A young girl is haunted by a demon and to find a sollution, her boyfriend buys a camera to register what happens. He starts to film themselves day and night.
“Paranormal Activity” has more than one thing incommon with “The Blair Witch Project“. Both films are very low budget, but made big bucks after hitting the cinemas (I even read it was released in Europe earlier than planned because of the success in the US, so why is it of 2007?). Both films are formed by the video footage that the subjects recorded themselves. Both films are creepy thriller / horror films in which nothing much is to be seen, but the suggestion and the fact that it looks authentic does the trick. Both films have a lot of out-of-hand filming that makes my stomach ache. “The Blair Witch Project” was hyped more, with fake newsflashes on the internet about lost students and the idea that the film was merely what was on the videotape of the recorder that was found. “Paranormal Activity” has obviously been edited more, but in several cases this really adds to the atmosphere. Most (of course) happens at night, but the periods that nothing happens are shown in fast-foward. There are also two fast-foward scenes in which something does happen, greatly enlarging the ‘creepyness’ of those scenes. Just as in “The Blair Witch Project” it takes a while before things start roling, but after that the film quickly runs to a climax. I personally did not find the film all that scary, not as much as “The Blair Witch Project” for sure. Maybe that is because the novelty is gone. The film still has a magnificent atmosphere though. Taking the reactions from the audience, many people did get the creeps though (such as the three girls next to us discussing if they still dared to leave the room 🙂 ). I have seldom seen a film with so many outloud reactions from the viewers, screams and yells, “oh my god”s, they were all there. There is nothing much to say about the story of the film, other than that what I started with. Be sure that it is the more frightening kind of film like the one I mentioned several times before. If you liked “The Blair Witch Project”, you want to see “Paranormal Activity”. On the big screen of course.
