Paranormal Activity

Halloween being here it was a good time to take in a scary flick. So it was off to the theaters to check out PARANORMAL ACTIVITY. What I really liked was how subtle it was. It seems like most of the horror flicks nowadays are over the top gore fests. This movie got the entire audience to jump in their seats from a door slamming.

I want you to roll that around in your head for a bit.

The movie does fly in the face of every other horror flick to come down the pipe recently. This isn't a super slick production. This isn't CGI every other frame. It's certainly not gory, in fact there's very little blood throughout the entire movie.

So why is it scary? PARANORMAL ACTIVITY does an excellent job of making the viewer believe that this is really happening to someone and it could happen to you. It makes you question the sounds you hear at night. There's been a lot of comparisons to THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT which are fair considering the style in which the movie was shot. The great thing here and what sets this movie apart is the camera work. It doesn't bounce all over the place. You can easily follow what what is going on.

Too often with horror and action films the directors recently have been using a quick cut style. It give a sense of the chaos that is going on within that scene. That's not done at all here. With the quick cut style the audience is left having to decipher what they saw. "What the hell just happened?" Here it is clear but still makes us engage. "I totally saw that! What the hell is it?" Both make our imaginations fire up.

It does get a bit over the top in the closing scenes, but I forgive it. It was a very memorable movie. There's been a lot of reports of people not being able to sleep after watching it. Well, I slept quite well last night, thank you very much.

Although I did get a bit of a jolt when the fitted sheet on the bed came loose and thwipped against my hand.