Never mind the vampires. There are bigger, darker forces at work. A sociologist might speculate on the recession; how tighter times make audiences more receptive to fantastical, escapist cinema. A psychoanalyst might say we’re retreating into infancy. Either way, the realist tropes that have governed Hollywood product since the mid-nineties have given way to magic and monsters. Six instalments into the inventively gory Saw franchise, Jigsaw may or may not be dead, but he’s looking pretty damned tired. . If 2008 was the year of the vampire, 2009 is the year of the retro-horror.
Retro-horror means Things That Go Bump in the Night. It means old school Satanic rituals like those found in the forthcoming faux-grindhouse hit, House of the Devil. It means freaky happenstance and Ouija boards, as seen in Drag Me to Hell and Oren Peli’s fine directorial debut, Paranormal Activity. Made for chump change on a camcorder, it would be all too easy to pigeonhole the film as This Year’s Blair Witch Project and say no more. Like that picture, Paranormal Activity makes canny use of its limited resources and mockumentary format to discombobulate and scare the bejesus out of its unsuspecting audience. But where Messrs.Sanchez and Myrick had spooky woods at their disposal, Mr. Oren must rely on traditional Val Lewton skulduggery; a noise here, a terrified response shot there.
Indeed, much of the project’s pizzazz comes from the weird incongruity between the film’s natural world – a cute, aspirational couple living in a dreamy pad with pool – and the intrusion of the supernatural and otherworldliness.
For anyone who has missed the TV ads, the hype, the $100 million taken at the US box-office, Paranormal Activity is the fictional video record of a haunting. Katie (Katie Featherston), a student who claims to have been ‘visited’ before, lives with her sceptical broker boyfriend Micah (Micah Sloat), who records their domestic life as a way of proving or disproving her beliefs. Soon enough, it’s clear that something very odd is going on in their San Diego starter home.
Stripped of SFX and gloss, Mr. Oren’s $25,000 dollar delight is a brilliant technical exercise that has won over genre aficionados and horror-phobes in equal numbers. The performances, given primarily by people who were still waiting tables during the film-shoot, are wholly convincing. The bickering, lively script adds kitchen sink authenticity. The timing is nothing short of miraculous.
Do yourselves a favour and skip the alternate endings circulating the web; the final, theatrical denouement – a development suggested by Steven Spielberg, no less – is the only game in town.