Paranormal Activity Film Review

So the film that everyone had been going on about : Paranormal Activity, a film made out to be found footage of what is said to be real ghost/demonic happenings.

When I first saw this film I already have been told that its obviously fake but went and sat down in the cinema forgetting this point to see how I'll react.

At first I didn't realise it was shot similar to the "Blair Witch Project", I had in mind that it was shot like "The Haunting in Connecticut" which is an supposedly a reenactment of a real event.

I feel that the film started off quite boring, with the way it was introducing the characters and everything, everything was fine etc I guess they used thi to lure you into a false sense of security first, and as this boring daily life situations went on you come to the night vision camera mode.

When the camera is set in the bedroom at night the timecode starts at the bottom of the screen and its when most of the "paranormal activities" starts happening. After the first time it you start to understand that that is when you're supposed to get scared so you start to brace yourself for it but since each event that happens different each one comes as a schock still.

The major reason it is actually freaky is because it looks real and especially because of how it looks like any other household you can relate to it. Another thing that helps is the very unsettling camera movement, since the camera is mostly moving about when male character "Micah" is holding it, it makes the viewers very comfortable.

This film is mostly creepy, since most of the things that happen are slow, you don't know whether it will suddenly make you jump etc. for instance, the scenes where the female character "Katie" is just standing over the bed watch Micah is probably the creepiest thing ever.

Its not a new idea but its done really well, with the all the supernatural occurances looking very realistic, the cuts were not smooth but obviously intended to add to the unease of the viewers.

In general a very good film, the only points that weren't realistic were the actions of the 2 characters. I believe that Micah's actions were especially not believable, for instance filming all day long and actually filming it when his girlfriend goes missing. If my girlfriend were to be missing after knowing theres paranormal activities in the house, first thing I'll do is definitely not to grab the fucking camera, but to actually find her first! but I guess they had to use it to get the footage for all the scenes, only solution were to say they had CCTV installed too to catch footage from other areas of the house without the his camera.

I think that the sound played a big part to the film, since most of the sound were backgroudn noises it makes you think that you hear things that aren't mentioned etc. its mostly the voices of the 2 characters, although they did use a demonic voice at some parts I think it was done well, conventional but creepy.

I believe the ending was fantastic, also unbelievably creepy and in general a very powerful film.

The budget of this film is apparently only $15,000 but had a tremendous gross revenue of $141,870,499. Its said that this film did so well because of internet virals, it was only firt viewed in selected towns and cities of America for people to review, then social networking websites such as twitter and facebook came into the equation and because of the good feedback it was getting they brought it out for a worldwide release. It began to get people really intrgued to its authenticity so many people went to watch this film allowing this massive gross revenue.