Paranormal Activity

One of the scariest films ever made, Paranormal Activity saw the first light of day at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival. Paramount found a perfect internet marketing technique and no doubt spent ten times the original $15K budget on the sound mix. A hand-held first-person supernatural thriller Paranormal Activity mimics the video recorder narrative of movies like Cloverleaf or The Blair Witch Project.
Most of the suspense in PA revolves around the bedroom sequences. A couple - a guy making good money as a day trader and his live-in girlfriend, a student - find themselves possessed by an unnatural presence. The guy hooks up his camera to a computer to record their bed while they sleep. An increasing amount of things that go bump in the night occur. The day scenes find the camera capturing the couple's strained relationship. She turns out to have had this entity appear at other times in her life. The guy wants to provoke a response if only to conform to his alpha male personality.
Paranormal Activity takes a page from the William Castle playbook. The film, after all, revolves around its gimmick plus the successful promotion that saw it launched first as a midnight-only movie a few weeks ago. When the guy brings home a Ouija board it cements the fact that the entity is evil.
With only four cast members PA has a striped down look enhanced by a single location and the fact that action relies on carefully placed sound effects or subtle moves like a door slamming shut. Certainly there's no gore and very few actual special effects like in the spate of recent torture-porn horror films. While the p.o.v. dictates that we see what the camera sees much of the film unwinds with the camera solid on a tripod, further giving Paranormal Activity a locked down claustrophobic feeling. Of course no demon in any movie has ever acted like this one does. That didn't seem to matter to the people in the audience screaming every time a light flickered on and off.