Movie: Paranormal Activity

Oh boy, I know it's been a while since this came out, but I wanna give my opinion nonetheless.

Alright.

THIS HERE, must be one of the worst fucking horror movies I've EVER fucking seen, and I've seen some really bad ones.

First off, yeah I know this is a indie film and you might think I should give it some slack because of it, but no, being an indie film isn't an excuse. If anything, it should be scarier because of their mostly raw and bootleg filming styles.

Let's cut to the chase, shall we?

The plot of the movie involves with a couple of Katie and Micah who's house is haunted, so they decide to film it. Apparently this ghost has followed Katie ever since she was a child and won't leave her alone even when she moves into a new apartment.

So, Katie decides to call this Dr. Fredrichs for help who is somekind of ghost expert, a psychic of some sorts and he advises Katie to call a demonologist (does such thing actually exist?) to help her, but Micah basically says fuck that and it results in verbal confrontations and frustration with Katie.

So after that, Micah plants the camera on a tripod in their bedroom every time they go to sleep and it records through the entire night so they can see if anything happened while they slept.

So... yeah, when you get to this point in the movie get ready to see alot of that bedroom because, I shit you not probably 2/3 of the movie is just you watching the fucking recordings. (movie's length is 83 minutes by the way) Just google "Paranormal Activity" and you'll see that nearly 90% of the stillshots are from the bedroom.

What do you mean we spend too much time in the bedroom? Don't be silly.

So, in about half way through the movie you watch the bedroom recording and the door of the bedroom slams shut, and by this point you think the shit starts to get serious.

You think? Or would that be just too traditional?

Okay, there's some other stuff there aswell, like TV's switching on and off by it's own and Katie getting up the bed in middle of the night and just standing next to the bed looking at Micah and doing nothing. Pretty exciting you can imagine.

Well, to be fair it builds up the tension pretty well but again after that it drags awfully long before anything happens again.

Later on, Micah the daredevil bastard brings a ouija board into the house. What the fuck is a Ouija board? Well it's a board with allkinds of symbols, letters and numbers in it that lets you message with spirits basically.

Katie is not very happy with this, since she's repeatedly told Micah to leave the fucking thing alone, but he brings it there anyway.

Jesus what the fuck is the guy's problem? Doesn't he understand that his girlfriend's been haunted by a ghost all her life and all this thing's gonna do is to provoke it?

Maybe he doesn't really believe in ghosts? I'm assuming he's just so much of a tool that even scratching and banging on the bedroom door in middle of the night isn't a clear sign that the ghost actually exists, plus the other weird shit that's been going on.

Well one night Micah and Katie go out, and Micah the fuck left the board in the house, which starts reacting while they're out, the pieces on the board start moving and wind blows on the room and small fire erupts on the board.

And then, by the last third of the movie, when you thought that it couldn't get any stupider, the most ridiculous and idiotic scene takes place.

Katie has called the Dr. Fredrichs back to the house to help them, but all Fredrichs does he comes in the house and quite literally says that the spirit is angry and doesn't want him there, and after that HE JUST LEAVES, THAT'S IT, NOTHING.

Not even, good luck with the demon or anything, guess even when he's a ghost specialist it doesn't occur to him that they might get hurt or worse, get killed.

Especially when Katie's boyfriend is a careless moron like Micah who has zero concern regarding Katie's safety.


I wish I was making this up but I'm not.

We were seeing this movie with friends and we all bursted out laughing. It was comedy gold.

Ok time to wrap this piece of shit together, Micah starts to scatter some powder in the floor to track any footprints the demon might be leaving, and it does, they find some inhuman footprints on the powder, then in middle of the night Katie gets dragged by her feet by the demon and Micah catches her and later on Micah climbs on the attic and finds a picture of young Katie which was supposed to have burned in the fire of Katie's old house years ago.

By now we've reached the movies end sequence. Katie wakes up in the middle of the night posessed and walks downstarts, then Micah wakes up to the scream of Katie that's coming from downstairs. He runs there and after that you hear Micah yell stuff like "what the hell AAAAH" or something, can't remember. Anyway.... couple of minutes later Katie comes back up to the bedroom with a knife and blood all over her, then she just sits next to the bed and the camera fast forwards until cops come to her and Katie wakes up from the posession of the demon and walks towards the cops without knowing what's going on and the cops shoot her because she's coming towards them with the bloody knife, the lunatic. So, yeah....


And that's it, although I've heard there are alternate endings, one of which being Katie coming up and looking at the camera with a disturbing demon face and slitting her own throat, now THAT I would've liked to see.


Now why do I hate this movie so much? I just find it so cliché, I know the movie expresses it's horror elements with scenes that you don't actually see, like when Micah goes down in the end gets killed by posessed Katie, you don't actually see that so you're supposed to use your imagination, but it just doesn't work here.

And about the filming style, I liked it with Blair Witch Project, but that was because of the setting it was filmed on, you really felt like you were in the forest with them, although it was a wide forest, it felt so claustrophobic because it was dark and you didn't know what creatures were out there and how many.

In Paranormal Activity you knew it was only the house that was haunted and you knew that everything outside it was normal, but in Blair Witch, there was nowhere to run or hide.

Let me talk about another horror classic that most of you might think overrated, The Exorcist.

To this day this movie is probably the scariest movie I've seen.


    Quickly! It's another "Paranormal Activity" syndrome! Call the exorcist.

It was so raw and grisly the way it was filmed and showed to you, Regan's demonic child face still haunts me to this day and whenever I think about it I get shivers, even when I go to sleep and I accidentally think about it I'm feeling uneasy and I'm having trouble sleep. The picture of her face is so vivid in my head still that if I try to think about it I can see the face almost clearly, that's how big impact it had on me, and that's what I think good horror movies are, movies that scar you for life.

We may have different opinions about horror films I'm sure but this is how I thought about Paranormal Activity, it was just a mediocre attempt of documentary style filming that was done in wrong context.

I know I left some of the parts of the movie unmentioned but frankly I don't give that much of a shit about it that I think it should be worth mentioning in every last detail.

Thanks for reading.