Paranormal Activity – Eerily Real
Anyone who follows the movie scene most likely saw that Paranormal Activity was the box office surprise of this century, ferreting $142M USD out of the wallets of the masses, on a production budget of only $15,000. I proudly admit that ten of those dollars came out of my own wallet as I took in a late night showing a week or so after it went national. It’s hard to say how much my mental state going into the film was affected by reviews and opinions that I’d heard and read in the lead up to it; Many people (horror enthusiasts, even) declaring it the scariest movie they’d ever seen, even more so that The Exorcist. Those were big words for me to take in, as I regard the tale of Fathers Merrin and Karras to be the clinical masterpiece in inciting absolute terror. I don’t care what crazy small budget foreign films get hocked on me, I doubt that I will ever shake from my stance that The Exorcist is the greatest horror film ever, while being my own personal scariest.
With this skepticism in mind, I walked into the theater and took a good seat, flanked by my girlfriend, mother, and sister. The film came on after the usual ridiculous amount of trailers, and the ensuing hour and a half left me suitably impressed. I had heard the comparison to The Blair Witch Project, but I, as well as everyone else I personally know, found it be far superior in every way. But this is not a movie review; The purpose of this post is to take pieces of the movie and relate them to real life.
Whether you believe in ghosts (and all of the sub-classifications therein) or not is irrelevant, because millions, if not billions, of people do in some way, shape or form. We may never know what this actual occurrence is; Whether it’s some sort of strange mass-illusion, or if it is some strange rift in dimensional integrity. Maybe it’s simply what so many generations have thought it to be: The living energy of the deceased. I would never claim to have anything more than an opinion, and I’ll leave the responsibility of answering this timeless question to people who have a greater understanding and knowledge base than my own.
What I can comment on with some certainty, however, is the process in which investigation teams use to look for evidence of activity. While teams around the world differ in many ways, with some opting to go with more subjective “hands on” approaches, and others doing their best to remain as objective and detached as possible, there is usually an underlying connection between their methods in the equipment used. Almost everyone uses cameras, and that is the focus point of the movie Paranormal Activity. The leading male actor, Micah, gets a brand new video setup and uses it to record the bedroom in nightvision while he and Kate, his significant other, are asleep. He would then take the recordings and play them back on his computer the next morning, to see what, if anything, significant happened during their slumbering hours. Indeed, strange things did begin to happen, and got progressively more bizarre and nerve-racking as weeks passed.
Things such as shadows moving against the wall, doors slamming shut, sounds of stalking footsteps, sheets being pulled off the sleeping protagonists, and eventually even people being pulled off the bed. The house would go bump in the night, causing a chandelier to swing violently back and forth from the ceiling. All in all, there was some creepy activity going on. To be perfectly honest, most of these things do not happen during any investigation or video recorded moment, with the exception of some things moving around once in awhile. So of course, that is where the similarities between real life and fantasy end. The time that they merge together, however, is interesting.
I have been participating in investigations for five years, so I’m not an old salt by any means, but I have had the good fortune of traveling to some incredible locations that most people will never go to in their lifetimes, including the Amityville House, the Charleston Jail, the Old San Juan Cemetary, and Mayan pyramids in Belize. In all of these investigations that I’ve taken part in, cameras and video recording have been involved. This comes as no surprise to anyone, but it’s the simplistic nature of this that makes Paranormal Activity compelling to me. Instead of relying on a pulsing soundtrack or blood and gore, this movie relied upon anticipation and subtlety to make it’s mark, which is precisely what goes on during an actual investigation. For hours, we sit in the dark, silent, waiting, watching. The anticipation of some kind of activity keeps us interested, until finally some barely noticeable subtle event happens, that sends everyone into a frenzy. Replaying tape back, taking a look at still frames, and trying to decipher exactly what it was. In this respect, the movie was a great representation of what an accurate “ghost hunting” documentary would look like.
There have been many people over the years who have turned camcorders on to record their surroundings while they sleep, and most of them have turned up nothing, but I am taken back to a story that I heard from an associate last year; This fellow and his wife would be asleep in bed every night, and then at some point, she begins waking up every night around the same time, feeling that there is a presence with her. This is not a unique occurrence, but the story got stranger when she and her husband told me that after awhile, there actually WAS a presence to go along with this feeling. It was a little girl, maybe 5 or 6 years old, with long dark hair and wearing a sleeping gown. She would appear at the side of the bed, and appear to be trying to interact with the wife. As this continued, the wife eventually tired of it and simply requested that the girl leave her alone. Sure enough, the presence seemed to cease making itself known, and she returned to a regular night of sleep. Not quite the shocking ending of Paranormal Activity, but as usual, the roots of fantasy are sprung from the nutrients of reality. What would they have seen had they set up a camcorder to record them as they slept? Would there have been something to go along with the apparition of the little girl? Would it have captured nothing at all?
No one can tell at this point, but that is another thing that makes the subject of the paranormal so engrossing: Mystery.
Stay tuned for another installment of Popular Paranormal!
