Posts Tagged Horror Films
Learning From Paranormal Activity
Warning, this post contains semi-spoilers.
Many films manage to leave lasting impressions, but Paranormal Activity (2009) is a one of a rare breed. It’s a low budget exploration of what’s fundamentally frightening to our frail psyches; The Unknown. It doesn’t yield anything particularly novel, but instead chooses to play upon a concept that’s traditionally confined to the thriller genre.
There’s something in your house when you’re at your most vulnerable. Asleep, we’re powerless and by watching a normal couple subjected to increasingly horrific events, powerless to interact, it instils deep fear. But why did a film, filmed on a meagre budget of $25,000 manage to gross over $100 million? I try to explore the reasons.
You can relate to it
OK, maybe we’re not all being stalked by aggravated demons, but we’ve all been in the situation where a creaking pipe makes you think twice. It’s just the wind, isn’t it? From a young age, the dark frightens all but the hardest of wills. You’re not able to fight back, run away or even understand your surroundings.
It’s the one concept that Paranormal Activity unflinchingly panders to – night is when the bogey men come out, concealed by a veil of natural secrecy. Satan is darkness. Crime is darkness. There’s nothing we can do about it. It’s the one constant, aside from death, that the Western World cannot control. Lights may piece the darkness, but the unknown forces that co-inhabit our world don’t play by the rules. Doors can be locked, but it’s not going to prevent anything.
Elsewhere, the majority of us have wondered what it’d be like to watch ourselves sleep – do we talk to ourselves, pouring out our consciences to empty rooms? Are we restless, turning amid the black of the night? How did those keys end up on the floor – do I secretly sleepwalk? Paranormal Activity takes this concept and merges it with the 19th Century Ghost Story. Gone are the men in sheets and in its place is the consumer camera controlled by the Everyman couple.
Content with life and playful in their performance, you’ll continuously have to remind yourself that you’re not watching the real life American Dream. An unabating curiosity drives on the leads as their desire urges them to understand. The audience, like the characters, need to grasp the ever elusive reason. It’s the modern, scientific way of thinking and Paranormal Activity plays with this cruelly.
You see nothing
There’s nothing more scary than our shadow. It never leaves us and it’s ever watching. It’s nothing but an outline. Alien is perhaps the best example of this in recent years. It left the creature unveil right to the end It isn’t the subject that’s scary, but rather the desire to see. Generation Yers may suffer in the imagination department, but withholding the horror only acts as a catalyst. It drives the tension (something often left to the score, but a factor left out in the film to increase believability) and causes the uncanny to flourish.
Paranormal Activity makes you squirm. You find yourself willing on the mock-recordings only to curse when the plot develops its next scare. A flutter here, a footstep there – it’s a combination of the aural with a lack of control that unnerves us. It’s an approach that’ll always trump outright gore and a style more horror films would benefit from.
Disgust is merely a method of making someone feel uncomfortable; raw fear is far more complex. Once understood, Directors can really begin to play with their audiences.
It builds slowly
Take the subtle move of the door. A whisper in the middle of the night. You know it’s going to get worse, but you find yourself powerless to stop watching. It’s no use turning on the light, you’re transfixed.
It perhaps the most impressive thing about Paranormal Activity, a fact compounded my subsequent watching of Drag Me To Hell. The latter is cinema that tries too hard relying on shoddy special effects and crippled clichés. It throws you right into the action and expects you to be afraid. There’s minimal development and maximum indulgence.
Paranormal Activity is by no means a long film – it never drags, even when the scene is being set – but it manages to lay down a natural arc that yields increasingly worrying set pieces. By the time you reach the shock conclusion, you don’t know what to think. The majority of films want to grab you straight away, rushing you through a whirlwind of SFX and character exploration. The result is a hagged film that lacks subtlety. Thankfully, Paranormal Activity doesn’t fall into this category.
It’s scary
’nuff said.