Paranormal Activity

Remember The Blair Witch Project? More to the point remember the hype machine that came with it? It was probably the first film to properly utilise the internet to promote a film. Well you'll remember the fact that it really was just an hour and a bit of camcorder footage documenting not very much happening in the company of some characters who annoyed you so much you couldn't wait to see them die. A decade later welcome to more of the same, only somehow less so. Yes, even more nothing posing as tension happens in Paranormal Activity than in Blair Witch, only this time instead of it taking place in a spooky woods it all goes down in one bloody room.

The internet hype about this mainly dwelled on the fact that it was made for a very low budget and that even without all the usual Hollywood bells and whistles it remains terrifying. The hype-mongers kind of got this right. Without the usual over the top effects or gore the film still lives with its larger budget peers, not because it's scary, but because it feels as derivative and piss poor as any of the Saws or Asian remakes being churned out. Whereas, say, a Sam Raimi or a Peter Jackson positively thrived when faced with the challenge of having no money to work with and turned in hugely entertaining and creative movies with miniscule budgets, here the emphasis appears to be to do as little as possible thus saving cash. Hence all the action taking place within one house, and in particular the bedroom. At one point the main protagonists actually venture out into the garden but it's at night so it feels as stuffy and sparse as every other setting. It may as well have been shot inside. Manos The Hands Of Fate had more scenic sets. Some may say this makes the thing wonderfully claustrophobic, instead you'll just get fed up looking at the place. It doesn't help that the house is populated by two woeful actors, again for budget reasons, who procede to whine and generally act like twats throughout. You begin wondering how the demonic force has been able to hang around them for so long without just packing in and going to possess someone less annoying.

It's not that Paranormal Activity is a particularly awful film, it's just not a very good one. Many will defend it citing the miniscule budget as a reason for its many deficiencies. Fun, entertaining and ambitious movies have been made for similar amounts of money, adjust Evil Dead's budget for inflation and it probably cost less. The problem lies in the fact that Hollywood saw their chance to ramp up the hype yet again. Blair Witch was long enough ago for Paranormal Activity's target audience not to remember the hyperbole surrounding it and probably have never even heard of other "found footage" sub-genre flicks like Cannibal Holocaust and The Last Broadcast. So it must have been very easy for the PR people to just repeat all the Blair Witch stuff, right down to the underdog movie sticking it to the man fabrication these low budget successes always get tagged with. And with the mega profits of Cloverfield and a raft of other camcorder horrors ((REC), Diary of the Dead) a film that probably should have gone direct to DVD proved a very easy sell to the mass cinema audience. Rather than being some trailblazing genre saviour you'd expect from the build up Paranormal Activity is just the same box ticking, copy cat guff that Hollywood serves up to horror fans constantly.