Trick or Trailers: Paranormal Activity (2009)

Are we really in October already? Like halfway through it, at that? 

Well, according to the calendar we definitely are. But it seems like time doesn't really have the same meaning as it used to, right? The weather changes with the seasons and we come up on holidays and other milestones but yet it feels like we went into limbo way back in March and still haven't come out of it. 

But no matter how different things might feel, officially being in October means that another round of Trick or Trailers is due! I haven't checked on how many years I've been doing this but I know it's been more than a few. Early on, I was conscious of trying not to repeat any trailers from years past but at this point, I'm not going to bother to go back and double check. I'm just going with my gut and hoping that I'm not just rehashing things. We'll see how it goes!     

First up, 2009's effective trailer for the original Paranormal Activity: 

   

This is one of my absolute favorite styles of horror trailers - selling people on the reactions of an audience. But man, everything about this trailer makes me want to cry now. An audience lined up to see a movie! In a packed theater, no less! Everybody screaming and hiding their eyes and clutching their companions and just sharing the rush of that communal fright! God, how I want to get back to that. 

With theater going pretty much on pause, as studios continue to hold back most of their product until the pandemic situation improves, I'm desperately missing the joys of getting hyped for new movies and anticipating trekking to the theater on opening night to have that experience with an audience. I know there's no shortage of new genre product on streaming services but, I'm sorry, pulling something up on Netflix or Hulu is no substitute for seeing a new horror movie on the big screen. Especially ones that caution you to "Don't See It Alone!" 

That experience is so key to appreciating movies and to horror movies, especially, that it is so dispiriting (no ghost pun intended!) to have it on hold and with such uncertainty as to when it might return. 

Watching the first PA trailer these days makes for a bittersweet reminder of better times, of the kind of simple, silly pleasures that we took for granted, never expecting that they might one day end. 

Trick or Trailers: Paranormal Activity (2009)

People often ask whether today's horror movies can ever have the seismic impact of a movie like The Exorcist (1973). In fact, just the other day Badass Digest was asking that exact question in this post.

First, you have to ask if any movie in general could ever have the same impact as movies once did. There are still popular movies today, obviously, that have a "can't miss" quality to them but it's different now. A movie like Gravity is huge by today's standards, most everyone who sees it raves about it, and it's maintaining its hold at the box office but had it been released in the '70s, or even into the '90s, however, it'd be a true phenomenon with lines around the block.

Our culture is just too splintered now for a movie - or, really, I think anything - to be such a focal point anymore. Not only is there so much out there pulling people's attention in different directions but specifically with films, the way we watch them has changed so much. I'm old enough to remember a time before cable and VHS when, if you wanted to see a movie, you had to go to the theaters.

When I was a kid, once something like Raiders of the Lost Ark had left the theaters, that was it - you couldn't see it again until it ran on ABC or something. And that would be a few years down the line, pan and scan (not that most knew what to call it then), and cut up with commercials. Even then, that would still rate as a big deal and you knew that on the schoolyard the next day, everyone would have watched it.

Now, if you don't see a movie in the theater, you know you can get through Redbox or Netflix or whatever just a few months down the line. Of course, that's if you haven't downloaded it illegally while the movie's still in theaters. There's more access to movies, from multiple venues, so the need to see them on the big screen and be a part of a cultural moment, is not the factor that it used to be.

Also, even if people were still going to the theater in the same volume they used to, digital projection means that theaters can have multiple screenings in a way that didn't used to be possible. During the '80s, I remember standing in long lines for every single big movie that came out. As much of an imposition as that was, it always made them all seem like true events - every Indiana Jones, every Star Wars, every Star Trek, Ghostbusters, you name it.

That's because my local theater had just one print of a film, maybe two. Usually it'd be one print that would have to be interlocked between two houses so the screenings would be set ten minutes apart so things would always be mobbed for blockbuster films. Today, sold out shows are practically unheard of because if they think a movie's going to be big enough it's booked into four or five houses with showings spaced every half hour or forty five minutes.

But back to horror - can a movie still wipe people out like The Exorcist did? Eh, yes and no. The reasons why it's tougher for a movie to have that kind of impact are multifold. One, someone has to actually make a movie as good as The Exorcist and that happens very, very rarely. Two, audiences are more jaded and more sophisticated. Not sophisticated as in smart because people now are dumber than they've ever been but sophisticated in the sense that they've seen so many taboos broken by now and special effects aren't mystifying in the way that they used to be. Add to that the fact that people are just bigger douches now and less inclined to give a movie their full attention and you've got a climate where, more than ever, horror movies have their work cut out for them.

