Paranormal Activity (2007)

"Paranormal Activity succeeds in staying unnervingly "real."  Dennis Harvey, Variety
"Paranormal Activity is a brutal, exhausting, and genuinely horrifying little ghost flick.  Felix Vasques, Jr., FilmThreat.com
"The fear is real all right, because the fear is really in you.  Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly

Editor's Note A haunted house makes no secret of the fact it's not pleased with its new tenants in this independent tale of supernatural horror. Katie (Katie Featherson) and Micah (Micah Sloat) are a twentysomething couple who've just moved into a new home in San Diego, CA. Katie has an interest in the paranormal and believes that malevolent spirits have been following her since childhood, though Micah is not so easily convinced. However, after several nights of loud noises and strange happenings, Micah starts to agree with Katie that some sort of ghost may have followed them to the new home. After a paranormal researcher tells the couple he can't help them, Micah decides to take control of the situation and sets up a battery of video cameras so that if a spirit manifests itself, he can capture its behavior on tape. Once the surveillance cameras are in place, Katie and Micah bring in a Ouija board in an effort to talk to the spirits, a move that deeply offends the ghosts. PARANORMAL ACTIVITY was the first feature film from writer and director Oren Peli.

	Katie Featherston
	Micah Sloat
	Mark Fredrichs
	Amber Armstrong
	Ashley Palmer
	Oren Peli - Director of Photography
	Oren Peli - Screenwriter
	Crystal Cartwright - Special Makeup Effects
	Oren Peli - Director

Entertainment Weekly
"[F]reaky and terrifying....The fear is real, all right, because the fear is really in you." -- Grade: A- 10/09/2009

Chicago Sun-Times
3.5 stars out of 4 -- "PARANORMAL ACTIVITY is an ingenious little horror film, so well made it's truly scary, that arrives claiming it's the real thing." 10/07/2009

USA Today
3 stars out of 4 -- "Think THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT meets THE EXORCIST and then dial it up a few notches, and you have an approximation of the subtle but terrifying atmosphere of PARANORMAL ACTIVITY." 10/09/2009

A.V. Club
"PARANORMAL ACTIVITY derives much of its power from juxtaposing supernatural otherworldliness with the mundanity of the apartment where its action takes place. At best, PARANORMAL ACTIVITY makes the banal and commonplace deeply unsettling." -- Grade: B 10/08/2009

Washington Post
"[G]enuinely chilling....The film's suspense, like BLAIR WITCH's, is the sort that lurks in the shadows..." 10/12/2009

Rolling Stone
3 stars out of 4 -- "[I]t will fry your nerves and creep you out big time without spending a dime on obvious special effects." 11/12/2009

ReelViews 9 of 10
The familiar looks different at night. Incandescent lights don't quite chase away the shadows with the effectiveness of the sun. The rooms and hallways of a home, so comforting at noon, can become cloaked with unease past the witching hour. This fear of the dark, one of humankind's most common phobias, lies at the heart of Paranormal Activity, as a seemingly normal house is turned into a nest of terror once the daylight has faded. Things that go bump in the night can instantly transform the most mundane location into a place of menace. This is a tale of the supernatural, but its strength is that it is rooted in the ordinary. That's what makes it creepy...Is the movie scary? For a horror movie, that is often the bottom line. While it may be a stretch to call any motion picture conventionally "frightening," Paranormal Activity is suffused with a creepy, disturbing atmosphere that envelops the viewer. The "boo!" moments are effectively constructed to generate the necessary jolt without seeming unnecessarily manipulative. The ending, which was apparently selected over Peli's original version after being suggested by Steven Spielberg, is appropriate for the story...In some ways, the marketing campaign for Paranormal Activity threatens to dwarf the movie. Paramount is building interest on the strong word-of-mouth generated by targeted screenings and by the exclusivity factor of slowly rolling it out to select theaters in specific markets. Those who feel "left out" in the early stages of the phased distribution can "demand" the movie on a website. Paramount promises that once 1,000,000 demands are recorded, the movie will go wide. (This is a bit of sham, since plans to distribute prints to multiplexes around the country were finalized weeks ago, but the website provides viewers with the illusion of participation.) The Halloween season is the perfect time of the year for a production such as this. Every October, we're all looking for a good scare. In an era when mainstream horror is often indistinguishable from self-parody, it takes something basic like this to be diabolically successful. - James Berardinelli

Chicago Sun-Times 9 of 10
Paranormal Activity is an ingenious little horror film, so well made it's truly scary, that arrives claiming it's the real thing. Without any form of conventional opening or closing credits, it begins by thanking "the families of Micah Sloat and Katie Featherston" and closes with one of those "current whereabouts unknown" title cards and a screen of copyright notices. This was apparently a film made without a director, a writer, a producer, grips, makeup, sound, catering or a honey wagon...All of the footage is presented as if it had been discovered after the fact. The story device is that Micah shot it himself. There isn't a single shot that violates that presumption, although a few seem technically impossible without other hands on the camera. Those are hard to notice...They do call in a "psychic expert" (Mark Fredrichs) but he's no help. He specializes in ghosts, he explains, and he knows by walking in the door that what's haunting them isn't a ghost but some sort of demonic presence. He recommends a demonologist, but alas this man is "away for a few days." That's the plot's most unrealistic detail. Having spent some time in my credulous days hanging about the Bodhi Tree bookstore in L.A., I would suggest that California is a state with more practicing demonologists than published poets...I learn from IMDb that Paranormal Activity does indeed have a writer-director, Oren Peli, and other technical credits. But like The Blair Witch Project, with which it's routinely compared, it goes to great lengths to seem like a film found after the event. It works. It illustrates one of my favorite points, that silence and waiting can be more entertaining than frantic fast-cutting and berserk f/x. For extended periods here, nothing at all is happening, and believe me, you won't be bored. - Roger Ebert