Even Demons Need Down Time
Paranormal Activity (2009)
directed by Oren Peli
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
watched instantly on Netflix during daylight
I love that Oren Peli is afraid of ghosts. I love that he did his "research" and that the scariest thing he found was a demon you never see. The secret to Paranormal Activity is Peli's decision to connect Katie's hauntings to childhood, where memories are half-formed, half-invented, and only sometimes remembered as they actually occurred. I love the idea that it's not the house but the girl, and that it isn't the girl who brings the pain, but the jerk who doesn't believe her. Her fate isn't in her own hands, poor thing, but as long as she's conscious of what she's doing, she's okay. But we have to sleep sometime.
That banal San Diego tract home is the perfect setting, just as I believe that Katie, who has been haunted since childhood, would be attracted to the false bluster and macho bravado of a day trader, who never takes her situation seriously because he isn't willing to see it as anything other than a scary movie on his computer monitor. Like Steve, the things that take place in that space between waking and dreams are the closest I ever get to an unconscious, visible world separate from the reality I call my life. Ouija boards are scary, darkness is scary, and so are the things that go bump in the night. And yes, the movie-lover in me misses the cinematic elegance and atmosphere of a production like Poltergeist, but Paranormal Activity is more frightening than any other film I've watched this month, and I'll take it.
directed by Oren Peli
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
watched instantly on Netflix during daylight
I love that Oren Peli is afraid of ghosts. I love that he did his "research" and that the scariest thing he found was a demon you never see. The secret to Paranormal Activity is Peli's decision to connect Katie's hauntings to childhood, where memories are half-formed, half-invented, and only sometimes remembered as they actually occurred. I love the idea that it's not the house but the girl, and that it isn't the girl who brings the pain, but the jerk who doesn't believe her. Her fate isn't in her own hands, poor thing, but as long as she's conscious of what she's doing, she's okay. But we have to sleep sometime.
That banal San Diego tract home is the perfect setting, just as I believe that Katie, who has been haunted since childhood, would be attracted to the false bluster and macho bravado of a day trader, who never takes her situation seriously because he isn't willing to see it as anything other than a scary movie on his computer monitor. Like Steve, the things that take place in that space between waking and dreams are the closest I ever get to an unconscious, visible world separate from the reality I call my life. Ouija boards are scary, darkness is scary, and so are the things that go bump in the night. And yes, the movie-lover in me misses the cinematic elegance and atmosphere of a production like Poltergeist, but Paranormal Activity is more frightening than any other film I've watched this month, and I'll take it.
posted by NPK at 6:54 AM
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