PARANORMAL ACTIVITY

Paranormal Activity: a "found footage" feature

that plays on our basic anxieties about relationships

 

AN INDIE FILMMAKER’S DREAM

To my recollection, it all started with the 1989 release of Sex, Lies, and Videotape. That was the film that showed that independent films could wield box office clout , (S,L & V cost 1.2M to make and grossed 24.7M in the U.S. alone, according to IMDB.Pro), turn unknowns (Andie MacDowell) into stars and character actors (James Spader) into leading men and unknown filmmakers (Steven Soderbergh) into well-known auteurs overnight. Not to mention catalpaulting Miramax out of the doldrums and into the big time.

 

I remember John Truby talking about this film in one of his screenwriting classes. He pointed out that the film had two things going for it: first, a small arena – most of the film is shot in one house; the location was a very elegant one and gave the film high production value. Second, and never to be underestimated, the film has the word “sex” in the title. IMDB.Pro’s “Fun Facts” mention that S,L & V was playing in Berlin when the Wall fell; many East Berliners went to see the film expecting a porn film, and left disappointed. To Americans the title communicated clearly what it was about: relationship issues. Sex scenes added.

 

If you are an independent filmmaker like me, you keep careful track of films like this. You examine carefully how they are written, financed, and distributed. You do your best to separate the truth from the hype, but you keep track of the hype because you know when you trot out your own film of this type you have to have material ready for the hype machine. These are the thoughts that went through my mind as I watched Paranormal Activity at 8 pm last Friday, the night it opened nation wide. This is my favorite way to watch films: opening night, in a big theater full of teenagers. The security guards in the lobby were quite busy all evening.

 

WARNING: PLOT SPOILERS AHEAD

It took the kids in the audience a minute to realize the film had started. Many of them missed the opening title thanking the characters’ (characters had the same name as the actors playing them thus eliminating the need for end credits and adding to the "documentary" feel) families for permission to show the home-movie footage found in the house. This title creates what Karl Iglesias calls “The Power of Anticipation” (for a detailed explanation of that concept, see his article in the Sept/Oct 2009 Issue of Creative Screenwriting ; if you don’t subscribe to Creative Screenwriting you can try this online interview). This form of anticipation is also known as dramatic irony, or the “reader superior position,” because we, the viewers, now know something the characters do not: that they will both be dead, (at least we assume they are both dead; director Oren Peli left himself room for a sequel here) by the movie’s end. Alfred Hitchcock said it best: “There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.” This is a summary of his famous “bomb theory,”   that is, that a bomb that goes off under the table where the two characters are talking provides fifteen seconds of surprise, but a bomb the audience is warned about at the beginning of the sequence gives us fifteen minutes of suspense.

 

Dramatic irony is the most effective way of creating suspense, but its not the only one. In his article, Iglesias mentions five other, simpler, methods: set up a character goal, have a character talk about the future, set up a secret plan, have a character be warned. The use of such foreshadowing devices is the task of the screenwriter. But wait, you will say, as you are a well-informed consumer of internet chatter, there was no screenplay for Paranormal Activity, Peli just had this list of incrementally paranormal events and the actors were cast for their ability to improvise. They never knew, when they went to bed at night, what paranormal event was going to befall them. Well, yes, that’s what they say, anyway, and watching the film, I believe them; Peli admitted to giving the actors more details for the “key” scenes (one assumes Katie Featherston  had some inkling she was going to get yanked out of bed and dragged down the hall). Such an approach can generate some lovely improvisational moments, but it does lead to some weaknesses, specifically, a weak buildup in the drive to the character goal (although Micah Sloat repeats several times that he is going to protect his girlfriend and his house from this demon, we never actually see him taking any real steps to protect her; we only see him reacting to the puzzle posed by the mystery). And although actors can improvise the characters talking about the future, it is very hard to improvise setting up a secret plan and carrying it out. (For a hysterical take on this problem in the film, see the blog entry “Subnormal Activity” by Will Ludwigsen).

 Finally, with so much improvisation it is extremely difficult to develop conflict. The movie gives us a nice bit of foreshadowing when Micah’s portrait is scratched and the picture glass is cracked; we know the demon has it in for him but we are not sure why.

This is where the relationship issue comes in. I’ve been exploring the ins and outs of horror all my life; at one point I conducted an analysis of basic human fears and added that to a survey of the literature on human phobias so that I could script an virtual realty environment with a biofeedback interface called Memesis. The interface would read the user's reaction's to the environment's stimuli; the data would tell the system what activated the user's phobia (we are all slightly phobic of something) and what the user's worst fears were. The game's final scenario would be based on a combination of those two elements. I simplified the basic fears down to about half a dozen; almost all of them are relationship based in some way.

Another relationship film, similar film to Paranormal Activity in that it was extremely low-budget – 135K – made lots of money -- 38.5M worldwide -- and focused on the relationship between a couple put into a high stress situation, was Open Water. Open Water made headlines because it was shot in High Definition Video, but what one remembers after watching it is how marital relationship dynamics enable a couple to survive (or not)  being abandoned in the open ocean with some over-friendly sharks.

 

Both films bring up deep but very common fears for most viewers. Most of us are not too worried about being possessed or killed by demons, or even of being eaten by sharks. But we are really worried that our mate won’t come through for us; we also fear that our mate may not be the person we think they are. In the case of Paranormal Activity, both fears are played on with a vengeance. Micah does next to nothing to protect Katie; he is not the man she thought she could rely on, and her despair over this leads to her eventually succumbing to the demon.

 

Katie doesn’t turn out to be who Micah thought she was, either; first of all, she’s got this demon stalking her (and now them), and by the end it is hard for him to tell if it is her or the demon talking (or stabbing, or screaming, or whatever). One of the huge missed opportunities of the film is that we never see Micah realize, even for a moment before he dies, that Katie is no longer in control of Katie’s body. In fact, the most missed opportunity of the film is that Micah never understands that he is battling a demon for possession of Katie, and that had he been a little bit nicer to Katie, and not keep insisting on things like filming their lovemaking, Katie might have been better disposed to resist the demon’s incursion. But don’t worry, in spite of the R rating, no sex makes it to the screen; that was a big mistake too, as it would have been an opportunity to personalize the demon’s possessiveness. Still, all those bedroom shots and Peli’s foot fetish made for great trailer material.

 

I don’t want to sound like I don’t like the film, because actually, I like it a lot, and had trouble going to sleep that night, something that hasn’t happened to me since I saw The Exorcist when I was a teenager. Apart from the fact that I take my hat off to anyone who can make a watchable feature film for 11K, what Paranormal Activity has going for it is freshness: there are no predictably-timed set pieces (those pieces of action designed mostly to be cobbled together in the trailer); the theme, that of how adults navigate the ins and outs of settling into a committed relationship, is one not so often dealt with in Hollywood films, at least. Finally, the film proves all over again that the basic techniques of suspense/anticipation/dramatic irony still rule, especially with teenagers who are still young enough to enjoy being scared for the sake of being scared.

 

Still, Now that Peli is at the helm of Area 51, with a 5M budget, I hope he brings in an experienced screenwriter, even though he plans to use his same modus operandi: set three teenagers loose in the desert and subject them to alien phenomena. He’s got a gift for finding good actors and guiding them through the improvisation process; he certainly seemed to trust Katie and Micah a lot more than the Blair Witch directors trusted their actors (they didn’t hesitate to torture their cast with food and sleep deprivation in order to get their performances). I, for one, certainly hope to see more of Katie Featherston and Micah Sloat, and I’m curious to see what Peli can do now that he’s been handed a ready-made myth and a big budget.