Goal: Find a horror movie that everybody loves.
Paranormal Activity (2007)
What I know about it:
I just watched five seconds of the trailer. Oh no. This seems like a movie I tried to watch a couple of years ago called Amityville in Space (2022). I tried to watch along with the podcasters at The Flop House—fellow Earlham grads—who pick bad movies and talk about them. Amityville in Space was the lowest-budgeted movie they ever did. It was filmed entirely in the director’s house, with some incredibly cheap, brief special effects slipped in.
I also know Paranormal Activity is the most profitable movie of all time—making $193 million on the budget of a used Honda Civic with 90,000 miles on it. I’m a big fan of movies by first-timers working without a budget, but I suspected I might hate this. It came out a little too close to “Ghost Hunters*, the most boring show of all time (to me). Those shows were about as scary as an improv comedy performance without jokes. The only thing scary was their acting.
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Shortly after I started this:
Maybe I overestimated how much people loved this movie. It’s always mentioned on “most important horror movies” lists, but its audience ratings are kind of low compared to The Conjuring, which I also never saw until this year. Five minutes in, and I regretted my decision?
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After the movie:
I’m surprised because I really liked this—almost. It isn’t worth talking about the ending, because the entire movie was building to something… and I don’t think the filmmakers quite knew what that was.
Still, it was extremely watchable for a no-budget production. Like some friends converted their grandparents’ house into a creep-a-thon haunted house that’s invite-only. It isn’t high art, but it’s thrilling and captivating. You keep wondering: What is that strange sound? Did they hear that? What’s going to show up on the time-lapse footage? Is this a haunting or something psychological? What’s going to happen with that dust they spread everywhere? A Ouija board?
The movie succeeds mostly because it feels like every relationship between a young heterosexual couple in 2007. Back before iPhones, when FireWire was king, and the 62-inch TV in the living room weighed 150 pounds and displayed color only if you sat at the right angle. Camera tech had finally made it possible to film everything in your house, and that novelty gives the movie its weird realism.
One genuinely real-couple moment: even though the husband has just spent several months’ salary on camera equipment—and even though Katie is the kind of freak who does things that are illegal in half a dozen states—they decide to keep the cameras off during their alone time. I think they’ll one day regret that decision.
At its core, Paranormal Activity is about having a romantic partner who doesn’t tell you everything. No matter how sweet they are or how in love you’ve been, what if there’s something truly wrong with this person that they never told you about?
“You didn’t say it on the first date. But it’s something you could’ve brought up on the fifteenth date. Or the thirtieth date.”
How much baggage can the nice guy carry? Is it ever acceptable just to leave?
Paranormal Activity is a novelty that has aged much better than it probably should have. It captures a moment in time that could only have existed within a two-year window. It shows a couple’s struggle so universal and normal that it’s easy to ask, “What would I do if this were us?”
This isn’t a true story—and I’m not sure anyone ever believed it was—but it feels real. You know where a story like this is heading, and some things are inevitable.
6.5/10
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