‘Paranormal Activity’ is a big waste of time

By Zack McGhee | Monday, October 12, 2009, 11:06 AM

Paranormal Activity opens today, October 16, in Dayton, exclusively at the Greene. I reviewed it on Monday after seeing it in West Chester, where it opened a week ago.

The usher walks up to the front of the theater and says, “Who’s ready to see Paranormal Activity?” The audience reacts mildly — half of them pumped, the other half just not quite willing to acknowledge this stranger. But we’re all excited about the potential of what we’re about to see. It’s palpable. The theater is packed, and we all want to be terrified.

Suddenly, he corrects himself: “‘Who prepared themselves for Paranormal Activity,’ that’s what I should say.” Answering his own question, he says, “No one.

“I saw this movie last night. This is the scariest thing I have ever witnessed.” If, he says, an hour into this movie, it’s too intense for you, feel free to collect your full refund.

After seeing Paranormal Activity, I wanted to hunt this man down and ask him: “So, had you just never seen a movie before?”

The marketing of Paranormal Activity is a masterpiece. Take a movie that cost less than $15,000 and use midnight screenings and the internet machine to generate $8 million and counting from fewer than 200 screens in three weeks.

The movie, Paranormal Activity, is a boring non-event — overacted, not scary, not creepy, barely a movie. I’ve seen balloon animals that packed more of a punch.

What is the deal here? Micah and Katie live together in a really expensive house, don’t seem to have real jobs, and have a little problem: Katie has been haunted by a demon since the age of eight. They hear strange noises in the night, Katie’s keys end up on the floor (oh noes!), etc. Determined to solve this problem, Micah buys a video camera in an effort to document these strange happenings.

The movie opens and closes without any credits — just a message from the studio thanking the families of the two main characters, Micah and Katie, and a screen at the end with some copyright notices. The intended effect is to make the film more real, and if you didn’t know anything about it going in, perhaps it would work.

For people who go in thinking this is found footage (people who can’t be bringing all that much to the table, I’m afraid), I can see how it would be effective. If you know that it’s a fiction film — how does this possibly work for you? And yet, many claim it does. “I guess I would say,” I told a friend surprised by my negative reaction, “if people can suspend their disbelief for that boring, unbelievable mess, God bless them.”

Much has been made of Paranormal Activity’s debt to The Blair Witch Project, which turns a decade old this year. On paper, that’s true. But considering how different my reaction was to Paranormal Activity, it inspired me to revisit Blair Witch for the first time in more than eight years.

Watching them just hours apart, I was stunned by how well Blair held up — surviving the passage of time, the hype, and Heather Donahue’s widely parodied performance — to still seriously creep me out. Honestly, it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly what works about Blair and what makes Paranormal Activity such a spectacular failure. But I’ll give it a shot.

For one thing, Blair is not just about three filmmakers getting lost in the woods and haunted by a legendary witch. It’s about the deterioration of their collective mental state, the friction between them, the suspicion they have about each other, their fear as it intensifies, their skepticism, their belief that it’s impossible to get lost in America, and the fury of gender dynamics. All of this coheres into an eerie tableau that capitalizes on our own fear and xenophobia, coupled with the legends of ghost stories and missing children with which we’ve all grown up.

Paranormal Activity, on the other hand, is only about what it is about, which is frankly not much. It’s about two people sitting around, haunted by a demon that rarely taunts them, and trying to capture it all on videotape. “At 96 minutes,” says Marc Savlov of the Austin Chronicle, “it’s at least 90 minutes too long.” The movie flirts with more interesting subtext — Micah’s macho-headed obstinacy, for example, or the way this experience weighs on their relationship — but it’s never fully prepared to go there. The shockingly dull result is a boneheaded disappointment and a big waste of time.

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