The camera plays a character, a presence that irritates Katie more and more throughout the film. He’s tech obsessed and dying to catch a demon. Part of the charm of the original PARANORMAL ACTIVITY was that the characters were completely aware of the camera’s presence-and it always made sense why Micah was filming.
Paranormal activity movie#
This movie takes place in 2006, just before the events of the original. Katie Featherston and Micah Sloat return, along with Brian Boland ( Proven Innocent ), Molly Ephraim ( The Front Runner ), and Sprague Greyden ( Dirty John ).
Paranormal activity series#
With a change in directors-still produced by Oren Peli, but directed by Tod Williams-the second in the series is more lighthearted and slick. PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 2 has a distinctively different flavor than its predecessor. PARANORMAL ACTIVITY was clearly a passion project of Oren Peli’s-he was the director, producer, writer, cinematographer, and editor. This gives the movie instant replay value by making the audience play Where’s Waldo? in the dark with demons. I noticed my eyes scanning the room left to right over and over, glancing at the seconds, waiting for even the most minuscule of movements. The timestamp clock creates an authentic-feeling set-up for increasingly more bonkers shit each night. Not every night is shown, but the ones that are shown are labeled with a time and date stamp, a hallmark of (almost) all of the PARANORMAL ACTIVITY movies. The spooky shenanigans take place over the course of roughly a month. Crucially, the psychic tells the couple that their negative energy could make the demon stronger. The psychic tells them a demon is haunting Katie, not specifically their home. The setup is explained in detail when the couple interview a psychic about the situation.
We understand that they have a relatively normal, happy relationship, but we can already see hints of Micah’s tendency to be controlling, and Katie’s irritation with Micah’s camera. Within the first 4 minutes of the film, we know everything we need to know about Katie and Micah. Katie semi-willingly obliges him, but she becomes more and more annoyed with Micah’s filming as unexplainable events start to happen at night. Her boyfriend Micah has an obsession with technology, and he wants to make a film documenting the strange occurrences in their house.
The first movie in the series, PARANORMAL ACTIVITY, follows Katie and Micah. I will be spoiling all movies…you’ve been warned. Let’s take a deep dive into why this series still matters over a decade after it began. My most important question to answer was: Am I expected to ignore my own eyes in order to understand these movies? Can the collective directors make me think people really do have a reason to film 24/7, and that they just happened to catch paranormal activity on film? How “real” can the PARANORMAL ACTIVITY movies get? The films are generally self-aware, creating horrifying situations within the uncanny valley of “narrative fiction” films and “documentary” films.
Ever since The Blair Witch Project sold its own authenticity with cult-status results, found-footage movies have been trying to replicate that success. There must be a reason they’ve done so well, a reason they resonate so deeply with their audience. With so many copy-cats out there, I wondered about the authenticity of the PARANORMAL ACTIVITY movies. Today, the market is saturated with found-footage movies- VHS, R.E.C., The Bay, Apollo 18, Grave Encounters, any number of current movies trying to recreate PARANORMAL ACTIVITY‘s cult-status success. They were some of the first movies that had me sleeping with the lights on, and I recalled them being extremely popular. I remembered loving the PARANORMAL ACTIVITY movies.
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