House arrest: Paranormal Activity

She’s a nice girl, but she has a history. She’s been followed all her life by something unseen, something which makes its presence felt in other ways. Katie is an English major, good-humoured, pretty, but somehow plain. Micah is a day trader with a large house for them to share. He’s got average guy looks, style and attitude, and an average guy’s fear of commitment. Everything about Katie, Micah and the house they occupy is so rigorously ordinary it’s nearly anonymous. There’s almost no décor to speak of. They don’t have photos on their computer desktops. But we know people like this, who like things new and clean and comfortably boring. Their relationship is founded on such unspoken acceptance of the status quo. Their characterless home becomes a blank slate upon which fear can slowly spread across.

Everything we see and hear in Paranormal Activity is transmitted through Micah’s video camera. There are noises in the night. Soon there will be movement. A sober psychic will visit, but he claims what they’ve got here’s a demon, and he’s strictly a ghost man. He gives them the number of a good demonologist, but the demonologist is out of town and they have to wait, with only Micah’s camera, an occult guidebook, and a Ouija board for protection. Of course they have each other, but their nerves are getting mutually rattled and, despite Katie’s repeated protests, Micah won’t stop taunting whatever is stalking her. Micah’s cocky—he thinks he knows how the movie is going to end. You could say Paranormal Activity is a parable of martial anxiety. Micah regards his camera as a sort of erotic appendage. He asks Katie to kiss it. Micah wants to get busy on camera, but Katie isn’t willing to consummate. Micah jokes that they’re engaged to be engaged, which is another way of saying that the force of Katie’s domesticating presence may be scarier to him than any malevolent demon.

Orin Peli’s micro-budget debut, arriving in theatres ten years after The Blair Witch Project, an obvious precursor both in form and marketing strategies, is flawed in several ways but perfectly ingenious nonetheless. It succumbs, like that other Blair Witch offspring [REC], to the habit of over-explaining the persistence of the running camera. It distracts with questions as to why this nice, if troubled young woman wants to be with this idiot, whose callousness is overstated. The film would benefit immensely from shaving off the last 30 seconds or so, when the sudden intrusion of corny horror movie effects sucks the air out of the documentary verisimilitude. (This ending, shot after Peli’s original cut was completed, was reportedly suggested by Steven Spielberg, an early fan and instrumental in the film’s distribution.) But Paranormal Activity still works, at times brilliantly so.


The most inspired shot in the whole thing is the one repeated over and over, one that almost echoes Michael Haneke or David Lynch. Micah’s camera is set up to monitor their bedroom while the couple sleeps. The results are mostly static, which is the masterstroke. Our eyes dart between the people sleeping, the gloom beyond the bedroom door, and the in-camera clock, which speeds up for expediency and then slows down just when that dreaded something is going to happen. Was that a murmur? A shadow? Was that just a breeze? This anticipation is what bad dreams are made of.

It bears comparison to The Strangers, a movie with an unusually large gap between the eloquence of its premise and the inanity of its resolution. Like The Strangers, Paranormal Activity concerns a couple at a turning point in their relationship, isolated in a single location, their anxiety seeming to manifest as an intruder determined to get inside. In a sense the entire story becomes a sort of sex act, or slow rape. The intruder, the ostensible demon, penetrates the house little by little, lubricating the cavity, if you will, until it’s made its way fully inside, fusing the alliance between sex and death inherent in these stories. But unlike many stories of this kind, Paranormal Activity understands the importance of restraint. And it doesn’t climax early.

When darkness fails: On horror, The Strangers, terrific first acts, lousy endings, and using unlikable stars to your advantage

