Full Title: Paranormal Activity
Year: 2007 (just reaching mainstream theaters now)
Director: Oren Peli (debut)
Genre: Horror/Thriller
Length: 86 minutes
IMDb Rating: 7.2/10
My Rating: B
Here’s Why:
This is a solid movie, not quite as frightening as the over hyped media it’s received, but still worth watching. Basically, the premise is a young couple buys a spooky house suffering from a classic case of a haunting: whsipers, loud noises, objects moving on their own, such as a door closing randomly, amongst other unexplainable phenomema. So, the husband purchases a digital camera to document this “paranormal activity,” and thus you have your movie. The entire film is little house disturbances every night that keep building and building up becoming more and more unsettling until the jaw dropping (to an extent) finale. The movie is fairly slow and is pretty much a build up to the last ten minutes, much like old school horror flicks, a tactic rarely executed in modern horror cinema. Another tactic effectively employed by the director was the documentary style in which the movie is shot, giving the audience the impression they are viewing raw footage of actual events. The entire movie is the footage captured on the characters’ camera and it all takes place at their home, making the viewer feel as confined and claustraphobic as them.

Chris