Paranormal Activity: Return of the Old, Dark House

The Boy and I snuck in a Saturday Matinee in the hopes of seeing Paranormal Activity while avoiding—well, let's be honest, the public, who can't really be trusted to shut up and actually watch a movie these days. Particularly, since one of our last horror outings (The Orphan) had taken place in a theater full of rowdy teenagers, we'd hoped an early Saturday show would be mostly empty.

It wasn't, unfortunately. But the audience was quiet, leading me to suspect that alcohol plays a factor in teen jerkiness, maybe more than the teen part even.

This movie, the brain child of writer/director/former video game programmer Oren Peli is actually nothing more than a classic Old, Dark House story. Which means, seriously, a bad audience will ruin it for you.

This movie has one of the slowest buildups for a horror movie I've seen in a long time. Well, for a good horror movie. The movie is absent any gore whatsoever—you've seen worse on "Law and Order". The horrors, very literally, are bumps in the night.

Actually, those are some of the more overt horrors. A couple of others are a door that moves about six inches, and one of the characters just standing there.

You get the idea. It's all in the telling. Oh! And sleepwalking! I haven't seen sleepwalking used to be scary since, what, 1943's I Walked With A Zombie?

The story is that Katie and Micah have been living together with a bit of poltergeist phenomenon. It's been getting worse and rattling Katie, so she calls in a psychic. In this interview, we come to understand the Katie's been having this problem most of her life. The psychic decides that it's not your average restless spirit, but a demon, and he doesn't do demons. Call the local demonologist.

Against this backdrop, the glib, cocky Micah goes through a number of changes. Katie, of course, believes and is very respectful of her demon while Micah goes from thinking on the one hand that it's all silly and psychics are worthless, to being excited about the prospect of catching interesting film footage and actually stirring stuff up.

And while this is all hand-held video, for good stretches the camera is mounted, meaning much less of the shakes.

It's actually got a very real feel to it, much more so than Blair Witch, and if Zombieland is a sort of low budget, the budget for this movie is said to be eleven thousand dollars. Most of the chills are ghost-story type things, such as a door opening slightly or a sheet billowing, but there are some interesting footfalls and a bit of special effects at the ending, too. It's all lightly done, though.

Adding to it is that Micah and Kate (the actors' real names) have a very real look to them. Kate is "Hollywood fat" which is to say, not fat at all, but probably fifteen to twenty pounds heavier than they'll let her be if she's in anything else. (Remember how skinny Heather Donahue got after "Witch". Scarier than the movie.)

Anyway, rather realistically and conveniently, her boyfriend tends to leer a bit when he's got the camera on her. A little less realistically is that she wears bras to bed. (I guess not unheard of, but it reminded me a bit of Megan McCain's just lying around the house picture.) A couple of other things like that sort of caught my eye. (Like, why don't they change sides in bed? Well, the camera shots are better that way and it probably wouldn't make any difference story-wise. Still, that's what I would've done.)

But when you're picking nits at this level, you've got yourself a solid picture.

Couldn't figure out why it was rated R when it was over. I guess there was some swearing? (I don't usually notice.) But I'd guess it was more that that's what the filmmakers wanted. PG-13 would've been more than adequate. It had an "R" feel, though.

I like "house" movies; always have. But this is an especially good one.

The Boy was less impressed. You could say we were flipped on this and Zombieland. I liked the slow buildup, he thought it was too slow. Also, Zombieland is more lighthearted, whereas this movie gets more and more serious every passing scene, despite a lot of humor.

Nonetheless, not only were people quiet during this movie, most stayed quiet well after the final scene, not really sure if it was over. Even the people who decided it was over left quietly. Pretty amazing, really.