With a budget of less than $15,000 and a handheld style so effective that director Oren Peli feared releasing a trailer for the film lest audiences assume the projectionist had slipped a home movie into the reel, Paranormal Activity readily succeeds as an exercise in lo-tech chills.
While it’s easy to joke that Micah Sloat and Katie Featherston play homeowners seemingly afraid of nothing more than a door, their chemistry was such that viewers just presumed Peli had killed two birds with one stone and cast a real couple. The ingenious use of a camcorder timestamp, furthermore, sees audience tension ratcheted up to near intolerable levels whenever the witching hour of 3am rears its eerie head. But while Paranormal Activity’s $100m-plus success, powered by a deftly handled word-of-mouth marketing campaign, is deserved for Peli’s innovative methods and the authentic fear of his leads, the film convinces in no small part for its retreading of well-worn ground.
Would a piece comprised of largely static camerawork, natural lighting and improvised dialogue, with a by-the-numbers plot about things that go bump in the night have been so palatable to audiences without the cinema verité of The Blair Witch Project or the captivating chaos of Cloverfield? To his credit, Peli admits the influence of the former, confirming a desire while filming Paranormal Activity to make audiences as scared of their own homes as Blair Witch had enforced fears of rural isolation and mythical malevolent spirits.
It’s easy to mock The Blair Witch Project in hindsight. Heather Donohue’s snivelling address to camera has been parodied as often as The Matrix’s Bullet Time or Austin Powers’ saunter down the street to Quincy Jones’ Soul Bossa Nova. And the film’s plot remains so threadbare that the Family Guy writing staff could summarise it with the words, ‘Nothing’s happening. Nothing’s happening. Something about a map…’
But as Oren Peli reiterated in Paranormal Activity, the fear of the unseen remains a primal, Jungian nightmare for many viewers. In Blair Witch, what was – from a purely logical, atheistically cynical point of view – little more than a pile of stones, or an entanglement of branches forming a stick figure – become chilling confirmations that the three young subjects were being targeted by an evil force. Paranormal Activity leaves the audience breathless with as simple an aesthetic as an open door or a flickering light.
Simplicity and reinforcement remain the crucial tenets of successful found footage filmmaking. Where Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers alienates through unpleasant and avant-garde scenarios, a more conventional film – say Spanish horror Rec and its US remake Quarantine – connects with an audience through the familiar technique of infrared camerawork. Though of course artificial, the green glow of a climactic sequence shot in infrared somehow feels more real than if shown through a series of swooping camera angles and jump cuts (with the bizarre popularity of paranormal pantomime shows such as Most Haunted playing no small part in reinforcing audience comfort with infrared).
George A Romero’s Diary of the Dead could conceivably be labelled a ‘found footage’ film but a distracting voiceover undermines its purported veracity. Cloverfield, on the other hand, feels entirely convincing – when not examining for too long the appearance of the multi-limbed monster attacking New York City – thanks to an opening title card that reveals the subsequent 85 minutes as government-held footage of ‘Multiple Sightings of Case Designated ‘Cloverfield’.’ In a world of increasing citizen journalism and grainy mobile phone footage providing on-the-ground evidence of breaking news, the manic and fraught camera style of Cloverfield grounds the film in a post-9/11 Western civilization, heightening the ‘found footage’ tone.
Cinema is sometimes at its most enjoyable when providing a form of escapism from the hopes and fears of the real world. But the release schedules also allow room for a genre that grants an audience an escape, but to a world almost identical to their own, rather than to another galaxy, a wizarding school or a multi-ethnic fantasy realm on the edge of war. It’s through playing on the desire for a step into an alternate reality, as opposed to an invented world, that ‘found footage’ films find their audience. The events of these films feel as if they could happen and if a film like Paranormal Activity leaves viewers scared of their own bedroom, it’s done is job.
