BrightBurn Trailer Analysis

Brightburn looks like something I may have stumbled across on Netflix or seen as a demo reel on IndyMogul. I'm not saying that to knock it, but I can't help but feel if James Gunn's name wasn't plastered all over this trailer in light of his unfair and widely-publicized dismissal by Disney from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, this might be regarded as a novelty, a mostly good idea that may or may not be enough to sustain a 90-minute runtime. 



I've got not problem with superhero movies that aren't directly adapting any existing material, and plenty of superheroes share origins along with powers that anybody yelling "rip-off" is a bit late to the party. Superman is a little bit of an odd duck because the "alien orphan" origin has only even been repeated for the sake of parody (Megamind). On that note, to anyone who thinks, "What if Superman were evil?" is in any way edgy or compelling or unsettling as a concept, I lean in and whisper in response, "That's what General Zod is for." Look, the Man of Steel has been around for over 70 years. The lore around him has become a multiverse unto itself, with every possible scenario regarding his morality played out in some way, shape, or form. He's been cloned/weaponized, brainwashed, hypnotized, driven insane, and that's not even putting the General Zod issue in perspective by bringing up all the other extraordinarily powerful adversaries Supes has had to fight off. The Evil Kryptonian is a weak enough proposition on its own merits that even stripping away the other superhero trappings to use as framework for a monster movie isn't blazing any trails. 

That said, on the subject of superhero horror: I'm there. I am so there. It's the only part of that Fant4stic Four reboot which really worked for the narrative and delivered on some genuine tension, even if it had to come at the expense of some pretty egregious character assassination. Seriously, why do villains in these movies have to become so cookie-cutter compared to their source material? We might as well give them all top hats and handlebar mustaches. 

Speaking of motivation (or lack thereof), the trailer implies a revenge angle (a la Carrie), the downtrodden kid getting back at the bullies who mocked him. However, we don't see anything like that. We see him scrawling an emblem over and over again in a notebook along with some voiceover exposition from Elizabeth Banks' character about general life hardships, but we don't have any obvious setup for a motivation. I could call this a flaw, but I actually think it might be a kind of subtle genius; there is no motivation for our menace. In fact, trying to force us to view a movie monster through the lens of a comic book superhero is humbly disarming, the terror bordering on existential. 

I can't find any exact figures on the budget, but horror doesn't lend itself to outlandish production values as their appeal and lasting qualities often have more to do with what you don't see than what you do. They also work best when they're as down-to-earth as possible, at least as a setup before all the terror sets in and disrupts your idyllic Americana-infused backdrop. Much of the psychology of horror is taking something mundane and ordinary to the point of inconsequential and making it into something that can hurt or kill you... or worse. On that front, this is hitting all the right notes: a quiet kid in an anonymous midwestern town is suddenly an uncontrollable force of nature bent on destruction and no one is equipped to handle the situation. 

Speaking of handling the situation, even if this is what could called a "medium budget" horror film with an emphasis on spectacle, it does limit the narrative in terms of resolution. Kevin Smith (in)famously scaled back the original, apocalyptic ending for Red State as it would have quadrupled the budget. Chronicle, another early example of superheroes played up as monsters, had a similarly more grandiose ending scrapped in favor of something more nuanced and ambiguous. Based on that, as well as this trailer, I'm going to throw down a spoiler warning and speculate on how Brightburn may end. Place your bets, cats and kittens; we can't let sports have all the fun. 

Much of the tension in the trailer not concerned with him discovering his powers comes from a scene of him being uncontrollably drawn to the spaceship that brought him to earth (kept a secret from him by Ma and Pa Not The Kents From Smallville). If I were asked to write a superhero horror movie but keep it simple (read: cheap) I could foresee two possible endings, the first of which involves that spaceship. If we're using it as some kind of narrative Macguffin for the plot to hinge upon, the obvious ending would be for his cradle to be his grave, so to speak. There's a writer's device known as Chekov's Gun, named for the playwright. It goes: If there's a gun on the mantle in the first act, someone had better be dead from it by the third. The inherent advice offered in this quip is to remove any unnecessary detail from your script. The other side of the coin spins it into a workaround for Deus Ex Machina, an ending that comes out of left field with no precedent set. As an example, I'm going to bring up Event Horizon, as I'm often wont to do in any discussion of horror movies. In that film, it's mentioned early on that the midsection of the ship is lined with explosive charges, meant as a last resort safety measure to separate the front of the ship from its engine. It is mentioned in the alpha, thus it becomes our omega. That's an oversimplification, but the point remains that it doesn't come out of left field because we pointed in its direction and said, "Hey, left field's that way and it packs a wallop." If Brightburn is Superman, then maybe his ship was powered by Kryptonite, or is lined with the stuff, or has a manual for how to make it, or what have you. If it is what gives him his powers, maybe it holds what may also take them away. It waxes a tad myopic, but for my money I would call them solid enough nuts and bolts to hold a narrative together. I wouldn't love it, but I would appreciate what it had to do given its circumstances. 

