Upon wide release in 2009, “Paranormal Activity” was sold to as a “Blair Witch Project” style success story. It was a independent found footage movie, made for 15,000 dollars, that rode a wave of festival buzz to become a massive box office success. This is not entirely the whole story. Director Oren Peli was already a successful programmer when he made the movie. An additional 215,000 dollars went into fine-tuning the film after Hollywood producers became involved. It's not exactly the story of two college students birthing a pop culture phenomenon. Yet it is undeniably true that “Paranormal Activity” was a huge money-maker, redirected the flow of the horror genre, collected praise and spurned debate. Over a decade later, how does the movie hold up?
Ever since she was a child, Katie has experienced unnerving anomalous activity. It has continued into adulthood. Katie's husband, Micah, is skeptical and decides to document the strangeness around his wife. He buys a camera and begins to record obsessively. He's especially focused on recording himself and Katie as they sleep at night, when the majority of the weirdness goes on. While Micah initially mocks the idea, he soon has video evidence of the creepy phenomena. Further research, and consultation with psychics, suggests this isn't any ordinary haunting either. That Katie is being pursued by a demonic entity.
Of course, a door closing or a woman standing up are not, in isolation, especially unnerving ideas. Peli helps make these moments a lot more unsettling by sticking closely to the found footage premise. While the editing is sometimes unlikely if you think about it too hard, or Micah maybe records a little too often, “Paranormal Activity” mostly does feel like real people being captured on camera. The performances are laid-back and naturalistic. Katie Featherston and Micah Sloat both look like real human beings and not movie stars. The movie has everyday stretches, where the couple is just lounging around their pool or goofing off in bed, to further establish this sense of realism. The sound design is strong, further putting us into this place with these people. You can't help but listen or watch carefully during the night time scenes, for any unusual sounds or sights. It does draw you in that way.
If “Paranormal Activity” was really as smart as it wished it was, the script would essentially make Micah the villain and have Katie's character arc lead her to freedom. Instead, Oren Peli's script attempts to forge some sort of mythology out of these vague hauntings. We get hints at Katie's life long experience with this demonic presence, including a childhood picture of her appearing burned in the attic. Micah digs up a website about a woman who dealt with demonic possession in the sixties, which seems to vaguely relate to the situation at hand. Just specifying that the entity is a demon, instead of a mere ghost, honestly demystifies what's happening and makes it less scary. The more “Paranormal Activity” leans into the demon thing, as evident in its jump scare final scene, the less creepy the movie becomes. Truly, vagueness probably was the route to go with this one.
In the sixties, audiences just couldn't get enough of crazy old ladies. The blockbuster success of “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?” led to a whole wave of movies starring elderly golden age actresses, going insane or murderous inside stories of psychological drama. Whether you call it hag horror, psycho-biddy, or Grande Dame Guignol, the subgenre was surprisingly long-lasted. Even into the seventies, a full decade after “Baby Jane,” they were still making these movies. Director Curtis Harrington, who had a strong career smuggling art into exploitation flicks, made three or four late entries. “What's the Matter with Helen?” is a typically overheated and lurid example, which has found a minor cult following for exactly those reasons.
Set in the 1930s, the film follows Adele Bruckner and Helen Hill, the mothers of two boys who recently committed a scandalous murder. Fleeing persecution in their home town, they arrive in Hollywood. Adele seeks to reinvent herself, opening a successful dance academy for young girls, and soon captures the romantic attention of a rich man. The religious, nervous Helen fears a man – well aware of their past lives – is stalking the couple. As she falls more into her delusions, and memories of her bloody past, Helen begins to frighten Adele.
