The Blair House Project

Last night, I attended a midnight screening of the new indie horror movie, Paranormal Activity. If you haven't heard of it, that's not too surprising, because this film is flaunting its underground status as a badge of honor.

Filmed two years ago in the director's own house, on a budget of just a few tens of thousands of dollars, the movie garnered acclaim in the tiny handful of film festivals where it was screened. But then Steven Spielberg was given a copy to watch, and his endorsement (and suggestion for a new ending, which was reshot) pushed the thing into the spotlight.

Now the film is part of a deliberately Blair Witch Project-esque marketing scheme. It "opened" last weekend in only 10 cities, all "college towns," and expanded to only a handful more this weekend. Boulder was one such location, so I made the trek last night to see this movie that is deliberately only screened at midnight, and only on two nights out of the week.

There's a certain point at which you could argue that people shouldn't make it this hard to give them your money. But was the film worth the hype?

Well, sort of. If you have to drag yourself out at midnight to some city an hour away from you to see this, I'd say wait. But the word is that the success of the screenings so far is getting the movie opened in a more conventional manner within a week or two. And if that comes to pass? Well, if you like horror movies, you're going to find something to like here.

The plot is straightfoward. A paranormal presence comes into the home where a young dating couple have moved in together. The woman has some history of the paranormal, and wants to leave well enough alone, but the man is intrigued and wants to better document everything that's happening. He goes out and buys a video camera to record what's happening in their house, and the film unfolds as the "edited footage" of what the couple shot.

Paranormal Activity is a mix of good and not quite good. Actually, the whole thing is certainly a cut above most fare in the genre these days, but the fact that the movie gets so many things right somehow calls more attention to the handful of things that aren't quite right. You want to get in there and tweak those last few things to make it a masterpiece.

In the plus column, the people involved with this film have a very firm grasp on what is scary. There are a lot of damn creepy ideas in the movie, presented very well. Most of the best sequences in the movie work slowly and generate suspense and tension, not relying on cheap tricks to merely startle the audience. And none of the moments in the film are about evoking revulsion, as the majority of the horror genre seems to be about these days. The big budget movies would do well to watch this movie and learn these lessons.

But on the other hand, they seem to know less about making a movie, in general. The plotting and pacing are a little bit off. There are about a dozen "incidents" in the film, and while they're all pretty good, I don't think they're in the right order. Things escalate a bit too quickly; one or two things that happen early in the film are too great to ignore, dismiss, or downplay. While the film does some quick lip service to explain why "just leaving the haunted house" won't solve their problems, it's hard to believe the couple wouldn't take more dramatic steps more early on, given some of the things that happen in the first act.

The film also doesn't quite have the right mix of characters. The man and woman at the center of it all are well drawn characters, and the actors have a solid rapport with one another. There's also a good side character, a psychic that appears in a couple of scenes to juice appropriate emotions. But then there's a "friend of the woman" character who barely drifts in for a scene or two and adds nothing to the proceedings. At the same time, you sense a lack of any other character in the man's life; some sort of "frat boy"-esque person egging him on to taunt the spirit in his house might have helped to better explain his motivations.

The documentary presentation of the movie both helps and hurts it at different times. There are moments where fantastic use is made of the simplistic presentation. The few special effects we see are all the more potent for not being part of a million dollar production. The performances feel quite real, like authentic home video footage.

But a few of the gags rely on loud noises in the house, and since everything tends to sound tinny and less forceful on a camcorder microphone, these moments don't land so well. Also, you do find yourself wanting to directly compare the film to The Blair Witch Project because of this similar presentation. (The tear-streaming monologue from Blair Witch may seem a cliché now, but it's incredibly potent in the context of the movie, and nothing here is quite so strong.)

I do think that you can bring more to this movie as a viewer, however, and in doing so get more out of it. I appreciated the things that were good about the film, but I can tell you that a lot of people in the audience were genuinely scared of this movie. There were lots of yelps, choked off gasps, and outright screams -- all throughout the movie. And it's been a long, long time since I've heard a crowd reaction in a theater like the one that accompanied that newly shot ending.

So, again -- if indeed you don't have to work so hard to see this movie a few weeks from now, I'd probably recommend it overall. I give it a B.