'Paranormal Activity': The Anti-Cinema of Mockumentary Horror

"The Blair Witch Project" wasn't the first mockumentary horror film, but it started a revolution. Numerous documentary style and found footage horror movies have been made since the 1999 blockbuster, including hits like "Paranormal Activity" and "Cloverfield." The goal of these films is to heighten the horror by making events seem more real.

Last week my girlfriend Lacey and I had different reactions to "Paranormal Activity," which has spawned two follow-ups since its 2007 release ("Paranormal Activity 3" recently broke box office records). She was engaged during the film and very frightened afterward, but I thought I had just watched a silly television show. It was my first mockumentary horror film experience (I had only watched scenes from "The Blair Witch Project").

Our reactions stemmed from different beliefs and experiences. Lacey believes in the supernatural due to unexplained experiences she had more than a decade ago, so she is the ideal audience for director/writer Oren Peli. This is even clearer when you consider that she can handle non-mockumentary ghost movies like "Poltergeist" and "Insidious." For her, the faux documentary brings her closer to the real terror she felt many years ago.

Unfortunately, I am not the ideal audience for Peli. I don't believe in the supernatural because I've never seen anything out of the ordinary (though for one year I lived in a house that was said to be haunted). But that by itself doesn't explain why I wasn't captivated by Peli's approach. For example, even though I wasn't scared during "Poltergeist" or its half-assed imitator "Insidious," they interested me. On the other hand, "Paranormal Activity" didn't have my attention until its deadly ending. The reason is simple: I believe in cinema, and "Paranormal Activity" is not cinema.

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One year after the mockumentary horror film exploded onto the scene with "The Blair Witch Project," reality television made its stamp on American television with "Survivor" and "Big Brother." This one-two illustrates a significant cultural phenomenon. Since 1999, more and more people have wanted films and television to be more real. For them, it makes viewing more entertaining and exciting.

Although "mockumentary" is most often used to describe comedies that satirize culture - films like "This Is Spinal Tap" and "Bruno" - I find the term even more suitable for this new wave of horror movies and reality television. These things mock reality in the most technical sense. During the first season of the hit television series "Survivor," I remember people getting off on the real interactions between the contestants. Hell, I remember getting off on the second season in Australia myself, mainly because it had this real crazy guy who killed a pig and smeared its blood on his face. But this man probably wouldn't have killed a pig and made such a spectacle if not for the show. Of course, we must consider the possibility that the whole thing was staged. But fuck it, right? It was the presentation and inclusion of no-name people that made "Survivor" more real for viewers. (I say "more real" instead of "more realistic" because the former is associated with the belief or perception that something is actually happening. "Realism," on the other hand, refers to art that depicts subjects as empirical reflections of reality.)

This is not to say everyone who watches reality television takes it seriously as drama. From my own observations, many people are more likely to laugh at reality television's subjects. It's cheap entertainment. But the phenomenon started from the idea that, yes, we are watching something that is more real than a sitcom or drama. And for what it's worth, reality television is more real than any silly-ass sitcom.

But the mockumentary horror film is taken as seriously (if not more so) as it was when "The Blair Witch Project" made millions. Some people who scoff at "The Blair Witch Project" are affected by the "Paranormal Activity" films. I think the main reason for this is that "Paranormal Activity" allows one to see everything more clearly; "The Blair Witch Project" is notorious for its shaky camera. In this way, "The Blair Witch Project" is pure anti-cinema.

There's that word again. What does cinema mean? For me, it means the work of many wonderful filmmakers and the standards they set. D.W. Griffith, John Ford, Akira Kurosawa, Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Federico Fellini, Francios Truffaut, Steven Spielberg, and Werner Herzog (who knows a thing or two about blurring the line between feature film and documentary), to name a few. Cinema represents the idea that film can do anything and make us feel a wide range of emotions by appealing to our most immediate sense: sight. The term also sets what we know as film apart from any other medium (please note the following is an incomplete list): literature, music, painting, and, oh yeah, television.

Critic Pauline Kael once remarked about the detrimental influence of television on film in her essential piece of film criticism, "Trash, Art, and the Movies": "Television is a very noisy medium and viewers listen, while getting used to a poor quality of visual reproduction, to the absence of visual detail, to visual obviousness and overemphasis on simple compositions, and to atrociously simplified and distorted color systems. The shifting camera styles, the movement, and the fast cutting of a film like 'Finian’s Rainbow'—one of the better big productions—are like the 'visuals' of TV commercials, a disguise for static material, expressive of nothing so much as the need to keep you from getting bored and leaving. Men are now beginning their careers as directors by working on commercials—which, if one cares to speculate on it, may be almost a one-sentence résumé of the future of American motion pictures."

Kael's comments can be applied to "The Blair Witch Project." Indeed, the story and thematic content of the film are so bare that the producers needed a shaky camera to keep people's attention. "[A]bsence of visual detail" and "static material" is "The Blair Witch Project" in a nutshell. We could even speculate that the main reason people distiguish it from television is that it was marketed and released as a theatrical movie.

So where does that leave "Paranormal Activity"? Well, I have to give it credit to an extent. It did set a higher standard for mockumentary horror films. For one thing, it's not "very noisy" or lacking "visual detail" in a sense. The noises in "Paranormal Activity" are doled out slowly, and as mentioned before, the film doesn't suffer from a shaky camera. I can see why the film spellbinds people. Its camera, unlike the cameras in normal feature films, is an object in the purest sense. In many scenes, the camera doesn't show you anything but what's happening in a bedroom while a couple sleeps (or tries to sleep), and we know it's not going to move unless something we're seeing tampers with it. The film gives the illusion that we're forced to watch malevolent forces unfold in real time. Whereas in a traditional horror movie, the camera is magic, separate from the scene - we trust the director to show us what we need to see.

However, I wasn't spellbound by the mockumentary approach. "Paranormal Activity" has an unoriginal, paper-thin story with characters who don't say or do anything interesting. The film didn't seem to comment on anything culturally relevant (though Slate critic Dana Stevens theorized it was a metaphor for the credit crisis - interesting, but I disagree). The editing has no rhythm; the film is shot from an exceptionally normal perspective for the illusion of realness, with choppiness to boot. But the biggest problem was how the film killed suspense. During the bedroom scenes, you can see the camera's clock in the low right-hand corner. The "scene" fast-forwards as the clock numbers roll. The scene resumes when the clock stops rolling, letting you know when to expect ghostly activity. The technique is a converse of the instant replay, which drove the film's relationship to television even further home for me.

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Last night Lacey and I watched "Paranormal Activity 2." Admittedly, it held my attention more than the first because it had more action, characters, and camera perspectives (the father sets up security cameras in the house), but I was struck by the fact that it had a different director. Peli is replaced by Tod Williams, but you can't tell a difference in directorial style. This uniformness reminded me of how television shows change directors while retaining the same stylistic elements. Mockumentary horror films appeal to individual beliefs and experiences while rejecting the individuality of cinema as a personal artform.

I could discuss the numerous cinematic limitations of "Paranormal Activity" and its kind for hours, but the reality is that the horror film and audience expectations have changed. I just hold to the hope that if this new wave of horror movies continues to take over, we, as a filmmaking and filmgoing culture, will not forget the past - that we will learn about it and from it.