See How Sweet She Sleeps

Paranormal Activity, a low-budget horror film that creeped even Spielberg out, has since become an audience phenomenon.

Paranormal Activity is a genuinely frightening film. As a horror aficionado who has seen most of what’s out there, I don’t scare easily, but this little film managed to scare me properly. Made for just $15,000, it has grossed within a couple of months of its opening $100 million—making it the highest grossing independent film to date. Inspired by the less-is-more minimalist school of horror made famous by The Blair Witch Project, the entire film unfolds through a video camera, giving it that same grimy verisimilitude, that feeling of ‘it’s really happening’, suggesting that the video was ‘found footage’, with no evidence of a film crew.

There is no opening or closing credits. At the end of the film, the screen simply turns eerily blank. Spooky. A young couple, Katie and Micah, move into a two-storied home in San Diego and find it haunted. What happens to them over a few weeks is seen through Micah’s handheld camera: the idea is to document anything unusual, especially at night when they are asleep. At the crux of Paranormal Activity’s suspense and dread is a simple, brilliant, recurring mise en scene: each night Micah places the camera in the bedroom, fixed on a tripod, and long after the couple have fallen asleep, the audience continues to watch what happens in the bedroom during the night through this camera.

A time-lapse clock in the corner of the camera shows us the way time is passing: at 11 pm the couple fall asleep… the clock speed winds to 3 am… silence… only the faint hum of the camera… except, wait, did we just see the bedroom door move a bit and then move back? Yes, it did! In the morning, Katie and Micah look at the night’s footage and see the same thing. They feel the same chill we did, and from then on, the air in the house—and in the movie auditorium—is thick with a creeping dread.

Paranormal Activity works more effectively than any gore and special effects movie because it understands that the real horror lurks in waiting for something to happen. A typical horror film works by heightening the tension and releasing it—we brace for the shock, the sound track cues us, and it explodes in your face. This movie, however, doesn’t play with us; instead it lets us anticipate the horror. And when something terrifying actually happens, it takes place off camera! We only hear the screams. The terror we have to imagine for ourselves. What Paranormal Activity is doing is transferring the fear to us—all the fright and fear the couple experience later is experienced first by viewers.

Katie and her boyfriend are blissfully asleep while we sweat it out. The creepiest scene I’ve encountered in a horror film recently is right here—and there’s nothing explicitly horrific or violent about it: Katie wakes up at 3 am in the night, gets out of bed, walks around to Micah’s side of the bed, and stands looking down at him… the camera speed-winds and we register that it is now 5 am. Katie is standing exactly in the same place, just looking at Micah sleeping. A little after 5, she walks back to her side of the bed, slips into the sheets and falls asleep. Creepy, creepy.

This film was made in 2007, but took two years to release. Part of the film’s lore is how, through the way it was discovered and marketed, it became such an audience phenomenon. Oren Peli, an Israeli living in America, wrote and shot the film in a week at his house, using two actor friends. Before it was released, Steven Spielberg took the DVD home to watch it. He returned the next day with the disc wrapped in a trash bag. He felt it was haunted: apparently after he watched it, the doors to his room got locked from the outside.

He wanted the film shown exactly the way it was and not remake it. The fundamental appeal of the film, he was quick to realise, was its amateur, no frills YouTube quality that gave it its creepy realism. Eventually, in 2009, Paramount picked it up and invited the audience to distribute the film. On the film’s website you can vote for the film to play in the place you live in!—whether Boston or Bangalore. The viral buzz spread on Twitter and Facebook. A totally new idea in viral movie marketing.

The trailer shows a terrified audience watching the film. Even critics who dismissed the movie as a crude little shocker that ‘feels more shot than directed’ testify to the shared communal experience it generates: the pleasure and fun of watching a horror film in a crowd (collective gasps and shivers) has never been more potently experienced and enjoyed than in this clever low-budget shocker.

horrorlow budgetParanormal Activityviral marketing