I managed not to scream like a girl, but it was a near thing

[trinityvixen]

The last time I remember being genuinely scared at a movie was the remake of Dawn of the Dead. I am Legend was pretty tense at parts, but I appreciated the crushing loneliness of the main character more than the occasional jump-and-go-boo frights. Since then, I've been scared by a few video games here and there (damn you, BioShock!) but not movies.

Then Tor.com sent me to see Paranormal Activity. I make a great show of not being totally freaked out by this film in my post over there.

I think it says a lot about a film that I can have it hyped, immediately prior to the screening, by no less than three people, one of whom was a studio suit promising that it was so scary that people walked out of the screening they did when they bought the film after it showed at a festival. I always find that movies that are hyped are never even 1/10th as superlative as promised.

I admit to being wrong with this movie. It was suspenseful and anxiety-inducing for a good hour and a half. I am a horror fan, which means I'm desensitized to a lot of horror movie scares. The Ring? Found it duller than ditch water. Cloverfield made me nauseated, not frightened, and for much the same reason, I found The Blair Witch Project to be an outright snoozer. So color me more surprised than any that this movie got to me. If it gets a wide distribution, I would say it's definitely worth seeing in the theater, the better to appreciate the creeps without distractions around you.

(It might also be better to see with people because they'll freak out and you'll feel superior to them. Until you get home and are laughing hysterically at random noises to make sure that they know that you're not afraid of them. Yes.)

Comments

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

Since The Ring freaked me the hell out, I think I'll be skipping this one.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I was going to post a message directly to you, glvalentine and Miss Beans about avoiding this one, except that save for the horror fan freaking on the internet, I don't think this film will get that much attention.

But yes. Skip this one, mm?

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

I tend to skip horror as a genre in general. I only watched the Ring cause a friend coerced me and said it wasn't at all scary. I doubt I ever would have contemplated going to this.

[droidguy1119.livejournal.com]

The cleverest thing the movie does is make the final scene an amalgamation of the ones that come before it. The first time the timer speeds up, the audience takes a second to know what's going on. The second time, my preview screening went fucking nuts.

I saw it at midnight on Thursday, but I'm not sure I took enough away from it to write a review about it. This is mainly because said preview audience was so vocal and so attuned to the movie, that I think I have a better impression of that than I do the film itself. I think there are only two places this film is going to work: in a packed audience of willing participants (something the internet campaign cleverly makes into a requirement) or alone, at home, at 1 in the morning.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

That's a great point about the final scene. It's basically the culmination of absolutely everything terrifying that had come before it.

As for where to see it: that's why I suggested it was worth a trip to the theater in my review. There are so few movies that are worth the nearly $14 it costs to see a film in my city these days. Things that make it worth it are really great special effects that require a big screen to view them or really intricately made films that can only be appreciated in the last venue on Earth where you are encouraged to do nothing else but immerse yourself in the film. And Paranormal Activity really benefits from that immersion/isolation. I think you can probably, if you have a good group of horror-loving friends, achieve that at your home, too, but it's just much harder to coordinate. Then again, if you're in the house where noises might sound out of nowhere or a cat might hop into a lap unexpected, that could be more scary!