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MOVIE REVIEW: Paranormal Activity (2010)
By Owen Gleiberman
September 30, 2009
Entertainment
Weekly
Exactly 10 years ago, The Blair Witch Project divided
audiences every bit as much as it unsettled them. So when I say that
Oren Peli's Paranormal Activity, a haunted-house thriller shot for $11,000,
was made very much in the peekaboo-vérité spirit of Blair Witch — and
that, in fact, it may be an even scarier film — you could find that frightening
in one of two ways. You might say, ''Cool, I've got to
see that,''
or you may think, ''No, I won't get fooled again!'' What I can tell the
Blair Witch skeptics is that in that movie, you never really did get
to see very much, but in Paranormal Activity you do, you honestly do
— though in a slow-build way that's freaky and terrifying.
The entire film takes place in the two-story San Diego home of sweet
but spiky Katie
(Katie Featherston), who claims to be plagued by demons,
and Micah (Micah Sloat), her obnoxious boyfriend, who totes around a
video camera to record evidence that those spirits are real. The two
joke and bicker, but at night we see them asleep, the camera at a fixed
angle in their dankly lit bedroom. The shot keeps skipping ahead, hour
by time-coded hour, until stuff starts to...spook. With
its this-is-really-happening
vibe, Paranormal Activity scrapes away 30 years of encrusted nightmare
clichés. The fear is real, all right, because the fear is really in you.
A–
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