Last weekend, Rachelle and I went to see the movie Paranormal Activity. Filmed on a budget of $15, 000 with a hand-held video camera, the film’s turned out to be an unqualified commercial hit. Presented in documentary style, a la Blair Witch Project, Paranormal Activity focuses on a young couple that are haunted by a supernatural presence in their home. In an attempt to try to figure out what’s going on, they set up a camera in their bedroom to film them when they’re asleep, so that they could ascertain if they were the victims of some sort of prank, or if there was a credible explanation for what they’d been experiencing.
Like all good horror films, the real fear is generated in the dreadful tension that’s building, rather than the release of that tension. You know, it’s scarier to watch the serial killer stalk somebody than it is to watch him kill that person.
The most excruciating scenes in Paranormal Activity take place when the video of the sleeping couple is being replayed. In grainy, night-vision style, we watch as if ourselves some omnipotent presence from above. As the vulnerable couple sleep, a clock scrolls by at the bottom of the frame marking the passage of time, as the audience waist for an invisible evil to make itself present.
It was scary, man.
Like listening to the shark music in Jaws.
As such, I was grateful for the moments in which this tension was cut. At the Rainbow Theatre, where we saw the movie, there was a couple sitting in the back row. They weren’t particularly disruptive, but they were unable to contain their observations. When something occurred to one of them, they simply couldn’t help but say it out loud. “ He shouldn’t do that!” the man would yell, to which his lady would respond, in an equally innocent manner, “ He is asking for trouble!”
It was pretty clear to us that the couple, who were probably in their 50’s, might have had a mild, developmental impairment, and the truth is that their spontaneous exclamations were kind of sweet and charming. And anyway, I was grateful to step outside of the movie for a second or two and shoot Rachelle a knowing, if still nervous, smile.
However, this want on for the entire duration of the film, and as the tension in the movie built, and the audience’s investment in what was taking place on the screen increased, people were getting edgy.
Eventually, a man, in a thin and breaking voice, shouted out, “would you please keep your comments to yourself!”
He sounded scared, this guy, like a nervous 14 year-old, which was pretty much the way everybody in the theatre was feeling, I suppose. However, I have no doubt that in the retelling of this story, he will portray himself as a lion, a man who seized control of the situation, and not somebody who began to lose his composure while watching a ghost story.