Will Sorg-

It is difficult to think of a genre more dead than found footage horror. Found footage movies had the horror market in a stranglehold for about a decade, and then they vanished from the box office by the mid-2010s. Still, for me, it’s hard to forget how big some of those really popular found footage films were. Paranormal Activity was one of those franchises that I heard basically everything about before I had ever actually seen it. I remember the trailer for the third film terrifying me as a kid, but primarily they all lived in my mind as a series that was everywhere until suddenly it wasn’t. So finally watching the original was… quite the experience.

Paranormal Activity is a 2007 low-budget horror film directed by Oren Peli and produced by Jason Blum. The film made so much money that Jason Blum was able to found Blumhouse Productions and, since then, he has made an entire business out of working with low-budget horror filmmakers and marketing them to the vast audience Blum has through his company. I don’t want to spend too much time going into detail on the plot because this film doesn’t really need much setup. If you don’t know it, Mica and his girlfriend Katie are being haunted by something. That’s honestly all you need to know.

The film itself is, in my opinion, actually very good. One of my biggest issues with found footage is when they lean a little too hard into the cinematic and end up feeling fake. It defeats the whole purpose of the genre and makes everything seem pointless. So I was delighted to find out that the filmmakers did everything possible to try and make this seem truly real. Most of the special effects are practical with VFX being done only when absolutely necessary. Choosing to film the whole movie with a camcorder and on location at a real house also definitely helps sell a believability that usually gets lost when these kinds of films are shot on uber-expensive film cameras and perfectly constructed sets. The actors are also a blessing in disguise as the two unknowns cast for the main pair of the film are delightfully normal people. Mica is incredibly unhelpful and often genuinely awful to Katie, but that honestly helps sell the pure desperation of the scenario as two people who barely even get along are forced to go through events that they cannot control.

The dread that comes from this lack of control is really effective. Nothing majorly scary happens until about half an hour into the movie but what I love about that is the way the previous 30 minutes set up a rhythm that is made to be broken. By the time the first major scene of tension happens, you have spent a considerable amount of time with Katie and Mica and know their house pretty well just from what you’ve seen through Mica’s camera. Perhaps it comes from my own overactive imagination, but there’s something viscerally terrifying about being led around a dark suburban home waiting for something awful to happen through the lens of a camera that gives the look of something genuinely real.
Yes, there are plenty of boring moments and quite a few terrible acting moments (mainly from the psychic character), but to me, there’s always something genuinely thrilling about movies that make it feel like you’re peering into someone else’s life. With Paranormal Activity, they gave what felt like exactly the right amount of information and then allowed you to let your looks into their life fill in the rest. It’s a perfect blend that makes sure the audience isn’t confused but gives plenty of chances for your imagination to run wild, like when you see a shadow in the corner of the screen that looks a little too human-shaped.