Katie (Katie Featherston) and Micah (Micah Sloat) have a problem. Something weird is going on in their home, some sort of entity making random noises and causing some of the furniture and furnishing to move seemingly on their own. Its focus seems to be entirely on Katie, Micah purchasing some high-tech camera equipment so he can document what’s going on and prove neither he nor his live-in girlfriend are crazy.

Home sweet scary home in Paramount Pictures' Paranormal Activity

Here’s all you need to know about the new low budget independent horror movie Paranormal Activity: It’s freakin’ scary. There isn’t too much to say other than that. For 90-plus minutes this little film made me laugh, made me smile and, right when I least expected it, proceeded to make me scream. It is a creative take on a familiar concept, and just over a half hour after exiting a midnight promotional screening I’m tempted to say it is the best of its kind I’ve seen since catching an archival screening of Robert Wise’s immortal 1963 classic The Haunting as a teenager back in Spokane.

If anything, that is the work it should be compared to, not 1999’s fellow low budget first-person shocker The Blair Witch Project. This is a movie set in an enclosed space, never straying too far beyond the confines of Micah and Katie’s relatively modest two-story home. Writer/director Oren Peli goes back to basics using sound as his weapon of choice, forgoing visual razzle-dazzle for a smoothly constructed (and extremely well edited) puzzle box of clever misdirection and ingenious slight of hand.

I will admit that the first-person device is getting a little old. I will even go further and say there are times when Micah grabs his camera to follow the thundering whomps and thwomps across his hardwood floor that stretch credulity. And, going even one step beyond that, I’ll finish by stating that there is a pivotal moment where he decides the two of them should continue staying in the house where I just wanted to slap him for being so foolish.

But so what? This is the type of movie you take these sort of decisions more on faith than on fact, realizing that the situation the characters find themselves in could lead to reasoning skills a little bit below what many of us would perceive as the intelligent norm. Besides, if the right choices were made then we wouldn’t have a movie to discuss, the simple fact of going left when right probably would have made more sense one a lot of us can relate to whether we’d like to admit it or not.

Rational thinking aside, the reason Paranormal Activity works is that it uses the unseen against you. Peli realizes that the imagination is the most powerful cognitive weapon of them all and that by giving us a seemingly never-ending cacophony of bizarre sounds and random shrieks we as viewers will do the hard work for him. The audience is the instigator of their own doom, and like many of the greats before him he uses this fact to his utmost advantage.

The rumor is that Steven Spielberg is the one who convinced Paramount Pictures to purchase and distribute this movie. Watching a screener in his living room, the film so terrified him he refused to allow it to be left in his home overnight, driving it back to the studio lot black garage sack that very evening. 

It’s a great story and I have no idea whether or not it is true. What I can say is that I can definitely understand the sentiment. The final moments are so fierce, so wonderfully unsettling, so sinister in their primal ferociousness, leaving the theater I couldn’t stop shaking, my hands so fidgety I had to hold an empty soda cup all the way home just to keep them still. Like I said, this movie scared me, and in a year where horror has been subpar at best Paranormal Activity is a terrifying ghost story worthy of the telling.

Film Rating: êêêê (out of 4)  

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