The cast list reveals two names for our super, one labeled as "young" and the other as "adult." Barring any accelerated aging (say, as part of his powers developing), this mostly throws a wrench in the works as to the Chekov's Gun idea for a resolution. This leads me to the ending I would personally prefer, one that ends with the start of a reign of terror. Something people often don't realize about the Alien franchise is that across all of them, the alien always wins. No, really, the alien always wins. Even when it's defeated, it's not only temporary, but such a costly defeat that our survivors end up in worse situations than when they started. Some argue what kind of narrative that is, to have their investment in our heroes overcoming impossible odds not pan out. It's a fair point, but I would ask then where it's written that horror movies need happy endings with all the toys put back in the box? I mean, does anyone watch an adaptation of a Shakespearean tragedy thinking maybe this time no one has to die? 

Going back to Chekov's Kryptonite, there is a third possible outcome, one presented by our voiceover from Not Ma Kent, about there being good in our Little Orphan Anarchy. He may well see the light, recognize he can use his powers for good, and shed his villain persona. Maybe they'll even cheekily end it on the arrival of a true and proper adversary, complete with a "THE END?" card before the credits roll. 

I would hate such an ending. That is the bar I would set for betrayal, a desperate attempt to unring the bell and make some point about redemption to go along with our messiah tropes. That kind of character psychology and pondering is wasted on spine-tingling chills and thrills, however effectively those sensations are delivered. 

I want the superhero horror sub-genre to persist, and I certainly don't want The New Mutants to bear that burden all by itself, but I wonder if Brightburn will deliver the super strength needed to make that happen. 

A Broken Piano & A Burning Car

Pictured: Tangential Learning (this will not be on the test)

The notion of hype and I have this understanding, that I'm allowed to write off whatever it's trying to sell me for any reason whatsoever, regardless of the final product's merits. It's no novel concept that suspense is a double-edged sword every bit as likely to intrigue your potential audience as alienate them. 

The upcoming film in question has the effectively ominous title of As Above, So Below, whose trailer I came across on YouTube only a few moments ago. I'm not going to bother embedding or even linking the trailer; the IMDB page is enough and about all the direct exposure I want to give this film, especially since I'll be touching on key scenes in the trailer anyway. 

Brief Tangent: Remember AOL Keywords? You know how ad campaigns have started using hashtags as a means of marketing & promotion rather than simply referring people to a website? In all, I don't see any of that as harmful, but something about how this movie markets itself is a bit worrying. The end title to this trailer has the following phrase above its web address: 
YouTube Search: Paris Catacombs. 
This bothers me for a few reasons. Firstly, the Paris catacombs are a real place, and likely there's a number of YouTube videos about them. This may well have been the intention of the film's marketing team to help spread word about the film and help aid suspension of disbelief by having people do research and get a better appreciation for the source material. Frankly, I don't buy that notion for a second. I think this is a case of YouTube selling search results to the highest bidder, not unlike promoted Tweets. Again, this shouldn't be anything harmful, but why not have the terms in question be the film's title or some cryptic phrase relevant to the movie? Why a vague geographic reference that's likely to flood the search results of people not interested in the film but the actual location? I'm not saying it's socially irresponsible or anything like that, but it's a sign of a bad trend I hope dies. 

The trailer starts off by introducing us to our setting and our main characters, a Scoobian (not a word, but should be) team of young professionals bent on exploring a network of caves and tunnels beneath the city of Paris. Right away, we can see the earliest signs of the problem this film will either have with itself, its campaign, or both. The movie seems to be a Blair film, a term I hoped would replace "found footage" because that's already a name for experimental films such as the works of Stan Brakhage, with the perspective set in a kind of quasi-first-person view via video equipment our meddling kids are taking with them to document their journey. I don't have a problem with the genre per se (I liked Cloverfield and Apollo 18), but a lot of these shots look way too good to be "amateurism" and makes me wonder if this is going to have the same problem as District 9 where we're not sure if this is true Third-Person Unlimited the more vaguely First-Person Limited viewpoint. It's a minor gripe coming from a film production major, so take it with a grain of salt. However, these doubts about exactly what sort of movie we're in for don't get much better. 

