Lucid Dreams and Saturn Skies

This review has been a long time in coming.  Not for any reason in particular, simply because I kept neglecting to do it.  It’s one of my little quirks – I’ll assign myself something and then put it off forever, even if what I wind up doing instead turns out to be more difficult.  *shrugs* I never claimed to be rational.

Anyway, back to Paranormal Activity.  For anyone who isn’t familiar with the movie by now, it follows a couple new to suburbia who find that their house is haunted by demonic activity.  But, in a twist on the old haunted house story, it turns out that that it isn’t the house that’s haunted, but the girlfriend.  The demon has haunted her since childhood, as demons apparently tend to do (the forces of Hell apparently have little to do when on vacation from stoking the souls of the damned).

That is the plot, such as it is.  What made this movie famous wasn’t the storyline, but the scares.  And it is on this point that the viewership polarizes into one of two camps (there may be a third, but like the Green Party there aren’t too many of them so they often get ignored…sorry guys, that’s just how America is these days).  Camp one thought the movie was terrifying, and thus would call it a good movie.  The other camp was horribly bored by the whole affair, and calls it little more than overhyped dreck.  And the fact that the movie made millions and spawned three sequels is proof that the Hollywood machine does nothing but spew crap…you get the idea.

I think your take on the movie depends on whether you saw it in a theater, or watched it later on DVD.  When it came out, the movie was pushed by a brilliant marketing campaign that showed horrified movie goers in their seats, screaming.  It also showed some of the creepiest bits of the movie, completely out of context – even the ending, which I thought was pretty interesting when I realized it actually WAS the ending.

So, thus primed by the marketing campaign, my bro and I went to go see the movie at a local theater.  It was fairly late at night, and the house was packed with folks of all ages, but mainly people in their late teens and early twenties.  It was interesting how the director approached the movie, as it started off very slow.  The crowd was beginning to get restless – it took probably forty-five minutes of an hour and a half run time (rough estimate) to get to the really intense “paranormal activity”.  But when it did, the collective terror of the crowd sucked me in.  Yes, I’ll admit it – this horror author (though not one at the time) was scared!  And I was scared on the drive home as well, although I didn’t lose as much sleep from this movie as I did after The Exorcist.

I do have to mention some funny things that happened during my experience watching Paranormal Activity in the theater.  There was one boisterous fellow who sat about three rows behind me.  He was one of the most vocal ones in complaining about the fact that little if anything happened in the early parts of the movie.  His complaints soon turned to a kind of terrified vocal tic when the movie ramped up the fear factor.  Literally every time there was a scare, he would say “What the heck! What. The. Heck.”  And there was another person – a girl sitting toward the back right corner of the theater – who would literally squeal every time something occurred on scream.  Between the two of them and what happened on the screen, I was both frightened and amused all at once.

I found on subsequent viewings that the movie lost a lot of its creep factor.  It just isn’t the same watching it alone in the house on a smaller screen television.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s still creepy, but the creep factor wears off pretty quickly.  Paranormal Activity is a one shot wonder, unlike a movie like The Exorcist which retains its creep factor no matter how many times you’ve seen it (but then I’ve only watched it twice).

Still, if you’ve yet to see it, shut off the lights and give Paranormal Activity a try.  You never know. You just might get spooked.

Andrew Kincaid writes horror and fantasy.  He’s making the world a stranger place, one story at a time.  Get in touch with him on Facebook and Twitter, and check out his debut horror anthology ON DARK PATHS, available on Kindle!