I was lucky enough to have the day off on Thursday so I decided to go see Paranormal Activity, since it is the big buzz movie of the month and I know our listeners would like to hear what we at Zombie Popcorn thought of the film.

I went to the 11:50 show and as I got to my seat I saw that there was no one else in the theater, but I did arrive early so I figured that would change. When the previews began I was surprised to find that no one else had entered the theater. So I was excited, I thought to myself, “Well, if I were going to be affected by this film this would be the perfect setting, in a dark place, all alone!”.

The film begins with Micah buying a video camera and shooting random things around his house. We are then introduced to Katie, his girlfriend and we discover that the camera is to be use to record them while they are sleeping because they have been hearing strange noises at night. The entire film is seen through the camera, which is not very original since we have seen it done by the likes of Cloverfield, Diary of the Dead, and The Blair Witch Project.

As the movie progresses, we see Micah and Katie meet with a psychic and, and Katie explains that she has always felt the presence of something since she was a young girl (shadowy figures at the foot of her bed, whispers saying her name, and weird sounds in the middle of the night). The psychic states that he deals strictly with ghost and that is appears Katie has a demon problem and that she should seek help from a demonologist. Micah (like the macho guy he is)  decides that they should try and deal with the issue themselves, and the psychic warns him not to torment the demon or thing will get worse.

From here on we get a few good scenes of he couple sleeping and strange things happening in the middle of the night, a pretty cool scene with a Ouija board that builds tension between the couple. None of the scares are very effective I have to say, anyone  that is a fan of horror can see the scares coming. I personally found myself laughing more than being frightened. Another thing that bothered me was that between the scare scenes they failed to keep me interested, while moving about the house I constantly found myself thinking “Wow, the layout of their house is amazing!!” and could care less about what they were talking about.

By the end of the film were are seeing more intense interactions with the demon, and Micah does exactly everything he is NOT supposed to do to make things better. Honestly, I would venture to say that Paranormal Activity (while much better) is The Blair Witch Project, in a house. It does deliver a much better ending than Blair Witch, which made me happy, and the scares were a lot more effective in a home environment, because that is where a person is supposed to feel the safest.

I would give Paranormal Activity a 6 out of 10, while I didn’t feel like it was a waste of money, the film still ceased to impress me, probably because it has been done before. I do see why people are liking this film and it does make a good movie for the Halloween season, but all in all it was very predictable and even in the most perfect of situations, in a dark room all by myself, it failed to scare me.

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