Normally I would cheer on a film like Paranormal Activity.  It was made on shoestring budget and managed be one the biggest movie successes in 2009 raking in over 100 million dollars at the box office.  However, after watching it I am completely baffled by the positive critical response and by the buzz it generated.  Ebert gave it 3.5 stars and it managed an 82% at Rottentomatoes.  All of this while from my perspective pretty much failing at every aspect of film making.

I don’t believe all films should be judged by the same standards.  There are some very good all around movies out there and there are also some good films that deviate.  From normal standards.  Typically a film is evaluated on things like plot, story, characters, acting, and in technical categories like camera work special effects and sound.  These are the basic things that you need to get right in order make a good film.
For example Children of Men is an amazing film which scores very high marks each category.  It is a well acted film, has a great story and superb camera work.

Now that I said that I also have to say this, I have a rule about movies,  The Golden Rule.  If a film is lacking in any one of the aforementioned categories then it had better make up for in the other elements.  Two films that immediately come to mind are Grande Torino and Hamlet 2.  Both films are hamstrung by a lot of mediocre acting or poor writing for the majority of the characters.  However, both films are saved by great performances from their leads; Clint Eastwood and Steve Coogan respectively.  Without them these movies would probably be unwatchable and forgettable.  There are also films like Last Year at Marienbad and Playtime that don’t really have stories but they make up for it with their visuals.

The two main characters are Katie and Micah.  Katie is an English student and Micah is a day trader who is really into electronics.  So into electronics that he buys a fancy video camera to record the poltergeist that Katie claims has been haunting her for most of her  life.  Micah’s attempts at filming the poltergeist’s actions make up the bulk of the film.  The performances by the two leads are flat and display almost no chemistry.  This is a result of obviously inexperienced actors and a weak script.

Instead of using the word “plot” we say “things that happen during the movie.”  The reality is there are very long scenes in which NOTHING HAPPENS.  It is a perfectly acceptable practice to build tension in a movies with slow scenes but there are long stretches in paranormal activity where all the audience does is watch the main characters do boring things like pretend to be interested in electronics and some craft shit.  I guess that this is supposed to be a way warming the audience up to the characters and making them sympathetic but this is undermined by their lack of action.  Other than consulting a psychic, and a bit of light googling they never do anything to rid themselves of the entity despite Micah’s vague assertion that he will do something about it.  These long stretches of nothing further undermine the movie because at times the characters don’t appear to be scared or worried or under stress, and then suddenly they are back to freaking out.

We also have to talk about another character in the movie: the demon.  One of my biggest complaints about this film is the lack of danger or tension.  The villain should be threatening in some way.  For most of the movie the most threatening thing it does is move the woman’s keys from the counter top to the floor and we can’t even prove that the demon did that.  I could imagine the demon sitting round getting pissed because they are blaming it for everything.  “Micah did you leave the milk out?”  “Oh man it must have been the demon.”

We also never get any kind of motivation for the demon.  Now this could be a minor point, I suppose it feeds off of negative energy or something like they said in the movie but what is its goal and why has it been haunting the woman her whole life.  Maybe you could say that it wanted to take over her body but why her?  If the demon wanted a body or soul or whatever wouldn’t it have been easier to find some weak minded individual?  Is she being punished for something? Does she have a deep dark secret?  Mystery is one thing but this is just lazy writing.

At the end the demon possesses Katie and kills Micah but it also takes control of her earlier in the film.  If that was the whole point of its activities then it accomplished them early in the film.  Also, the demon place the partially burned photo from Katie’s childhood home in the attic above their bed for no apparent reason.  Why does it matter that it’s above the bed?  How did it get there?  It still looks like it’s in decent shape and recognizable so apparently the demon grabbed the photo after the fire and stashed it at a storage rental facility?  The villain in a story is a character and should be treated as such.  In this movie it is just a plot device to generate some action in the story.

The main device Paranormal Activity relies on is what I like to refer to as “Random shit happens for no reason.”  Yeah it’s long winded.  If I knew Latin or something I could probably come with a more concise term.  Basically they have no story it is just events that add up to nothing.  This is also a favorite device in thrillers, the film maker creates a plot twist that you never see coming because it is so damn illogical.  There is no planning, no clear way that it fits into the story, it is just a cheap thrill.

I also need to point out what I feel is the worst plot device I have ever seen in a movie.  In order to communicate with the demon Micah obtains the best looking Ouija board Katie has ever seen and leaves his camera on it in case the demon wants to leave a message.  Oh but wait the idiot doesn’t even position the camera on the board so that he can clearly see what the demon is saying.  Micah proceeds to watch the film and deduce that the demon has spelled “Dianne.”  A quick internet search turns up a story about a woman named Dianne who was haunted by a demon and whose case was made worse by the intervention of a demonologist just like the one they are trying to contact.  Oh yeah the Ouija board also catches fire for some reason, maybe to suggest that the demon burned down Katie’s childhood home.  I think it was just  another cheap random trick.

This also leads to the worst example of writing in Paranormal Activity.  In the aforementioned story about the woman named Dianne it is stated that the demonologists made things worse.  We are not told how, just given more vague information.  At this point I was thinking “Ok at least we finally have some conflict.  I wondered what they would choose to do?”  Then the psychic informs them that the local demonologist is out of town and can’t help them anyway.  Oh be still by beating heart.  So the film goes to all of this effort to set up a conflict and then completely nullifies it.  Now something could have been salvaged from this.  Without the aid of the demonologist they are left to face the monster alone which they accomplish by doing nothing.  They go to sleep again and the demon appears, possesses Katie and kills Micah.

I guess if this movie has one saving grace it may be that it has some kind of deeper subtext about relationships.  Perhaps it is really meant as an allegory about relationships, about people who get together for no conceivable reason, who have nothing in common with one and other.  Or about women who stay with guys no matter how big an asshole he is.  Ok this might just be my brain trying to salvage something from this movie.  Then again, how does the poltergeist fit into this?

The Appeal

I submit for you the following comment from a youtube video showing supposed poltergeist activity.

man i thought this coulda been real? 1st i seen it but looking at it again u can see at :40 seconds in after the b4 the spoons come out that it stop recording look on the dishwasher on the bottom left the shadow from the light changed. man i wish it was real i am a believer in the paranormal and to get some video would be nice

The only poltergeist out there is the one haunting this guys shift key.  Seriously why bother with the colon and the one period?  For some inexplicable reason there are people who have a predisposition to believe in the paranormal.  Notice the logical error at work here?  Rather than deriving a conclusion from the evidence they place the cart directly in front of the horse and seek to justify a point of view.  This simultaneously demonstrates two logical fallacies: confirmation bias and begging the question.

I wouldn’t assert that all of the people who went to see Paranormal Activity buy into these ideas or that was the only reason people went to see it.  I do believe it played a part in its appeal.  This is definitely what the promoters were thinking as they sold the film to the public.  Maybe this was my problem with movie and why I couldn’t get into the film.  I usually feel insulted by advertising because of the way it condescends the average person.  The only people who could possibly be scared by this film are the ones who bought into the advertising and allowed themselves to be conditioned for it.  It is laughable how they tried to make this look real.  This boils down to such acts of chicanery as saying “based on true events” or not having end credits and calling it the scariest film ever made.  Hey doesn’t the alternate ending on the BluRay kind of undermine this veneer?

Paranormal Activity suffers from many bad acting, lack of tension, a poorly conceived story and a bag of cheap tricks.  It has nothing to fall back on.  It is lazy, boring and most certainly not the scariest film ever made.