All that said, I'm reassured by the impact horror can still have. I think it's kind of a miracle, really. Over the summer, The Conjuring was a big hit and it was generally agreed to be effectively scary. For seasoned horror fans, it was kind of lightweight, yes, but what's interesting and encouraging about The Conjuring's popularity is how old-fashioned its approach was. Nothing explicit, no FX to speak of, just things that go bump in the night and I find it heartening that there's still a big audience that's receptive to that kind of fright.

In 2009, I felt similarly encouraged by Paranormal Activity's success. What Oren Peli's film proved was that you could still scare an audience with very little. Sure, not everyone will be affected equally but that's always been true. I had an uncle who saw The Exorcist in theaters back when it came out and found it laughable.

The magic of movies, horror movies specifically, is that there's a suspension of disbelief involved. For them to work, it requires that we set aside the part of our brain that tells us it's just a movie. It may be that fewer people are able to, or care to, make that leap than there used to be but when a movie like Paranormal Activity does succeed, it's because, like the best classic horror movies, it invites people to stop being jaded smart-alecks and just scream.

Paranormal Praise

Even if I wasn't particularly fond of the Paranormal Activity films, I would still feel eternally in their debt for the fact that they drop kicked the yearly blight known as Saw from its Halloween perch and made the witching season safe for fun scares again. Sorry, but Halloween is for ghosts, goblins and the supernatural, not torture.

When Paranormal Activity became a hit in October 2009, I considered it cause for celebration. Even better was the fact that I actually liked the movie itself - I wasn't just grateful that it cleared the stink of Saw out of the room. Some would argue that the couple at the heart of PA were not the most sympathetic of duos but if I had a beef against every horror movie where the protagonists were not especially likable, I wouldn't like many horror movies. Personally, I thought Katie Featherston and Micah Sloat were fine (if a little too rich, but whatever) and I was in their corner enough to care what happened to them. But what I really liked about PA is how director Oren Peli had just one imperative in mind - to scare the shit out of the audience. So many horror films seem made by people oblivious to the mechanics of generating fear but Peli showed an innate understanding of how to build unease and deliver big payoffs.

Like The Blair Witch Project in 1999, Paranormal Activity proved that you don't need big special effects to deliver big scares. And unlike BWP (which I still consider to be brilliant), PA had more showmanship to offer, injecting more audience-pleasing jump scares into the mix. I love the rinky-dink, handmade quality to PA's brand of funhouse tricks (like the Ouija board that bursts into flames) and I love that they've carried that quality onto the rest of the series. It would've been so easy for this series to get off track and become too slick for its own good but PA 2 smartly stuck to what worked in the first film, embodied the same low budget aesthetic, and it did what I would've thought was impossible - allowed lightening to strike twice.

The quality control on that sequel was air tight and it proved that Peli didn't just fall ass backwards into Paranormal Activity's success. This was someone who really knew what they were doing and in his producer capacity, he's continued to guide his series well. Other filmmakers who claim to be such hardcore horror buffs could stand to learn something from him as Peli clearly knows more about what makes a horror film work than many fan-favorite directors who are superstars on the convention circuit and the blogosphere. But that's the subject of another blog post, perhaps.

Now the third PA is arriving in time for another Halloween and the first full trailer indicates that, once again, all involved have kept their eyes on the prize. Early reviews (like this), from a surprise showing at Fantastic Fest, confirm as much. I'll still be keeping my expectations in check, because that's only sensible, but based on the trailer I'm very game for whatever PA 3 has to offer.

Some like to bitch that the PA films don't show anything and that, you know, it's dumb for people to find them scary. Personally, it restores my faith in not just the horror genre but in audiences as well that these films do work. You'd think that modern viewers would be way too jaded for these simple spook house style films but I love the fact that there's enough people out there who appreciate this type of horror to make these movies huge hits. I love hearing an audience scream at a well-timed jump scare and to see rows of people fly back in their seats all at once. That's a part of the horror movie experience that's so essential to the genre's appeal. There's an often unappreciated art to making those moments happen and not every filmmaker can successfully pull them off. In the three decades or so that I've been watching horror films in the theater, I've seldom heard an audience reaction as loud as the shrieks that I heard accompany a key, kitchen-set moment in PA 2.

