Paranormal Activity

Combining classic retro showmanship and thoroughly modern high-tech storytelling and promotion, "Paranormal Activity" works as a great test case in how marketing, moviemaking and movie-going can still deliver shrieks and scares in the 21st century while wringing goose bumps out of ancient ears. Pushed, prodded and promoted by Paramount with a series of word-of-mouth late-night screenings in a handful of cities, people were encouraged via the Web, Twitter and Facebook to request that the film play their town, which they did to the tune of a million requests. With that milestone reached through the magic of the Internet, Paramount's opening the film wide this weekend. The sizzle of the marketing is impressive; the steak of the actual movie, served bloody and rare and juicy, is even more so.

Shot by writer-director Oren Peli for a rumored $10,000, "Paranormal Activity" is at heart a haunted house tale, in which San Diego couple Katie (Katie Featherston) and Micah (Micah Sloat) have a perfectly average life in a beautiful home. He's a high-tech day trader; she's a student. All very normal, except for the noises in the night, the mysterious events, the things happening when they shouldn't. Micah, a swaggering, every-problem-has-a-solution technocrat, gets a video camera to chronicle the house's strange phenomena; Katie, who's more freaked out than curious, is less interested than Micah in proof of what's going on. She just wants it to stop.

And so we see, only through the lens of Micah's camera, the mysteries of the night unfold; small, at first, like when Katie finds her keys in the middle of the floor. Micah's unimpressed: "Obviously, this is verifiable proof that evil forces came from beyond the grave to move your keys." (And this is another arrow in the quiver of "Paranormal Activity": It's funny, until it stops being funny.) But soon, Micah is going to be impressed as he and Katie review the tapes of what happens while they sleep, but not intimidated enough to stop being curious and start showing some respect.

There's nothing impressive about the camerawork and low-tech, high-impact effects of "Paranormal Activity." Or, rather, it is impressive once you realize how much effort must have gone into creating the fake found footage, in a clear nod to "The Blair Witch Project" and "[REC]." Like both those films, we see only what the camera saw; like the latter, "Paranormal Activity" wisely, claustrophobically, stays in one place and keeps the lid on tight. Peli even writes his way around what pop-culture buffs call the Eddie Murphy problem, after one of the comedian's rips on horror films in "Delirious": Why don't they just leave? The solution's simple, elegant and, on contemplation, even more scary.

I have to note that I didn't see "Paranormal Activity" at an afternoon press screening surrounded by know-it-all film critics who noted its debts to Robert Wise's "The Haunting" before walking into the sun's soothing, rational bright beams. I saw it at midnight, as part of a paid audience, and the collective shrieks and groans as the things that go bump in the night bump harder, or as Micah does the one thing Katie and their psychic advisor (Mark Fredrichs) beg him to not do, or as a shadow moves when nothing is there to cast it were, to be honest, priceless. The primal appeal of movie-going is to sit in the dark and have the same emotional experience as a group of strangers (from midnight Mass to midnight movies, collective emotional transport is a cornerstone of the human experience), and "Paranormal Activity" works like a voodoo charm in a crowded theater after dark. (I can't determine if watching "Paranormal Activity" at home on DVD would be less engaging than watching it in a theater, or if you'd be even more freaked out by the noises and shifts in your home as it played out.)

After it screened at Slamdance to acclaim and Paramount picked "Paranormal Activity" up, some alterations have been made that all, to my mind, improve the film: a leaner running time, fewer scenes in the daylight, a more visceral and kinetic ending that had the crowd I was with back into their seats grunting with fear and shock. "Paranormal Activity" weaves together several strains of popular American horror: the creepy spirits of Henry James, the skewed suburban normalcy of Stephen King and Steven Spielberg, the queasy intimacy of video camera-era horror films, the macabre morality of Edgar Allan Poe, the small-scale supernatural scares of Shirley Jackson. Still, the biggest secret it knows, and deftly exploits, is that it knows we're in the theater because, deep down, we want to be scared. "Paranormal Activity" may be an ensemble made of borrowed pieces, but if you catch it in the light of a theater late at night surrounded by like-minded, similarly-scared moviegoers, any second thoughts your rational mind might raise will be drowned out by the spooked sounds of your fellow patrons and the thumping and thrashing of your tell-tale heart.

James Rocchi's writings on film have appeared at Cinematical.com, Netflix.com, SFGate.com and in Mother Jones magazine. He lives in Los Angeles, where every ending is a twist ending.