Another theme inside "What's the Matter with Helen?," always threatening to boil over into full-on hysterics, is repressed sexuality. Adele is eager to start over, to leave her past behind and make a more successful future. Helen, meanwhile, is obsessed with the past, still locked into that pain. Adele moving on threatens their friendship, which was born out of coping with their shared trauma. It's obvious that Helen's fixation on Adele isn't platonic either. She seethes with jealousy whenever she sees the other woman with her boyfriend. When Adele pushes back against Helen's clinginess, it pushes her further towards violence. That Helen is a religious nut job, always begging for forgiveness for all her real and imagined sins, just makes her mania more intense. She can't accept her own sexuality, even if it drives everything she does.
I don't think “What's the Matter with Helen?” holds together especially well. It's script is messy and only some of the plot threads it develops ever wrap up in a satisfying manner. Naturally, this kind of overheated campy horror will not appeal to everyone. I'm fairly certain in saying that this is the only horror movie to feature a performance of “Animal Crackers in My Soup.” (Though if some Blumhouse movie wants to reinvent that as a creepy song, I wouldn't object.) Yet I think the overheated melodrama of Winters' performance and the film's ideas about the intersection between sexuality, religion, and the need to be loved make it worth seeking out. [7/10]
Earlier in the year, I watched the pilot movie of “Night Gallery” for my Steven Spielberg retrospective. That's probably enough “Night Gallery” for most people but, I guess, I simply like to give Rod Serling's other show a fair chance every October. “The Different Ones” is a short, fifteen minute long segment from the first season. It follows Mr. Koch, father to a hideously deformed son. The setting is a distant future, where the physically disadvantaged are often humanely euthanized. Koch wants more for his son though and signs him up for a risky exchange program, which will send the boy to an alien civilization on a distant planet. What follows is one of those classically Serling-esque twist endings.
“The Different Ones” does not crop up on the list of people's favorite “Night Gallery” segments very often. The episode's sci-fi is campy and largely unnecessary. You could tell a similar version of this story without then-futuristic TV monitors, vaguely dystopian government agencies tasked with disposing of deformed children, or intergalactic space travel. We certainly could've done without the lengthy montage of a rocket taking off and traveling among the stars. The glimpse we get at the alien society, at the end of the episode, feels like a cast-off from “Space: 1999” or something. The ending is certainly among Serling's more ham-fisted. You expect something more sinister to happen and, instead, you get a childish message about one man's trash being another man's treasure.
“Knock Wood, Here Comes Charlie” is the first “Munsters” episode to give us a look at the extended family. Herman's identical twin brother Charlie, a notorious con artist, comes to visit. He's selling a machine that turns sea water into uranium, which naturally doesn't actually work. Charlie's con is complicated when Grandpa creates a functioning alchemy machine from his phony one. “Autumn Croakus” begins with Grandpa deciding it's time he get himself a new wife. He signs up for a by-mail matchmaker service, soon meeting up with a woman named Lydia. Lydia is actually a black widow style murderer, marrying men just to knock them off and take their money. Clearly, the Munsters will provide more of a challenge than usual for the criminal.
The identical twin premise is pretty hoary and “The Munsters” doesn't find much to do with it. Seeing Fred Gwynne looking like Herman but wearing a monocle produces limited laughs. Once you see where the story is going – Charlie is going to rip everyone off but get his comeuppance – this one starts to feel tedious. What chuckles I did get out of this one is from broad physical gags or just these characters simply being themselves. Herman getting frustrated with a vault and simply punching through the wall, the staircase swinging open after its button is smashed, or Grandpa suddenly turning into a bat are among the better moments here. You know things are dire when the raven in the cuckoo clock gets one of the better one-liners.
3 comments:
I was lucky to see Paranormal Activity during its traveling midnight movie phase, knowing almost nothing about it other than that early audiences said it was scary. The marketing for the broader release would really lean into it later, but I went in almost blind, and it was a great experience. An underrated part of that strategy is that the movie lets out around 1:45 am, so you're just getting home around 2-2:30 - which is when most of the creepy stuff happens in the movie. It was a creepy night!
Going in, knowing as little as possible, was definitely the ideal way to see Paranormal Activity, I'm sure.
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