A $15,000 horror film has me sleeping with the lights on!

I’ve barely watched a horror film in ten years, since The Blair Witch Projectwas released on DVD. I thought that was the scariest supernatural film since The Exorcist thirty years earlier, which, in turn,  was the most frightening demonic screen experience since Jonathan Miller’s brilliant TV adaptation of M.R. James’s classic short story, “Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” in Rosemary’s Baby, both 1968. 

Before that, you’d probably have to go way back Dead of Night in 1945 and then Nosferatu in 1922.  (Remember, I’m talking about supernatural horror here.)

Earlier this week I watched possibly the scariest supernatural horror movie I’ve ever seen. Paranormal Activity, currently running on Sky Movies, was made in 2007 for a reputed $15,000 by writer-director, Oren Peli, in his own house, using a home video camera and three actors. This tale of a young American couple plagued by an unseen demon is supposedly told – as with Blair Witch – entirely using what is supposedly “found footage”, i.e. video found after the event (the “typical bloke” day-trader boyfriend decides to capture everything on camera after his girl-friend claims that an unseen presence which has visited her twice before has returned). 

The rights to the film were acquired by Dreamworks at the Sundance Festival in 2008. They trimmed it a bit and gussied up the ending and it went on release in cinemas in October last year, since when it has earned some $198 million worldwide – making probably the best return on investment in the history of the cinema.

And it is brilliant!

Its creator has been afraid of ghosts all his life, and he evokes that visceral, primal terror so successfully that this large, 58-year old man, living in one of the most crowded cities on earth – someone who once earned his crust dreaming up horror stories, so knows all the tricks, and who has spent decades laughing or sneering at countless lame “horror” movies – actually had to sleep with the light on afterwards.

It is that good. (Just look at audience reaction in this trailer.)

And it’s all done with the bare minimum of special effects, and less gore than you’d find in the average episode of In the Night Garden. Best of all, there are no teenagers being bumped off one by one! Or some impossibly unkillable killer wearing a mask! Or a series of silly false endings, where the killer/entity has mysteriously disappeared! Or zombies frightening everyone to death despite only being to move at two miles an hour! 

What you get is a series of quiet, subtle events (until near the end – but even then, it’s all pretty low-key) which, as they build in intensity, send more genuine shivers along the spine than any other film has ever managed. 

Of course, there have been several really enjoyable supernatural horror movies along the way, but they’ve tended to be either straightforward cop thrillers (1998’s highly enjoyable Fallen, in which detective Denzel Washington is pursued by a body-shifting demon) or quirky new takes on old horror themes, where the “horror” element is basically a metaphor for, say, teenage alienation (e.g. last year’s superb Swedish movie, Let the Right One In). With Paranormal Activity, the supernatural element is the whole point of the film: it doesn’t symbolise anything - the movie really is about a demon. 

There are countless creepy scenes which will live in my memory for years. The video camera, which is left on all night in the corner of the room to capture untoward events, shows the girlfriend getting out of bed in the middle of the night and standing, staring at her boyfriend, stock-still, for two hours (the time code is shown in fast-forward mode). I can’t tell you how weird and wrong that is. 

At one stage – another night-time fixed-position bedroom shot – we see a shadow move across the open bedroom door (I let out a yelp). A sheet puffs up, as if caught by the wind (I made one of those sounds men tend to make when changing a nappy).

The dialogue is mainly extemporized: “I lightened up the footage from last night. You can see the footsteps,” presages a particularly fine moment (cue more nappy-changing sounds).

The following exchange, which takes place in the upstairs hallway just after they’ve found a picture of both of them smashed, is wonderfully creepy:

She: Something's here.

He:   This is bullshit.

She (stiff with fear): It's here.

He:   What's here? What? What're you talking about?

She: I don't know. I feel it. I feel it breathing on me.

Eurrggghhhh!

I realize that all of you skeptical sophisticates will be wondering what the fuss is all about, but for an old horror fan who had assumed that no film would ever again make him worry about entering a dark room,Paranormal Activity is a huge and unexpected treat, which proves the old adage: less is sometimes more