Since my own foolishness has impeded me from doing what I was meant to do this morning, I’ll type a lengthy post about having watched Paranormal Activity last night. To make a lazy comparison, it’s the early Coldplay to the Blair Witch Project’s Radiohead - the bolder formal stuff ironed out into something more traditional, but still decent.
Loads of the core horror is really good – the just standing at the side of the bed for hours, and oh my god finding the charred childhood photo in the attic is an absolute shitter-upper particular – but the stuff around it a tad less so.
Definitely falls into the trap which Blair Witch surprisingly manages to avoid: the justification for his continuing to record starts to edge very close to “annoying your partner thread” material, and I wasn’t that surprised to read on the IMDB trivia page that it was Curb Your Enthusiasm style retroscripting rather than a written script: that forced realism feel sparks up at points, especially when - for example - they have a visitor round and are faced with the challenge of somehow having a casual chat about how dangerous ouija boards are, and there’s those hallmarks of 2000s-era improv dialogue where it sometimes sounds a bit like an episode of Family Guy.
Can’t remember how the endings work in this film - I know there’s more than one planned / shot. I’m sure I’d seen the ending where she’s waiting in the room for days before police arrive or something rather than the one where she chucks yer man at the camera and then does that walking directly into frame thing that shits me right up but also reminds me of one of those ‘screamer’ things from early 00s meme culture.
