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Paranormal Activity stars only four people, with most of the action centered around only two leads. It was shot by the first-time actors themselves over the course of a single week for a price tag of less than $15,000. And since opening at only a handful of fringe festivals, it has generated such a cult following that an energized grass roots campaign is sweeping the minor cultural phenomenon into a theater near you. So is it worth all the fuss? You better believe it! Paranormal Activity is not a movie; it is a participatory sport, an amusement park haunted house complete with the obligatory shrieking teenaged girls clinging to each other for solace.

The plot is simple. Micah (Micah Sloat) and Katie (Katie Featherston) live in a San Diego house haunted by something that goes bump in the night. While they’ve been dating for several years, the pair only recently moved in together, forcing Katie to confess that some sort of presence has regularly visited her at night ever since she was a young child. A meeting with a psychic about the poltergeist allows a lot of necessary exposition to be delivered quickly and believably. Intrigued but more than a little incredulous, the snarky Micah buys a video camera with the intent of filming them while they sleep and hopefully catching visual proof of Katie’s apparition.

What follows is some of the most terrifying footage imaginable, even though it is almost completely devoid of violence or viscera. There is no CGI. There is no latex makeup. Paranormal Activity’s terror is rooted in the mundane — plants that quake by some unseen breeze, rustling bed sheets, swinging chandeliers, advancing shadows, lights switching on and off, footsteps in baby powder — but don’t think for a moment that such commonplaceness will save you from being frightened. Without a release valve in sight, the tension the film creates grows exponentially until an explosive finale is inevitable.

Paranormal Activity may not be the most frightening film you will ever see, but it comes close. Its genius lies in the fact that it works at a slow burn, building the tension from miniscule, even laughable incidents in the beginning to abject terror by the end. But to cross the distance between those two spaces is to measure the tensile strength of the human stomach, which will be in knots long before the credits role. Micah, rather than Katie, is our emotional compass. While she has lived with the hulking shadowy shape breathing down her neck for most of her life, Micah is understandably skeptical. We identify with each stage through which he progresses: disbelief, exhilaration, taunting aggression, stunned uncertainty and finally abject dread.

The filmmakers are aware that we have seen films that used this conceit before, from The Blair Witch Project to, more recently, Cloverfield. It knows that in reality, you would most certainly toss the camera aside at the first sign it was endangering you. And the film, for the most part, does an excellent job at ensuring those moments are genuinely rare, even going so far as to wink at the audience once or twice just to let us know its in on the joke. It certainly helps that, unlike the nausea-inducing shaky cam of the two aforementioned films, Paranormal Activity is largely relegated to clinical static shots — the tripod mounted camera voyeuristically gazing upon the couple while they sleep. This has the effect of making the danger seem all the more real, as if the camera and those behind it are merely observers, like the audience. See, the filmmakers say, no hands!

One of the smartest things Paranormal Activity does, from a production standpoint, is inform the audience that Katie’s apparition is linked to her and not any specific geographical location. It does not matter if she flees her house in terror and hides out in a hotel room or a friend’s house. “You can’t run from this,” Katie is told by the psychic. “It will follow you.” This simple conceit, born out of a need to constrain the action to a single set (in this case, the director’s own house), works believably and effectively.

Paranormal Activity is scarier than it otherwise has any right to be because it is about those things that happen to us while we are at our most helpless and vulnerable — while we sleep. It has the effect of heightening our senses to the most insignificant and innocuous disturbances. It is the sort of film that suddenly begins percolating in your brain just as you turn off your bedroom lights and slide beneath the covers. Don’t be surprised if it also becomes the stuff of your nightmares.

© Copyright 2009 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.