Film Friday: Paranormal Activity (2007)

Earlier this week, we talked about how too many horror films fail to take advantage of the things that naturally scare us. Instead, they rely on a final reveal to scare the audience along with a few moments of shock as their monster jumps out at the audience or a few moments of gore as they try to scare us by showing a bloody death. Paranormal Activity is different. This is a super smart film.

** Major Spoiler Alert **

Plot

Paranormal Activity is a “found footage” film about a young couple, Micah and Katie, who have moved into a new house in San Diego in September 2006. As the story opens, Micah is setting up a camera as Katie tell us that she has been haunted periodically throughout her life by an evil presence. Micah is determined to capture evidence of this entity on film.

After a few nights, small things begin to happen: items move, lights flash, etc. These things scare Katie and she hires a psychic, Dr. Fredrichs, to come examine the house. He specializes in hauntings and he warns Katie that she is not dealing with a ghost, but is instead dealing with a demon. He tells her he cannot help her, but he gives her the name of a man who can. He warns her and Micah not to try to communicate with this demon. Micah, however, refuses to take Fredrichs seriously.

Over the next few days, things keep getting worse. Katie wants to call the demonologist, but Micah keeps stopping her. Then Micah buys a Ouija board despite promising Katie he would not do this. They fight and storm out of the room. When they do, the demon takes over the Ouija board and causes it to burst into flames. After this, the demon becomes increasingly more powerful as we move steadily toward the ending.

What This Film Does Right

Wow, where to begin? Let’s start with the fact that they focused on believability, they eschewed cheap gore, and they did exactly what we discussed earlier in the week: they used human nature against the audience. Three great choices!

In terms of believability, they chose a well-known bit of mythology that most of us fear deep down: demonic possession, and they handled it extremely well. For example, to make the audience buy into the demon, they ratcheted up the danger each night as the movie progressed. This made the demon seem more plausible because we feel that we understand how it gained its power: the more they fight, the more the thing grows, and when Micah buys the Ouija board, it really becomes strong. Since you see the cause and effect, it all starts to feel natural to you.

This idea also plays on the part of human nature that looks for patterns. By ratcheting up the demon’s powers and giving the demon more power to manipulate our world each day, the writer establishes a pattern which the audience will recognize and extrapolate. The result is a constant feeling of dread as we see this thing getting stronger and stronger without end. That is ominous to us and makes us feel trapped because we know it will soon be too powerful for us to handle. The writer then makes the characters oblivious to this pattern which triggers our need to warn people of a danger. And since we can’t fulfill that need, we end up feeling helpless and anxious.

Important to maintaining the believability, at no point, does the demon do anything we can’t imagine a ghost doing. At no point, does it show more power than we imagine a ghost or demon might have. At no point does it do something that makes us doubt that it is real. And the more real something feels, the more scary it will be. It even behaves consistently, which adds to the realism. Indeed rather than randomly doing scary things, this demon has a purpose. Interestingly, at no point are we ever really told what it wants, but its behavior is so consistent and so obvious that we realize the demon is sexually obsessed with Katie and it wants her. It acts like a nasty, obsessed (and supernatural) jilted boyfriend, and it portrays the role perfectly. This makes its motive real to us as we can understand this from our own lives. In fact, this is a motive that will already scare a great many people in the audience who have dealt with an obsessed ex-lover.

Beyond this, the director expertly plays upon our instinctual fears. The demon attacks at night. It cannot be seen or fought. It can be next to you and you wouldn’t know it. It cannot be escaped because it can find Katie anywhere. In fact, it has followed her since her youth. Each of those things terrifies us and triggers our “fight or flight” mechanisms. Then they go further. In one scene, we watch as Katie gets out of bed and stands by the bed for more than half an hour watching Micah sleep. This is amazingly creepy to us because we are completely vulnerable when we sleep and the idea of someone standing over us as we sleep is a terrifying one. It also suggest unnatural behavior on the part of Katie, which tells us that the demon is gaining the power to possess her.

All of this is compounded by some smart choices regarding the characters. Throughout the film, the characters do things they’ve been told not to do. But unlike most horror films where the characters are just morons, these two are doing this because it’s in their natures to do them. They are told the demon feeds on negative energy, yet they fight. They fight because their emotions are raw and they are an incompatible couple. Micah is told repeatedly not to use a Ouija board, yet he does. He does so because this is all a game to him and he thinks he can solve the problem in this manner. We know better, but he doesn’t. This frustrates us and makes us feel helpless that we can’t stop them. It fills us with dread too because we know the consequences. And what’s best about this, is that it again draws upon moments in our own lives where people we know refused to follow good advice and then found themselves in trouble. Thus, once again, the film evokes emotions that are already within us rather than trying to get us to imagine something we’ve never felt.

Then, as we near the ending, everything begins to fall apart. We can’t trust Micah anymore because he stopped Katie from calling the demonologist and then he took away her cross and burns it. At best, this is bad judgment and cruel. At worst, this is the final straw which leaves her defenseless to the demon. And either way, he is clearly a hazard at this point. At the same time, Katie puts us into an impossible position. It is time to flee the house. Even Katie agrees. But then Katie suddenly refuses. Yes, she is showing signs of possession, but what do you do with her at that point? If you care about her, and the audience does, then you can’t just abandon her. But it’s clear you can’t stay either. And Micah shows no ability to force her to leave. Thus, the audience is faced with an amazingly difficult decision and ultimate must choose a path they know they will regret.

(spoiler alert reminder)
Finally, we come the ending. There is a huge twist here in a way as the ending unfolds in a most unexpected way. Indeed, throughout this film, we are constantly told that the danger is to Katie. The demon wants her and it has followed her. She cannot escape it... but Micah can, he can just walk away. In conformance to this, she is terrified of the demon and Micah is not. What we don’t suspect watching the film, however, is that the demon will use her to kill Micah. So it comes as a real shock when that happens. This shock is genuinely frightening because it wasn’t something the audience considered. The entire film had built up to the demon taking or killing Katie, and now it instead killed Micah. Unexpected twists like this strongly enhance the terror of a horror movie. The film even does a fantastic job of not showing what is happening, which leaves the audience on the edge of their seats as they wait to find out.

And in terms of this being a twist, it is very well done. Up to this point, you’ve been focused on what the demon wants to do to Katie, but now it flips that around. Yet, when it happens, you immediately remember a whole series of clues that this would be the ending which you missed or misunderstood. For example, the demon wants Katie sexually, i.e. it’s not looking to kill her. It attacks the picture of Micah, but not her, showing hostility to him only. It possesses her several times, once controlling her enough to leave the house and the second time making her stand over Micah as he slept. There is even a strong suggestion that the demon possessed her when she was eight and made her burn her house down. That shows it can use her maliciously. And then Dr. Fredrichs flees the house in a near panic because he senses that the demon resents anyone who helps her. All of this suggests that the demon’s hate is focused on Micah... but you don’t see that because the writer cleverly misdirected you throughout by pointing to the danger to Katie. This is clever, it’s like undermining everything you thought you knew for certain right at the end.

To sum this up, this is a brilliant film. Rather than trying to scare you with fake gore and a horrific ending, this film steadily builds your level of terror step by step by playing on fears you already have, by making you feel helpless in light of the characters’ mistakes and lack of knowledge, and by making each scene count. In fact, you never know what will happen in any scene, if anything, and that keeps you nervous and on edge. Then it finishes strongly by expanding the threat in a way we should have seen coming, but didn’t.

The end result is a truly terrifying film that drew in amazing numbers. With a budget of just $16,687, this film made an incredible $210,391,025, and it was well-deserved.