If you have read an entertainment magazine, newspaper or news website in the past few weeks, you have likely heard about the latest phenomenon to ignite the film viewing public: Paranormal Activity. 

Hailed as this decade’s Blair Witch Project and inspiring independent filmmakers everywhere, Paranormal Activity is an ultra low budget, shaky-cam horror film chronicling the haunting of an ordinary American couple. 

Paranormal Activity follows Micah and Katie (Micah Sloat and Katie Featherston), a couple in their 20s living together in a two-storey house.

Katie is worried that she is being haunted by otherworldly beings and Micah has purchased an HD video camera in order to capture on film what exactly is behind it. That’s it — a very simple framework upon which director Oren Peli weaves an exquisite showcase of unbearable tension and horror. 

Paranormal Activity’s footage is supposedly that of Micah’s video-documentation of what is happening to them while they sleep. Every day, the camera records Katie and him bickering about how to approach the latest problem in their relationship and every night it is positioned in the corner of their master bedroom, recording the anomalous activity that is unsettling their lives. 

The nighttime scenes are what make the movie. The horror begins slowly, with odd yet amusing things occurring such as the swinging of a door or a thumping downstairs. Peli eases the audience into watching exactly what is occurring on screen; his choice to make the camera static was brilliant, adding an unexpected amount of realism to the scenes, as well as forcing the audience into witnessing everything that unfolds.

Like slowly boiling a frog in a pot of water, Peli tricks the audience into accepting every layer of tension he builds until, near the end, the emotional strain becomes almost unbearable. There are no cuts to relieve tension, so when Katie’s leg is mysteriously lifted from the bed and she is dragged kicking and screaming down the hallway, the audience is forced to witness the entire scene.

“Every scare in Paranormal Activity is earned through ever present tension and an expert manipulation of innate human fears.”

There are no musical swells to alert the audience of danger, no Bernard Herrmann strings to emphasize the thrills or cheap jump-scares to unnerve the audience; every scare in Paranormal Activity is earned through ever present tension and an expert manipulation of innate human fears. 

Paranormal Activity draws its horror from the most instinctive human fears — nighttime, demons and the unknown. Peli wisely draws upon the films of Val Lewton and chooses never to show the actual source of the disturbance, instead allowing the horror to swell inside the audience’s mind, letting their imaginations run wild and distort the fear into something more than it is. 

Of course there are some shortcomings to Paranormal Activity. Its filmmaking is uneven and it often shows that it was made for a scant $15,000; occasionally it has poor dialogue and weak acting. However, the nighttime scenes are so expertly crafted, so brilliantly framed, so inherently scary — especially for a low-budget horror film — that they make the film’s other flaws negligible. 

Much like comedy, horror is an extremely subjective genre. Paranormal Activity might not scare you, but, on the other hand, it could easily be one of the most terrifying and exhilarating experiences at the theatre in years, and one that comes recommended to everyone — unless you have a weak heart. See it with a crowd. Don’t go alone.