Paranormal Activity Review

So, after hearing the hype about Paranormal Activity 2, we watched the first one last night. I’ll admit to being bored for the first half, found it a bit overdone with the “we’re showing you how much we make this look just like a home movie” angle. Yeah, much like looking at other people’s holiday snaps. Really boring. I “got” the idea in the first ten minutes. No need to bash me over the head with the tedious showing of their life prior to catching the demon on tape.

Once the first night of catching footage began, the boredom lifted a little, but I still had the urge to wander outside for a cigarette or bugger off into the kitchen to make a cup of tea, maybe even a massive chicken roast dinner while I was at it… Anyway, we soldiered on, and around ¾ of the way in, the film finally got going. I got chills, goose bumps, and, when the demon lifted the bedsheet, I reached out to grip Hubby’s thigh.

The guy, Micah, irritated me. Even after having irrefutable proof that something nasty was messing with them, he still antagonised the demon and encouraged it to come after them. Of course, his actions don’t justify him being killed, I don’t mean it like that, but I do wonder if he’d just left it alone whether the demon would have remained quieter without going as far as it did.

The spookiest bit for me was when the woman, Katie, stood beside the bed for hours, unaware she did so. And also the knowledge that the demon had possessed her. Where did she go after killing Micah? Did her possession change her into a “being” without a body and she went up into the roof space with the original demon? Or is she out there somewhere as a human, still possessed, doing all manner of demonly things to other people? Wondering if film two deals with that.

We went to bed after watching, and my mind lightly churned over all the fascinating aspects of such a thing happening. That many of us could have demons in our houses and not even know it. So of course, even though the film hadn’t freaked me as much as it could have, and I hadn’t given it too much thought, I did wake up in the middle of the night, sat up and wondered if I’d heard a noise or whether something else had woken me. And then I moved to hug Hubby and he woke, gripped my wrist and gasped before falling back to sleep, unaware he’d even done it.

So I guess you could say the movie did its job. Disturbed us, settled in our subconscious, even though we didn’t find it as scary as we’d expected. And I’m not going to be clamouring to watch #2 either. My son said it was “horrible”. LOL