Paranormal Activity

Paranormal Activity,2009's little horror engine that could, joins the ranks with Cloverfield and The Blair Witch Project as a stellar example of a faux documentary horror flick. Filmed with a miniscule budget, Activity raises more neck hairs than any other mainstream horror release this year.

The premise is as simple as the budget: A young couple, Mikah and Katie (Micah Sloat, Katie Featherston), decide to use a home camcorder to try and capture what they feel is an entity haunting their home. Katie seems particularly in distress, explaining to the camera that she has felt this force on and off since the age of eight years old. She expresses these concerns to a psychic, who, upon visiting the house, suggests there may be a demon present.

Determined to get to the bottom of the haunting, Mikah documents Katie and sets the camera up every night while they sleep to see what occurs when the lights go out. The camera catches some mildly creepy things at first (doors moving, strange noises) but that soon gives way to much more menacing, destructive activity.

Paranormal Activity is an efficient scare machine. Director Oren Peli runs circles around the shoestring production limitations. Using various sound effects, suspense and other very basic ingredients, Peli successfully creates an organic sense of terror. Sloat and Featherston, who pretty much remain the only two characters throughout the entire film, raise the level of horror as well with their improvised dialogue and realistic portrayals.

Paranormal is not all great, however. It's seriously in danger of becoming a victim of it's own hype, much as Blair Witch did back in 1999. That film was also undeniably creepy, but hardly the "scariest film ever made", and neither is this film. It suffers from an overly long setup and several lulls in-between the creep out moments. And like that film, Paranormal suffers from some plot holes. It's even harder in this case to justify why Mikah would continue filming this awful experience, especially as the situation spins out of control.

Halloween is a time of many things, one of them being great scare movies. The film industry has been very weak on this front for several years, serving up a new SAW film yearly to bored horror fans. Paranormal Activity, despite its flaws, is a cure from that boredom. It may not be the scariest movie ever, but it will send a serious chill up your spine.