For all my problems with the movie—which you can read about here—I have to give Eden Lake some credit. It did manage to kinda stick to my ribs after I rented it a couple of weeks ago. It whetted my appetite for more new horror, and I found myself deciding to give writer/director Bryan Bertino’s debut The Strangers a whirl, despite my having this lingering memory of glancing at reviews from the time of its theatrical release last year that deemed it ridiculous. Well, ridiculous it certainly is, with far more creeping-up-behind-you moments than any movie can probably sustain, a few of those turgid scenes where the actors have nothing to do but flip out, cover their faces and say oh my god a dozen times, and risibly inconsistent antagonists, a zombie-like trio who wear these stupid masks for no apparent reason, who rarely talk, and when they do they sound like morons, and who seem to suffer from some serious short term memory loss, given how often they lose track of the whereabouts of our vulnerable, desperate heroes, a young couple trapped in a cottage in the woods. Still, I find myself in this position of, on one hand, wanting to completely write-off the movie for ultimately proving itself to be so dramatically soppy and, on the other, pondering the intricacies of its highly intriguing first act. I didn’t realize just how similar the set-ups were in Eden Lake and The Strangers when I rented the latter, but let me tell you, while Eden Lake is arguably the more effective chiller of the two, The Strangers has certain elements that if reapplied could still make for a very interesting movie.


Kristen (Liv Tyler) and James (Scott Speedman), like the protagonists of Eden Lake, venture into the woods for a romantic getaway during which the male of the couple plans to propose marriage. Unlike the unfolding of Eden Lake however, the proposal in The Strangers occurs before the couple arrive at their isolated locale. In fact, we only confirm the proposal’s occurrence in what is basically a flashback within a flashback, in a sequence of narrative fragments that serves to disarm the viewer quite effectively. And unlike the couple in Eden Lake, who seemed unambiguously in love with each other and ripe for tying the knot, essentially just tragic victims of circumstance, Kristen and James begin the story with the devastating realization that they’re not in agreement as to what they want from their relationship. Kristen, we discover, has turned James down, and in the same way that we can read the apocalyptic events of The Birds as being some sort of manifestation of Melanie Daniels’ perusal of Mitch Brenner, of the female protagonist’s sexual unconscious overwhelming that of the male’s, so can we read the horrific events that arise in The Strangers as being some similar manifestation of Kristen’s assertion of her desire to remain unwed and independent, of the intense discord it inflicts upon an event intended to be a celebratory confirmation of love and devotion.


I have to confess that I really don’t find Speedman a very appealing presence in movies. I won’t get into the quality of his acting abilities here, but, for the sake of my next point, let me just announce my entirely subjective distaste for the guy as a movie star. The point being that Speedman, for precisely the same reasons that he bugs me, is, for me at least, pretty much perfectly cast in The Strangers. James, having been freshly rejected, comes off as a truly oppressive boyfriend, one who grows only more oppressive with every ostensibly gentlemanly act he performs, such as his insistence that Kristen take the engagement ring he bought for her regardless of her refusal of marriage. He can’t take it back, he says, so she might as well have it. So gratingly paternal is James with Kristen that even when he’s about to leave the cottage to run an errand, he lights a fire for Kristen, as though she were incapable of doing it herself. The extent of his oppressiveness can be found even in the film’s setting itself: it’s his family’s cottage they’re going to spend the night in, full of his memories, placing him into an even greater position of power, power now essentially resigned to gloating resentment and annoying self pity. (And, to return to the movie’s dumbness, this old family cottage that seems to be uninhabited most of the time somehow has this amazing collection of contemporary music from the likes of Joanna Newsom, Gillian Welch, and Billy Bragg and Wilco, and not just on vinyl, but on 45!) No wonder Kristen doesn’t quite feel comfortable marrying this guy. He’s suffocating.


So a stranger turns up at the door, asking for somebody named Tamara. James leaves on his errand and while he’s gone the stranger returns and starts to torment Kristen, even penetrating the house without Kristen’s witnessing it, only to go back outside and knock on the door again. Go figure. James returns, the strangers multiply and get noisier and more insistent and there’s a predictable but nonetheless satisfying twist in how the first real act of violence plays out. So far so good, but it’s all downhill from there. So be it. But what about that first act? Is it me or is there something to it? It seems to be a prime example of the peculiar condition of the horror genre: while things are still ambiguous and the basic elements still falling into place, a horror movie can hold so much promise that that promise itself can, for some of us, actually make the movie worth watching. Even if the ending stinks. I’m imagining a film festival somewhere that only shows the first half-hour of horror movies. Afterwards audience members gather and discuss various endings that would often be superior to the actual endings. Who knows? Could be a hit.