First things first. Paranormal Activity did not chill me to the bone, freak me out or leave me sleepless for weeks. It is not the scariest film ever, but then nor was The Blair Witch Project which became one of the highest-grossing films of all time in ratio to the thruppence ha'penny or whatever for which it was made.
Oren Peli's ultra-low budget film has already achieved box-office phenomenon status after a mighty run in America and there is certainly something interesting about Paranormal Activity. But it isn't the business aspect, nor the spooky factor, the things going bump in the night while a bickering young couple – We're engaged to be engaged" – try to sleep in their smart San Diego starter home.
What's really at play isn't a demon or poltergeist which knocks keys off the table or makes the bedroom door snap open; rather, it's the relationship the characters develop with film itself, an obsession with watching and recording footage. The character of Heather in Blair Witch was possessed by little more than a desire to film, and Micah (the actors use their own names for their characters here) is equally committed to capturing his girlfriend Katie's trauma on his new high-definition video camera.
The film's most fascinating moments are thus the time-lapsed ones of the couple asleep, caught in night vision mode by the camera positioned religiously on its tripod every night, at the end of the bed. We, the audience, then watch the couple speeded up with the time code ticking away as they toss and turn until the replay slows down to playback speed, signalling something scary is about to happen. This is an ingenious cinematic device, a new way of ratcheting up tension and arriving at release.
In a bid for verisimilitude, Paranormal Activity weakly disguises itself as "found footage" and, despite the late appearance of cloven footprints, it never really convinces on the demonic level. Yet it does partly succeed as a relationship movie, asking why a nice girl like her would even be with an egomaniac like him – Go off with the demon, I kept thinking. And as a document of a generation's refusal to believe anything unless it's on film, it's truly troubling.