Movies that revel in atrocities, like the Human Centipede films or A Serbian Film, are not the future of horror. They're curiosities, at best. And I say that as someone who spent their adolescent years combing video stores for films like Cannibal Holocaust and Make Them Die Slowly. Maybe I'm just getting old and I don't need to fly in the face of society's norms as much anymore with my entertainment choices but when I hear that a movie features someone jerking off with sandpaper, it sounds like a waste of time to me. Things that go bump in the night, though?

When done right, that stuff never gets old.

In Space, No One Can Hear You Scream

In Scream 4, the film kicks off with spoofs of the fictitious Stab series - the films within the Scream films. Apparently, in the Scream-verse, Stab has chugged along to something like seven or eight installments. Unfortunately, unlike Stab's witty recreation of the events of the first Scream wherein Heather Graham was substituted for Drew Barrymore's character and Tori Spelling for Neve Campbell and the restaged scenes were given a glossy Hollywood horror sheen, the clips of these later-day Stab sequels prove to be soggy spoof material. Mostly they're just there to set up a pair of fake-outs as we think we're watching the opening of Scream 4 with two female friends alone in a house being stalked by Ghostface only to have it revealed that it's a Stab sequel and then the gag is repeated again with another pair of potential victims before Scream 4 properly begins.

The content of these mock Stab sequels is so banal, it made me wish that Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson would've tried to have some real fun in imagining where the phony Stab series might have progressed. If only they had seized on the starry precedent set by Hellraiser: Bloodline, Leprechaun 4: In Space, and Jason X and gave their bogus Stab sequel an out-of-this-world setting. Even John Carpenter had once lobbied for a Halloween sequel in which the indestructible Michael Myers would be shot into space (whether he really thought that was a good idea or if he was purposely out to undermine the series, who knows?) so taking a horror franchise out of earthly orbit is enough of a reoccurring theme to warrant spoofing. Yes, it would've meant that the fake-out scares of Scream 4 would've had to go by the wayside but I believe it would have been a worthy sacrifice.

Seeing Ghostface lurking on a space station would've been a wonderfully cheesy way to kick off Scream 4. And honestly, I wouldn't have minded if it had been the real story to Scream 4, either. It would've been ridiculous, yes, but I have to say I miss the days when horror sequels would stray into strange, misguided territory. Back in the day, it frustrated me to see a phony Jason behind the hockey mask or to see the real Jason fighting a telekinetic teen or stalking Times Square or to have the Halloween series derailed by the odd mythology of the Cult of the Thorn (having already been really derailed by the machinations of crazed mask maker Conal Cochran) but in hindsight I appreciate the room for spontaneity that existed then. As inept as some of those sequels were, and as much as they showed a deep misunderstanding of the creative properties involved, I miss the willingness to deviate from the program.

In the '80s and '90s, there wasn't much thought as to whether fans might be affronted or outraged by the direction of a sequel but the keepers of today's franchises always stay on script (with the sole exception being the Child's Play films, but that series has sadly been on hold since 2004's under appreciated Seed of Chucky).

The Saw films never took any zany detours (no Jigsaw Goes To Washington, for example) and likewise, for however long the series lasts you'll never see Paranormal Activity spring any surprises on viewers. At least the Final Destination films can keep ballooning its set-pieces to increasingly absurd levels but in general, the days of horror franchises doing anything to challenge or test their base are over. Walking out of a movie like Jason Goes to Hell, I would've told you that's what I always wanted but I'm not so sure anymore.

Being too cautious is ultimately what gutted Scream 4. I enjoyed it myself but as I said in my review, it's a movie that favors the old guard over the new blood and horror is always about new blood. That's how it's continued to survive. As confounding as some of the horror sequels of the past were, in hindsight I like that they only followed formula to a point. It's true that most of the creative leaps those sequels took didn't pay off but at least the attempts were memorable. It's easy to tell one Friday the 13th from the other - but can anyone other than the most attentive Saw fan tell those sequels apart?

While the box office for Scream 4 on its opening weekend wasn't exactly dismal, it was definitely lackluster compared to its predecessors. The series now ironically finds itself in the same position of the '80s warhorses it used to mock - a once thriving franchise whose audience has shrunk. If another Scream comes around, maybe they'll decide to throw caution to the wind and set their sights a little higher.