As may well be expected, our team finds themselves trapped in these catacombs, possibly by some outside malevolence. This is genuinely interesting, because we're almost made to think the various cave-ins and pitfalls could be little more than that, with the characters' reactions misleading us into thinking it's something worse. Honestly, that's a neat idea, playing with perspective like that, a disaster movie masquerading as a horror film. As the saying goes, we have nothing to fear but fear itself. The Blair Witch Project has a similar sort of ambiguity, whether or not there's evil afoot in those words, or if it's an elaborate murder conspiracy perpetrated by the participants. Sadly, and as much as I think it's a solid sequel, Book of Shadows threw a lot of that ambiguity out the window. As Above, So Below does not even wait for its sequel to throw subtlety and ambiguity out the window. It doesn't even wait for opening day. It reveals its ineptitude barely halfway through the trailer. 

The Broken Piano.

After the initial series of setbacks that leave our characters going in circles (paranoia, or something worse?), the gang stumbles upon an upright piano covered in cobwebs. One of them comments that he had one just like it growing up. He goes on to say that one of the keys was messed up, the A4 key. This is where the movie more or less loses me completely, as his finger lands on precisely the same key, which is broken. The camera pulls back to give us a reaction shot from the group. It would have been more subtle and less patronizing if they'd all looked into the camera and yelled in unison, "DUN-DUN-DUUUUN!" 

For the record, two of my favorite horror films are Event Horizon and Solaris, the latter not even being much of a horror movie, though it has that 2001: A Space Odyssey quality wherein by not trying to be a horror movie, it succeeds at being one anyway, if that makes sense. Anyway, those movies are about people being confronted with their own personal inner demons via hallucinations made corporeal. I don't think that's a bad cliche, though I could name about a dozen other films I abhor because of it. It can be effective, but it has to be handled very delicately. How that's achieved is highly debatable and equally subjective. In theory, the best way would be to draw as little attention to the trope as possible, i.e. not giving it away in the damn trailer. To be fair, the broken piano is still subtle compared to what comes next. 

The Burning Car. 

Having established that what we're seeing is a group of explorers confronted with a supernatural force that plays off their respective consciences and forces them to confront their inner demons, the trailer is basically done with leaving us guessing exactly what type of film we're getting into. A better film would have left things at the broken piano, cut back to some of the screaming and running from earlier, and then flashed the title and release date. After all, the piano may not be terribly subtle, but it doesn't betray the film's overall sense of scale. It still leaves a bit of mystery as to what our team is up against, how real the danger is. Sure, the question at this point has boiled down to "Ghosts or Demons?/Haunted House or Hell?" but considering ghosts often have motives and even goals (that may only appear malicious) while demons are simply evil for evil's sake, it's still interesting from a conflict perspective. Again, what exactly are we up against? Will confronting these skeletons in the closet lead to some kind of redemption or at least a moral victory (a la Laurence Fishburne in Event Horizon), or is this simply a meat grinder? 

That question gets answered when our team happens upon the burning car. Yes, they turn a corner and see a small, red car engulfed in flames. The camera whip-pans to one of the explorers, sobbing, "It wasn't my fault! It wasn't my fault!" If your eyes are rolling, that's probably a good thing because you won't see what happens next. Our "faultless" guy not only gets yanked off his feet and pulled into the car through the rear passenger window (not unlike Mica's "throwback" in Paranormal Activity), but the car then caves in on itself and implodes like the house at the end of Poltergeist, taking with it anybody's ability to take this film seriously. It's not simply because the effect itself isn't all that good (I often wonder about trailers using unfinished or rough renders of composites), but because we've lost all mystery as to the extent of the danger. The piano left us asking whether or not the worst thing these people have to fear is each other/themselves or something else. The burning car externalizes the threat. It's no longer about facing fears, it's about being picked off by a manipulative and evil force. It's almost like we've seen the entire film, because the number of possibilities for resolution are in single digits by this point. 

Some would argue it unfair to write off the movie based on the trailer simply because it appears to give away so much, going from slightly inept to downright moronic. They would argue that there still could be more to the film, something that may fall outside those few, finite possibilities. In other words, I could be completely wrong the movie's scale and the nature of the threat and conflict. My question, to those people, is how many twists and turns does it take to pique your interest and how many does it take to lose your interest? It's the same problem I had with The Machinist. That film throws so many plot twists and big reveals at you that you're left with absolutely nothing to be invested in by the final act. Questioning reality is fine, many of my favorite movies are all about that (like American Psycho), but it's all for naught if I don't even feel like asking the question in the first place because I'd prefer short answer or even essay to multiple choice. 

