Thanks, I Hate It: Paranormal Activity

Is there a blander movie than Paranormal Activity? Are there more generic-looking people than Katie Featherston and Micah Sloat? There's nothing remotely personal about this movie, none of the tight characterization and naturalistic acting that made The Blair Witch Project -- its most obvious point of found footage comparison -- great. The house in which it's filmed is likewise a tedious eggshell-painted box with no trace of the people who inhabit it reflected in its decor. Blank walls. Office carpeting. It's meant to be a new home, sure, but there's nothing to suggest people live there at all.

The script is pure placeholder, full of bizarre sentences like "once we know what's going on, we can react appropriately" and "do you know of any tricks to make this stuff happen?" Any time Micah and Katie talk about anything other than the basic facts of the film's premise they talk in circles, marking time between the movie's supernatural sequences. These scenes aren't much, just bare-bones stuff like Katie standing over Micah while he sleeps, doors closing on their own, lights going on and off. The scene in which Katie is dragged out of her bedroom by an invisible force is head and shoulders above the rest of it, but it can't carry the movie's scares on its own.

With no interesting characters or relationships Paranormal Activity depends entirely on its conceit -- that this couple disagrees about whether or not one of them is being haunted and has thus decided to videotape themselves -- to drive the plot. There's a lot of Katie and Micah ribbing and joking about the cameras, a lot of protracted scenes of one or both of them reacting to minor supernatural phenomena, and not much else. The obligatory supernatural adviser character comes and goes without leaving much of an impression. The whole thing is perfunctory, like someone's script notes jotted down on a napkin got produced and filmed by accident.

There are plenty of lazy horror movies driven by cheap scares or mean-spirited violence, but even that kind of path of least resistance storytelling is missing here. There's no gore, only one scare worth its salt, no sex or screams or slime to set the mood. It lacks both the humanity of serious art and the tawdry glee of the great b-movies. There's just something dead about it, something that feels like packing peanuts, cheap, squeaky Styrofoam rubbing against itself in an unmarked parcel. It is to a real horror movie as a fully clothed mannequin is to a human being.