Like, maybe as high as the moon even.

Paranormal Activity 2

A few weeks ago, Hatchet II came out with a big push among the internet horror community to "support unrated horror." Personally, I think supporting scary horror sounds like a better way to go so I'm throwing my endorsement behind Paranormal Activity 2, one of the scariest horror movies to come along since, well, Paranormal Activity.

A common refrain among the positive reviews for this sequel is "I didn't expect this to be any good, but..." and I've got to say the same. Upfront, this movie had a very high likelihood to suck. The idea of a quick, cash-grab sequel to an out-of-nowhere indie hit reeked too much of Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 (2000), a movie justly regarded as an instant franchise-killer and just a shit movie altogether. Happily, the team behind Paranormal Activity 2 are clearly a smart bunch who aimed to not repeat the mistakes of that film.

Original PA director, Oren Peli, returned as a producer and the new film's director Tod Williams (The Door In The Floor) and screenwriter Michael R. Perry (a TV writer who contributed to such '90s series as Millennium and Freakylinks) have proved to be completely in synch with the aesthetic established by Peli in the first film. The difference between the two films, from a production standpoint, is virtually imperceptible. Whatever minimal jump up in budget this sequel had has allowed children and dogs to be incorporated into the mix (child and animal actors being wild card factors that a low budget film would usually want to avoid) but other than that, Paranormal Activity 2 uses the same low tech cinematic tools found in the original.

As with Peli's film, Paranormal Activity 2 again demonstrates how effective the simplest scares are if they're executed the right way. A slamming door or a child's mobile moving on its own can be hair-raising if it's part of a story that the audience is engaged in. While some viewers will carp - as they did with Blair Witch - that there's nothing scary about these movies because they aren't explicit, it's heartening to me that so many people have embraced them. It's a sign that everyone isn't completely numb to the old-school appeal of things that go bump in the night.

The story of PA 2, admirably kept under wrap right up until its release, is more of a prequel than a sequel. Rather than focusing on just a tormented couple, here it's a married couple, along with their teen daughter from the father's previous marriage and a new baby that's just being brought home as the film begins. For those who found Micah Sloat and Katie Featherston to be an unlikeable pair, the family at the heart of PA 2 might be more appealing. I understood how Sloat's character rubbed people the wrong way - by design, he was generally a complete ass. But whether the filmmakers were deliberately responding to audience criticism of the first film or not, the family that PA 2 focuses on is extremely likable - even the teenage daughter, a character that would usually be a source of annoyance.

Just to note - once again, we're dealing with people that live well outside the income range of most Americans (this family has enough bread to have a live-in nanny) but outside of making me wonder why horror has inexplicably gotten away from depicting working class, or even middle-class, characters, I have to concede that the actors here are able to sell their characters as accessible, down-to-earth people.

In seeing how effortlessly PA 2 gets us involved with its well-off characters, I flashed back on William Friedkin's botched return to horror, The Guardian (1990). With Friedkin's film, one of the reasons why it didn't work was that as soon as you have a family rich enough to be hiring nannies, it's hard for everyone across the board to naturally empathize with them. These aren't the people next door.

At the time of The Guardian's release, Friedkin stated that horror doesn't work unless it's a blue collar thing and I guess he thought his characters were close enough to qualify as working stiffs but they didn't and Friedkin didn't find a way to make their troubles relatable. PA 2 doesn't have that problem. I'd be very surprised to read even negative reviews of PA 2 that cite the cast as a detriment to the movie.

The escalation of events in PA 2 and how things line up with the original is best left for audiences to discover on their own. I will say I was surprised at how gracefully it all came together, especially for a film that likely involved as much improvisation as this - and that was under the gun to be made quickly, to boot. A lot of films and TV shows today are all about building a mythology and that's something that usually puts me off as it seldom feels like organic storytelling. Here, though, I'd almost be willing to believe that Peli had it all planned from the start.

