Happy All-Hallow’s Month! In anticipation of Halloween — which, let’s face it, we’ve been anticipating since last Halloween — Daily Grindhouse will again be offering daily celebrations of horror movies here on our site. This October’s theme is horror sequels — the good, the bad, the really bad, and the unfairly unappreciated. We’re calling it SCREAMQUELS!
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There’s something incredibly intimate about found footage. Done well, it breaks the walls of belief and disbelief down with such ease that we barely notice they’re missing until we’re leaning over the edges of our seats trying to see around the doorframe into that corner just out of camera’s reach. As if, if we could just see over our shoulder or around the next corner, we might more easily handle the impending, undefined threat. This level of connection gives found footage some allowances not as easily carried off in other genres. Consider, for example, the marketing strategies behind such staples as THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT. No longer could you manage the kind of word of mouth, early-Internet-style strategy that had people chomping at the bit to believe in the reality of the story before them. Nothing is better than a scary story or a backwoods witch, after all, as long as we’re not the ones who have to come face to face with them. If we heard from a friend of a friend? Or found some weird tape in the street? That’s cool. As long as it’s not us. And so, the word-of-mouth advertisement caught fire like a campfire tale, and everyone wanted to see this supposedly true tragedy play out. Even now, finding someone who still doesn’t know whether or not BLAIR WITCH is real is an experience to be treasured.
PARANORMAL ACTIVITY is probably the next closest instance of the BLAIR WITCH level wildfire speculation. While you probably couldn’t manage, in 2007, the same air of mystery around webpages the BLAIR WITCH did, everyone was talking about Katie and Micah and their definitely-haunted house. It was as if we had all found a new illicit tape ourselves and passed it around in whispers around hallways and street corners. “Have you seen? Do you think it really happened? What if…?” Even after it was revealed to be just a movie—not based on any actual occurrences—several people believed for a while almost despite themselves in the first one’s veracity. And when a sequel came out that revealed not only a tangential occurrence but also what happened after the haunting final scenes of the original? It didn’t have as much buzz around it as being true, exactly, but it certainly maintained buzz for being scary.
If found footage is your genre of preference, the PARANORMAL ACTIVITY franchise is must-see material, and not for nothing. You don’t need to believe it really happened for it to get under your skin, though you might find—at least for the duration of the film—that a part of you does anyway. Upon a recent rewatch in preparation for the impending release of NEXT OF KIN, I was not delighted to discover the scares of PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 2 hit just as hard years later as they did when it first released. In fact, some of my most deep-seeded anxieties about those impossible-to-place sounds and occurrences that can happen in a house—particularly if you believe in the spirit world—are put on display at full impact here. But it isn’t the banging doors and anxious yelling that builds the most dread, at least not for me. What gets me about these movies is the way they use silence.
When you make the agreement to plant video cameras around your house in an effort to catch any nefarious activity, you’re guaranteed to have tons of silent footage. You have to sleep sometime, and no one can occupy every room at once. Where the first PARANORMAL ACTIVITY sought to present hours of no movement by speeding up the clock, the sequel pressures you to examine every corner of a room for yourself. If a shot is lingering soundlessly somewhere and you can’t tell why, you’re missing something. In particular the way this film spends time lingering in Hunter’s nursery planted a bloom of rapidly spreading anxiety in my chest no banging cabinet door has ever managed. Silent, motionless, the camera sits in the corner, putting the whole room on display. And yet, even though I know what happens, even though I’ve seen this franchise front to back at least twice through, I did not immediately go to the crib. So much emphasis had at that point been placed on the possibility of something going on behind the mirrored closet door, or in the connecting room, that I found myself staring at those for so long I didn’t trust my eyes when Hunter’s little baby body started inching down—and then up—the crib until he started levitating.
Silence can be a powerful tool for building dread and tension if used correctly, and perhaps no other genre is better equipped to weaponize it than found footage. It’s one thing for a movie to be quiet…and a whole other for it to make you yearn for the kinds of auditory cues you expect to find in a house. Even now, as I write this, my refrigerator is humming along and the house itself is popping every once in a while, as one does when it settles. You don’t hear any of that in PARANORMAL ACTIVITY’s universe. You don’t even hear the audio of the living room television very often. It’s a recipe for the audience to create their own fears in a story that’s more or less a standard haunting/possession narrative. And that’s why it works so well, and what keeps the franchise effective.
The end credits of PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 2 begin the same as its predecessor: in absolute silence. This auditory absence goes on for so long, in fact, when the static and the sound of Hunter’s toy truck—which at one point during peak activity drives around the living room on its own, sounds and lights a’going—started playing I was so convinced the kids next door were playing outside my living room window I almost ran out of my house. That kind of anxiety you don’t even realize is staying with you is where the PARANORMAL ACTIVITY franchise operates best, and the audience experience—routinely a part of the series’ marketing and always filled with communal screaming—proves it time and time again.
Tags: Blumhouse, Brian Boland, Found-Footage, Katie Featherston, Micah Sloat, Michael R. Perry, Molly Ephriam, Oren Peli, Paranormal Activity, Screamquels, sequel, Sprague Grayden, Tod Williams
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