Paranormal Activity - The Movie.

I have always maintained that human experience is never fake. The way you look at/interpret this experience can lead to false conclusions, but then that does not invalidate the experience itself.

My approach to films hangs on the same as well. What we are essentially trying to do in a film is create an experience for the viewer and let him go to his own conclusions. Everything else, the style of narrative, the opulence etc are distractions to appeal to that part of ourselves that wants to experience them.

But stripped to the bare minimum, a movie first needs to connect to the viewer - which is probably why leisurely opening narratives that create a wholesome experience (sometimes peaking them to maximize this connection) have a better chance of making it big with masses and become a true expression of art than those that rely on artificial elements to overawe the audience.

So then now, what is fear? A powerful emotion we experience – and if you experienced it, it never comes in real life is CGI packages or gory images yet we would have experienced it – often in error though – and it has a great impact.

A few years ago, I was put up at Pune. The house where we lived in was very comfortable. Except, there was spook in the air. Every evening an Owl would perch onto the kitchen window sill and sit there still without movement all night. It wouldn’t budge an inch at an attempt to scare it and it was considerably big. If you woke up in the middle of the night and went to get a glass of water, the owl could spook you out when the light suddenly turns on and you see this huge figure apparently looking into the house. Then there were bats, regular visitors huge ones and in humongous numbers. Worse every night we would be woken at a particular hour by what we thought was a baby crying. Only we were on the second floor of an isolated building and there were no babies around. Worse there were recurring nightmares and frequent waking up and occasional feeling that someone was watching us.

I don’t know what happened and now it seems irrelevant, but what could have skewed up our whole perception was the extreme amount of stress me and my wife were undergoing on various accounts. I really don’t know.

But guess what, we were spooked, and by a great measure. And ever since we have loved horror movies or pseudo ghost hunting shows like ghost hunters or paranormal state etc. Because we know what it feels like to be in the middle of the night totally awake and attentive to every noise around you in anticipation and fear of harm to you or your loved ones – the ones you are responsible for. What makes worse is that you cannot share what you experience with anyone else and sound sensible to them, and that creates a sense of isolation and helplessness - and you are alert because you have to rely on yourself in every which way.

I would often wonder as to why the events that were happening were so insignificant in total contrast to the intensity with which we were experiencing them in our minds. And I would devise strategies to capture this form of fear on celluloid. The key is anticipation that comes out of connection.

This Key is what eventually works for Paranormal Activity the film. If the same movie were to be made by a big director on a lavish scale it would simply fail because the elements of spook themselves were very small and something not totally unseen before in movies. Yet a director who would visualize this fear and try to bring it onto screen would fail in any format other than the one used in the movie. That of a simple camera and a day to day setting where everything outside what we are accustomed to is suspect.

The camera and the story and the performances are set up in a way to give a feeling that it’s a real event, and the real life setting and motivations give you that element of connection. There is a hinted history and eventual feeling that there is no escape. There is minimal drama outside what would happen everywhere and whatever is there dosent feel like drama because there is a connection established to begin with.

The movie brought back memories, my wife had a distrubed sleep and dreams in the night, where the shaking of the shades gave her problems. And that is the ultimately victory of a horror movie. The connection, the unknown, the trauma, the reality and the creation of doubt about everything you would otherwise deem harmless. Ultimately its nothing better than a combination of an episode of Ghost hunters on home video, but it has one thing going for it, the novelty of the concept.

This is not a repeatble formula, like the Blair Witch clones, but it qualifies as what we all look for in films: An experience.