So it's two in the morning right now, Pacific time, and I just got back from a midnight screening of a little movie called Paranormal Activity. Before I go on let me set the stage for you a little bit. The year was 2007. I was working on an MMA TV show. A guy that I work with sent me a trailer and told me I should check it out since I'm such a horror geek. I watched it and it looked scary as shit. I looked around for some information and I found out it had just debuted at a small film festival called Screamfest. I kept searching around for more info for a couple months, and it made its way around the festival circuit, and then I started losing interest as the hype machine started losing steam.
Cut to like a year ago, where it resurfaces again at some other film festival and eventually gets picked up by Steven Spielberg and Dreamworks. So I get stoked again because at least now the movie has a chance to see the light of the day. Once again a lot of time passes and the movie seems to disappear. I keep checking for updates and there's really nothing going on with it for about 10 months. Then, finally, there are rumblings the movie has been green lit to be remade. Now I fucking HATE remakes, especially when the movie hasn't even been fucking released yet. What is the point of remaking a movie unless it's like 30-40 years old? I don't fucking understand. I guess I shouldn't say I hate all remakes, just like 90 percent of them. Anyway there was also rumors that the movie wouldn't see the light of day until AFTER the remake came out on DVD. And now I was officially pissed. I had read so many amazing reviews and people were saying it was the scariest movie they'd ever seen. I needed to see this movie.
About 2 months ago, Dreamworks decided to release the movie in 14 "college towns" just to test out how it would do. 13 of the 14 screenings sold out and people couldn't get enough of it. So Dreamworks put it out in about 20 more theatres. All the showings started selling out, and even more people wanted to see it purely from the word of mouth going around. So director Oren Peli decided to see how many people actually wanted to see it around North America and set up some website where you could demand the movie to be played in your town. Over a million demands later Dreamworks finally decided to give the movie a wide domestic release. The movie premiered on October 16th, 2009.
So your boy jeanshorts was sitting at home, watching the Oilers game, and having no intention of seeing this movie until sometime later next week, because I fucking hate going to opening nights. I hate people, and I want to shoot up a theater when people are talking in a movie. But my buddy called me up, told me him and his brother were going to the midnight screening and convinced me to go.
So there we were, 10:45 we show up and get in line outside the theatre. At about 11:15 the earlier showing gets out and we watch people to gauge their reactions. There was everything from smiling and laughing, to yawing, but 75% of the people had stone faces and looked like they just saw their dad run over their dog on purpose. So now I'm fucking so excited.
The movie starts and there's a pretty good buzz in the air. But since this movie has been touted as the scariest movie in the last 30 years or so, some of the drunk assholes there start to get a little restless. People start adding their own commentary, with such gems as "why don't they just turn on the lights" and "I'd fucking break up with her". Yeah guy, we get it, but if any of that happened there'd be no story and none of us would be sitting there watching this. It's a fucking horror movie. The reason they don't turn on the lights is the same reason the big titted blonde runs into the woods after she finds her boyfriend dead, and why said boyfriend went downstairs to check out the noise in the cabin where those other kids were murdered 20 years ago to the day. It's a fucking fictional movie, suspend your common sense beliefs for a bit please? Fuck.
And even despite this, and the fact I wanted to kick the teeth in of a few specific assholes in the front row, I got goosebumps a solid 15-20 times throughout. Once again the movie is a little slow, so people are continuing to get restless about an hour, hour fifteen in. And then, the fucking ending comes. Now let me tell you my friends. I've been scared by a few movies before (Rec and Ils are pretty much the only other ones that rocked me) but I have never, ever jumped this high off my seat in my entire life. I thought I was going to go right over into the row in front of me. It was so fucked up and scary that 20 minutes after the movie I was still shaking. It fucking rocked me to my god damn core. And I fucking loved it! I can't stop thinking about it. I'm going to have to sleep with my lights on, the TV on, fuck maybe I'll run the shower just for good measure as I board up my doors and windows.
I recommend this movie to anyone and everyone. If you like horror movies you'll love every minute of it like I did. If you want to scare the shit out of a girl in order to have sexual intercourses on her, this will do the trick. Or it might just scare her so bad that she turns celibate, at least for the night, but you might as well chance it. What do you have to lose really?
I can't wait for this fucking thing to come out on DVD and like I said I think everyone should see this. Unless you have a heart condition because I wouldn't be surprised if this movie killed someone eventually. Fuck I want to call like everyone I know and yell at them to go see it, but it's like 2:30 in the morning and I don't think they'd be that happy to hear from me. Anyway, go fucking see it. NOW. I'm going to go try and sleep now, but it's going to be an uphill battle.
-jeanshorts
*so I've been reading reviews and shit for the past like half hour, and what this guy said completely sums up what is happening to me at this very moment. "If you've read any of the other reviews for 'Paranormal Activity', you will notice almost all of them mention that a viewer will not be able to sleep after watching it. I will make my review one of them. You will not sleep if you see this movie. Not only is it terrifying, it's thought-provoking. Then when you think about it, you are terrified all over again." Fucking, amazing*
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