Micah’s girlfriend Katie claims that she has been stalked by an entity since she was a teenager, and believes that the ghost has followed the couple to their new home in suburban San Diego. Micah decides to buy a camera to try to film the paranormal manifestations that would take place at night. Quickly, Katie’s suspicions are confirmed: objects move, noises are heard: something manifests in the house, and becomes more and more present…
“The new Blair Witch”, one can read here and there on various websites. Indeed, the “Paranormal Activity” phenomenon is not without reminding the one created by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sànchez’s movie already 10 years ago, with an extra internet buzz. The two films have several elements in common: the “video-reality” side shot by individuals looking for sensationalism, the very low budget side (we’re talking about $15,000 for P.A., which should be released here shortly before James Cameron’s mega-blockbuster, “Avatar”), and echoes qualifying them as “the most terrifying film of all time”, as pompous and necessarily inaccurate as this assertion might be.
However, Oren Peli’s film was not to be released in theaters. After a screening at the 2007 Screamfest Horror Film Festival, the director gave away DVD copies in the hope of seeing his film distributed. The film finally arrived in 2008 at DreamWorks, then at Steven Spielberg’s, who took the DVD home to watch it. What follows is probably more of an urban legend and a marketing ploy than anything else, but the director of “Jaws” will claim that a few minutes after watching the film, he was locked in his room by the door that had slammed shut by itself, and had to call a locksmith to get out! He would then have brought the DVD back to DreamWorks in a plastic bag, thinking it was possessed… Anyway, Spielberg liked the film, which makes it possible to imagine making a remake of it, that Peli would have directed himself. Unbelievable these Americans, so dumbed down by their automatic remake system that they have trouble even considering releasing an original film! The latter agrees, on the simple condition that he can broadcast the original in order to be sure of the public’s reaction. The reaction was so positive that the original film was finally released in theaters. First shown in 33 theaters, a viral marketing campaign will develop word of mouth on Facebook, Twitter and company, allowing a national and then worldwide distribution.
But, beyond the buzz and the nice story around the movie, what about this Paranormal Activity?
I don’t know if you’ve seen those trailers showing, like for “Rec“, the images of the movie alternating with the reactions of the audience? With everyone jumping, girls hiding their faces, a real tension in the room. Well, frankly, my first thought was that Americans don’t need much to be scared. That would explain the level of some Asian (hello, “Pulse”) or European (hello, “Quarantine“) movie remakes. Or maybe they were paid to pretend to be scared. I hope in this case that they were compensated handsomely. Because Paranormal Activity is not scary. A very peremptory judgment, I know. But still, to remake Blair Witch in a room, with effects so old-fashioned that even an Australopithecus wouldn’t blink, I don’t see the point. Apart from surfing on this fashion of amateur films and earning a maximum of money by investing as little as possible…
If showing as little as possible is not a bad idea, on the contrary, to try to create an atmosphere, the film has many flaws. First of all, the characters are not very endearing, and you want to slap them during the whole movie. I must confess that I only had one desire, that the entity zaps them quickly. Not the best way to get the sauce going, you’ll agree. But above all, unlike Blair Witch, Rec or even Cloverfield, which are composed of long sequences of shots that do not affect the time continuum, the directors have decided to speed up the tape to get to the paranormal events. Immediate effect: to remove any surprise. How to feel a real tension when a sign “something is going to happen in the next 3 seconds” is put in front of us?
If the manifestations had a little punch, it could still work. But here, with a few exceptions (notably the sleepwalking), the paranormal activity is of a deep boredom, and is limited to footsteps that one would judge to be those of a drunken bear who has swallowed kilos of poppers, and objects that move. They will try to give us a semblance of explanation about this spirit that knocks against the door after having violently closed it (yes, this is what we call a knocking spirit), with a photo discovered in the attic or the elucidations of a medium, but the interest is more than limited.
In terms of direction, it’s a mix between a fixed camera on its stand in the couple’s bedroom, in order to capture events taking place while Micah and Katie are asleep – sorry to disappoint some, but they’re just sleeping and waking up – (big scary potential, with this idea of vulnerability linked to sleep, too bad), and a hand-held camera carried by Micah when he comes out of the bedroom and tries to capture images of what woke them up. Well, that’s when he’s not filming boring discussions, or when he’s not letting the camera go while he looks at the images he got the night before on his computer. Because, if the film doesn’t show the nights during which there were no demonstrations, it doesn’t do away with a completely failed attempt to deepen the characters, which almost reinforces the antipathy they provoke.
In short, Paranormal Activity is a completely empty movie, in which almost nothing happens, except for scenes that the haunted house movie fan will have already seen dozens of times, usually better. A completely inoffensive movie, whose only quality will be to have generated a buzz important enough to arouse the curiosity of yours truly, who thus found himself trapped in front of this nothingness, whose success seems to me indeed paranormal…