Your trailer is supposed to be you putting your best foot forward. If you can't even sell me on your suspense, or make me care to ask what else your movie has to offer, what else are you getting wrong? 

You Needn't Fear

You Needn't Fear by *NeuronPlectrum on deviantART

Tried something different with this one, albeit it started as just faffing about instead of working on other stuff. I put the watermark below the image instead of over it (I'll have to figure out how to put a drop shadow on text in GIMP) and I also submitted this directly to my Tumblr page (instead of just using the share buttons on the Deviation page). I don't quite agree with the notion that Tumblr is a good place to post art in lieu of either DeviantART or the like. At least, I don't think it's a good place to post art exclusively. I may write more about this sentiment, but not right now.

UPDATE: And just for the sake of redundancy (and entertaining the possibility of using Blogger as well as Tumblr to post artwork directly, here's what the image would look like if uploaded directly here).

Horror For All!

As Stephen King pointed out in his nonfiction book Danse Macabre, horror comes in three flavors: Terrify, Horrify, and Gross-out. Gross-out is self-explanatory, best represented by films like the Saw series (which will plague us for, hopefully, the last time with this year's installment), Turistas, and anything made by Herschell Gordon Lewis, the Godfather of Gore. Horrify is less obvious, but just as straightforward in concept; it refers to what's commonly called the jump scare, anything that's only really scary because it startles us with its abruptness and unexpectedness, playing on our flight-or-fight response hardwired into our very being by evolution itself. Terrify, lastly, is the hardest to describe as it relies neither on visual stimuli or instinctive reactions to make itself known. Rather, it works by what it doesn't do but makes you think it will.
One might think, then, that this makes for three different types of horror movies, one for each form of fright. However, in terms of horror movies, there's more like two, with Terrify serving as a kind of guiding principle for the other two to follow. In fact, Terrify is so vague as a principle that some of its best cinematic examples are not even horror movies. Films of the Gross-Out variety, on the other hand, tend to "preach to the choir" so to speak, while those of the Horrify ilk rise above the one-trick pony quality of their gory kin and tend to draw the bigger crowds.
What follows, in honor of having only 13 days until Halloween, is a list of films that favor the Terrify variety of horror, and only occasionally employ the Horrify strategy, but all generally steer clear of the Gross-Out ideology. In other words, these are horror movies that really anyone can enjoy; not many people like to get grossed out, but deep down, almost everyone likes to get scared on some level, even if only at one particular time, like a certain holiday.

KAIDAN:
This Oscar-nominated anthology based on Japanese legends collected and published by Lafcadio Hearn is as eerie as it is beautiful. Japan as a nation was something of a Johnny-come-lately when it came to color in its cinema, having been completely left out of the Technicolor era. That said, when they came on the scene, they hit the ground running, hitting their full stride by the time Kaidan (sometimes spelled "Kwaidan" due to the translational sensibilities of the time) reached screens. The sets look like sets, it's true, but what sets they are. Admittedly, I've only seen two of the four segments that comprise the film, but even just one of them is worth the price of admission and I'll probably be celebrating Halloween by checking out the other two. The two parts I saw were "The Woman of the Snow," where a happily-married woodsman admits a terrible secret to his wife, only for her to have one for him as well, and "Hoichi the Earless," where a blind musician is asked by a mysterious visitor to play for a most uncanny audience.

SOLARIS:
Not many would consider Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey to be a horror film, nevermind that most of the story involves a group of astronauts trapped on a claustrophobic ship run by a sentient computer with full control of the airlocks, life support, and (most importantly) any and all communications with anyone who might be able to do anything to help in case, say, said computer were driven homicidal by a small oversight in teaching it the difference between being asleep and being dead. In Andrei Tarkovsky's "Anti-2001" film Solaris, it's not the computer onboard that one should be weary of, nor even the enigmatic and alien ocean below, but of one's own demons within, or rather, what the aforementioned ocean makes of those inner demons. For reasons never fully explained, the ocean of the eponymous planet is able to make physical representations of people from the crew members' respective pasts. The trouble is, the ocean doesn't quite get many of the details right. It's not its fault, though; it's working from their memories... and consciences.