Speaking of Peli, I've got to say how much I like the fact that I know so little about him. Over the last decade or so, there's been a rise of horror filmmakers who've made a career out of working the horror community. Above whatever other skills they might have, they're experts at selling themselves to the horror fanbase. They say all the right things in interviews (fans eat it up like dogs if they think a filmmaker is speaking their language) and they're tight with all the right people within the online press. Basically, their thing is that they're "one of us." And that would be fine - if their movies were better. In light of that, I find it refreshing - and telling - that Peli doesn't pander at all to the fan community (I can't even recall reading a single interview with him in Fango or Rue Morgue) and yet he makes movies that are actually scary. Which, to my mind, is what someone who really knows horror ought to be doing. Call me crazy.

As you might expect, the ending of PA 2 is left open for a sequel (although off-hand I can't think of too many horror movies that don't naturally allow for a sequel). I'm not sure if I want to see the story continue but then again, I said the same thing after the first film. Whether they go ahead with a third installment or not, PA 1 and 2 can be safely regarded as one of the best one-two punches in horror history.

Undercover Of The Night

Earlier today I finally caught up with this year's horror phenomenon - the shot on $11,000 spook-tacular, Paranormal Activity. Did I think it lived up to its reputation? For the most part, yes. I will say I found it to be more satisfyingly creepy than outright terrifying but I think it's difficult at this stage for it to impact viewers the same way it did unsuspecting film festival attendees. I also have to say that on this first viewing, I couldn't help but have part of my attention focused on admiring the resourcefulness of writer/director Oren Peli.

Unlike its faux-doc brethren, The Blair Witch Project, which was completely free of any effects work, Paranormal Activity does show some physical manifestations of its haunting. And while these moments are all convincingly accomplished (save for one brief, late-addition instance of CGI - which doesn't seriously harm the movie but yet is the phoniest-looking shot in the film), it was hard for me to not be speculating (with admiration) on how Peli pulled off some of his low tech tricks (was that done with wires? was there a magnet under the table?) rather than just being wrapped up in the story.

While critics of Blair Witch often complained that "nothing happened" in that film, I think the fact that we never saw the slightest sign of any movie-style trickery (no glowing eyes in the woods, no levitating bodies, no ghostly apparitions, etc.) is what helped it maintain such a perfect illusion. Paranormal Activity, on the other hand, risks breaking the spell of reality to deliver the kind of goods most audiences want out of a spook show and I expect most will appreciate its concession to showmanship. In endeavoring to please the audience, there's nothing esoteric about Paranormal Activity. Just as the film's 'Demand It' marketing campaign recalled the kind of bluster and ballyhoo of William Castle, so to does the movie's thrills show an ingratiating desire on the part of Peli to really work a crowd.

Given the film's limited (by Hollywood standards, at least - I wish I had $11,000 to throw around) means, this will inevitably not be an eventful enough paranormal happening for all audiences. And the avalanche of hype it's arriving in theaters on, while doing it a lot of good commercially, is surely creating the kind of outsized expectations that any film would be hard pressed to meet. But Peli doles out his story's supernatural incidents in steady increments, leading to some nice payoffs. Sam Raimi's recent return to horror, Drag Me To Hell, was referred to by Raimi as a 'spook-a-blast' and that's an apt description of Paranormal Activity as well. It's nothing that's going to seriously traumatize an audience, just keep them jumping and shrieking.

While a 'found footage' film like this is supposed to appear relatively artless and off-the-cuff, Peli does a couple of things in regards to storytelling that I thought were smart. One, he answers the 'why don't they just leave' question right out of the gate by establishing that this isn't about the house, it's about the girl, Katie, and how she's experienced similar haunting episodes throughout her life in every place she's ever lived. So until events escalate to a violent degree later on, the idea of leaving doesn't make much sense. And secondly, Peli makes the ongoing recording of events plausible by portraying Micah as an arrogant ass, whose machismo only acerbates the situation. While some will find Micah's behavior to be too much of a turn off, I enjoyed Micah Sloat's deliberately unsympathetic performance as a skeptic, control freak, and all-around ego tripper.

Whether or not Paranormal Activity scares everyone the same across the board (it won't, because nothing ever does), I love the fact that it's scared as many people as it has with such old-fashioned means. This is a movie that rediscovers (as Blair Witch did) how cheap it is to frighten an audience. Slamming doors, lights that turn on and off by themselves, screams in the night - Peli is working from a familiar bag of tricks but it just shows how hard-wired the human brain is to react to these primitive, primal fears. This probably isn't the movie to make hardened horror fans curl up in a corner but it may brush some of the cynicism off their love of the genre.