PARANORMAL ACTIVITY (2007/09) d. Oren Peli (USA)
PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 2 (2010) d. Tod Williams (USA)
PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 3 (2011) d. Henry Joost/Ariel Schulman (USA)
PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 4 (2012) d. Henry Joost/Ariel Schulman (USA)
PARANORMAL ACTIVITY: THE MARKED ONES (2014) d. Christopher Landon (USA)
PARANORMAL ACTIVITY: THE GHOST DIMENSION (2015) d. Gregory Plotkin (USA)
Paramount’s plucking of this microbudget feature from obscurity and its nimble (some might say omnipresent) word-of-mouth marketing scheme will undoubtedly go down as one of the biggest Cinderella stories in horror history. Shot for a paltry $11,000, writer/editor/producer/director Oren Peli’s first-person account of a young couple plagued by inexplicable happenings in their new suburban home works surprisingly well under its own limitations, or perhaps because of them.
Like its stylistic and spiritual companion piece, 1999’s The Blair Witch Project (itself another stunning, out-of-nowhere indie success story), PA's strengths lie in its ability to tap into primal, everyday fears: a new building’s unexplained creaks and groans, a partner’s emotional swings, etc. Other recent features have utilized the now-familiar camcorder POV “found footage” convention, some of them admirably, but what sets Peli’s feature apart is its simplicity and courage to allow mundane objects/events, like Blair Witch’s stone piles and stickmen, to take on heightened significance.
It’s a deceptively simple high-wire act that works better than it has any right to, and while not a perfect (or even a “great”) film, it contains more genuinely creepy and unsettling onscreen moments than all of Hollywood’s big budget remakes of the last three decades put together.
Join AC and his amazing panel of guests (Amy Pearson, Frank Merle, Brett Neveu, Anna Maurya, Chelsea David) as we celebrate the one that truly, for better or worse, kicked off the found footage barrage of the 21st Century, PARANORMAL ACTIVITY!
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