Thoughts on stairs that go thump in the night …

This content has been archived. It may no longer be relevant

I saw Paranormal Activity at a late showing one evening last winter, braving the icy roads for the thrill of a $5.00 movie and a 32 oz soda served in a cup they won’t let you pee in.

It was no Blair Witch Project,  which as someone secure in her geekiness can honestly say I throughly enjoyed.  PA was bogged down by what felt like an info dump, though anyone with half a brain could have figured out what was happening.  What was worse, the info dump did nothing for the actual movie, since it was all a poorly constructed misdirection. If that’s how yuppies act in the face of DIY Paranormal Investigation, I am clearly in the wrong business.  There’s money to be made on suckers.

The movie sacrificed character development for cool information and it made the characters the kind of unlikable (yes, dumbass – taunt the unknown destructive force). Plus throw in the unexplained photograph and the last third of the movie you were just waiting for the creep factor to be amped because the last thing you really cared about was the people involved.

Ghost stories scare the crap put of me, so within the movie, the thuds up the stars the shadows in corners – all of that found those buttons inside of my fear center and mashed them with a sledge-hammer.  The added tension was tweaked even tighter with the absence of incidental music. I left the theater thinking it was okay, but not great. The scares were good, but kind of empty. This is what a scary movie looks like, but the innards were all in the wrong place.

Now comes Paranormal Activity 2, and I’ll go see it because I can’t help myself (unlike M Night’s latest which I will not see because I understand it will never be different this time and he will never stop hurting me). The trailer is well done (again) and the thumps up the stairs actually made me push the laptop away from me.  This is the second trailer for this, the first one ending in a voice asking “Where is Hunter”, and if you listen closely, you’ll hear at the end of this one “There is no … Hunter”.

I don’t know if this works in the embedded version (I have to assume it does) when you get to the end of the trailer, grab the slide bar at the bottom and rewind it back to the midway point. Creepiness abounds with new images and I was very happy.

It does not help that I keep thinking I hear noises in my headphones while the trailer is paused.  More thumps? Wind? Voices? I think I need to go outside now …

[EDIT]

In typical style, the video won’t embed. So go watch it and let me know what you think.

Link to stupid video that won’t embed