pandora's box, it matters little if you close it.
For the way that it sets (and keeps) the story in motion, the camera is that box. (I should point out that, as with most POV horror, the camera is a frequent object of discussion and open disdain.) Because of this, I detect a critique on our perpetually deepening obsession with recording and examining ourselves. It feels particularly pointed here, not just because Katie and Micah's actions lead to their demise, but because this collection of supposedly found footage has been unmistakably edited to include just the good parts. (For once, this POV horror doesn't purport to be raw footage, but that which has been manipulated via selective inclusion and fast-forwarding, as, we can assume, a way to explain the heinous, human crime that eventually takes place. After all, it couldn't be any other way, since these characters were filming themselves for hours each night, and we only have so much time as moviegoers.) As something that has been picked over to exploit the most sensational elements of these people's lives, Paranormal Activity feels like the answer to or heir of reality TV or YouTube-worthy material. Paranormal Activity is a critique of our compulsive documentation, but it's also a celebration of its entertainment value when assembled properly. That kind of irony and ambivalence nicely sums our ever-strengthening love of the guilty pleasure as pop-culture consumers. Even if we aren't amongst demons that go bump in the night, this is how we live.
