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Easy A
Mean Girls by way of Nathaniel Hawthorne
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reviews containing all of these words: Paranormal, Activity
Paranormal Activity
(2009)
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| Horror
Rated: R
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We’re never more vulnerable than when we’re asleep, and Paranormal Activity preys on our innate fear of such defenselessness.
An intimate, lo-fi horror flick, the movie stars Katie Featherston and
Micah Sloat as Katie and Micah, a young couple who have been bothered lately by bumps in the night. Micah sets up a camera in their bedroom – the wide angle captures both the couple asleep and the hall and stairway just outside their door – in hopes of getting a glimpse of what’s going on. They get that, and more.
Paranormal Activity is a slow-burn horror movie, my favorite kind. Writer-director Oren Peli understands that dreading something is often worse than experiencing it. And so the most excruciating moments in the film are those in which the screen returns to that static shot of the bedroom at night. The time counter clicks away in the bottom right-hand corner, and you’ll find your eyes clinging to it like a life preserver.
As an entry in the “found footage” genre, Paranormal Activity isn’t as polished or seamless as Cloverfield or the 1999 standard bearer, The Blair Witch Project. Many of the scenes outside of the bedroom struggle to justify the presence of the video camera, while Sloat makes Micah such a frat-boy blowhard that it isn’t long before you’re rooting for the paranormal presence.
I won’t reveal whether or not the cocky Micah is put in his place. I’ll only note that as it proceeds, Paranormal Activity touches on something else unsettling about falling asleep: You’re especially vulnerable if you share your bed. |
The Blair Witch Project
(1999)
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| Horror
Rated: R
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Nothing less than one of the scariest films of all time.
Later it became a challenge to go into The Blair Witch Project and not let it scare you – as if any horror film would work under such circumstances – but when it first snuck into theaters, thinly disguised as actual found footage, the picture left audiences shaking.
The premise is both gimmicky and inspired, a high-concept contrivance that’s brilliantly fleshed out. “In October of 1994, three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland, while shooting a documentary,” the opening titles read. “A year later, their footage was found.”
That footage consists of film students Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard and Michael Williams getting lost, being tormented by unseen forces at night and eventually turning on each other. Using only the basics of cinema – motion, light and sound – the writing-directing-editing team of Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick evoke fear and paranoia with a sinister simplicity.
Some scenes take place in total darkness, so that the audio from Heather’s video camera provides our only sensory clues. Others unfold under the sparse lighting of the video camera’s lamp, which is only strong enough to illuminate the spindly branches and broken logs that are three feet in front of us, not the unknown horrors that lay beyond.
The Blair Witch Project doesn’t only show us how fear can come to dominate the human psyche – it lets us experience it. The indie sensation led to an awful sequel, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, and a host of “found footage” imitators - some silly (Quarantine), others inspired (Cloverfield, Paranormal Activity). It’s a landmark not only in horror, but of film form itself.
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| A Nightmare on Elm Street
(1984)
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| Horror
Rated: R
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A Nightmare on Elm Street has a powerful sense of surrealism - both visually and thematically - that more than makes up for the movie’s horror hokum.
Written and directed by Wes Craven, the film takes a diabolically ingenious conceit – a killer (Robert Englund) who murders teens in their dreams, so that they’ll never awake – and dramatizes it with ghastly, insidious imagery. The menacing figure stretching out from a wall over a bed; a body bag being dragged down a school hall; the killer’s signature blades arising in the bathtub between the heroine’s legs. These sights aren’t simply shock effects. Woven somewhere between the movie’s dream scenes and its “real” ones, they have the true terror of an unshakeable nightmare.
A Nightmare on Elm Street is a feat of considerable formal ingenuity. At first, we’re fairly clear when virginal teenager – there’s that hokiness - Nancy Thompson is dreaming. As the movie goes on, though, the dream world and the actual one begin to intertwine. When Nancy (Heather Langenkamp) asks her boyfriend (a baby-faced Johnny Depp, amusingly cast as a jock) to watch over her as she sleeps, he pops up in her ensuing dream as an ineffectual guardian.
In these scenes, Nightmare resembles less the slasher silliness of the Friday the 13th films than the narrative inventiveness of Charlie Kaufman efforts such as Adaptation and Being John Malkovich. These movies toy with us by puncturing our rational understanding of reality; Nightmare does it in a more malevolent manner.
A Nightmare on Elm Street is decidedly anti-art – at one point, a teen dozes off while reading Shakespeare – yet it still manages to rank among the top horror movies of all time. Despite its genre shlockiness, Nightmare, like 2009’s Paranormal Activity, brilliantly taps into one of our primal fears: the vulnerability we feel when we’re asleep. |
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