THE FORGOTTEN:
There's quite a bit of hate out there for this film, and, for the life of me, I don't understand exactly why. In a way, it's the perfect kind of horror movie; it takes a simple premise (in horror terms, a common fear) and runs with it. In the case of The Forgotten, the base fear that makes up the premise has to do with paranoia, the feeling that some unseen force has an agenda against you and you are completely powerless against it, coupled with the possibility that the whole thing may be merely self-delusion. In the film, Julianne Moore plays Telly, a mother grieving the loss of her son, the exact circumstances of which are not only mysterious, but ever-changing, from a plane crash at the age of nine to a miscarriage that many years earlier. Admittedly, the execution of the film's "What's real and what isn't?" motif is fundamentally flawed, but the performances keep you invested in spite of that.
My only beef with the film is that I've somewhat already seen it before, albeit in a rather unlikely place, the 5th episode of the 4th season of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Entitled "Remember Me," the story centers on Dr. Beverly Crusher unknowingly trapped in a failed warp bubble experiment wherein members of the ship's crew sporadically disappear without anyone giving any notice or having any memory of them ever existing. It aired on the 22nd of October in 1990, fourteen years before the release of The Forgotten. The two share a similar premise, and both feature a strong female lead (both redheads, oddly enough). They even share a subtext in the form of romantic tensions between the leads and their male counterparts, Crusher and Picard in the case of Star Trek, and Telly and Ash in The Forgotten. I wonder if screenwriter Gerald Di Pego is a Trekkie?

PARANORMAL ACTIVITY:
I feel like I've talked endlessly about these "faux first-person footage" films and, for those of you that have endured reading those reviews of mine, it may seem a bit strange that I'd recommend one in any favorable light. Put simply, of all the Blair films out there, this is one of the best. Most of the scenes in the film are locked-off shots. That is, the camera is mounted on a tripod and left "unmanned" by any sort of camera operator. The angles favor function over flattery and certainly aren't intended to hide or obscure anything. Though seen as a weakness in comparison to other Blair films, this lack of ambiguity works in the film's favor and while we may never see the entity in question, there's certainly no question about what it is, what it wants, and how far it's willing to go to get it.

FLATLINERS:
The fear of dying is arguably the most common and universal fear that plagues humanity. Almost all of our actions are dictated, driven, and motivated by the singular principle that we are mortal, and that mortality is fickle and unpredictable. Flatliners centers around a group of medical students obsessed with death, namely patients who have actually experienced it or situations not far removed from it, with one patient having once been declared legally dead for four-and-a-half minutes. The students, using their medical knowledge, endeavor to "explore" the great unknown by way of inducing near-death states of being. They each are revived, luckily and in the nick of time, each having a different and unique experience of "the other side." The trouble is, they don't leave those experiences behind when they come back. What's great about this film is that, because the fear it centers upon is essentially that of the unknown, it really doesn't matter what your personal beliefs are going in. I don't personally believe in the afterlife, but that didn't make the film any less terrifying. For me, the real moments of fear and tension are in the CPR sessions where the students bring each other back their states of near-death.

THE SHINING:
Part of the reason why this film seems to have such a wide appeal beyond the normal crop of horror fans is that it's really so unlike any other horror film to come before or since. Stanley Kubrick has never been one to work within the confines of genres, ignoring their far-too familiar tropes and cliches yet still staying respectful to them and not straying too far from the path. The Shining stands as a kind of horror psychology test, with different people seeing the film in different lights. For some, it's a ghostly, haunted house story of the most supernatural variety. For others, it's a psychological thriller about the effects of isolation, where . For others still, it may be both of these things, or neither. Whatever the overall interpretation, it's a textbook example of the best kind of horror movie, taking a simple premise and running with it.

THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES:
I actually debated whether or not to include this one, and I'm not going to have that much to say about it, and what I do say will be the result of a mental strain to find the right words. Don't get me wrong, The Mothman Prophecies is an effective horror movie, but the way its horror works is so different from the other entries on this list that it stands as having an unfair advantage over them. Whereas the other films are ultimately works of fiction, though some more thoroughly researched than others, this film is only a slight dramatization of a book that chronicles and collects the accounts of residents of the otherwise-sleepy little town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, of a series of seemingly unconnected events culminating in an unquestionably tragic event not forgotten today. The film is well-made enough on its own merits, but having the backlog of lore, skepticism, and facts sets it above any other attempt in cinema to capture the essence of human fear. The fears are real because the people are real. Say what you will about what they believe they saw, but that makes it no less real to them, their fear of it no less real.

Nope, just a demon.... (Paranormal Activity)

First things first, I hate the word "mockumentary." In fact, let that be the only time the word is mentioned forthwith. The problem is that the term implies connotations of humor and parody (This is Spinal Tap, Waiting for Guffman, et al), which gives other and especially more recent films of this style (Faux Amateurism?) a very debilitating handicap right out the gate. Luckily, The Blair Witch Project came out like a bolt from the blue and breathed fresh life into the style (Diegetic Archive Footage?) by applying its stylistic principles to the horror genre, where it's made itself surprisingly at home with works such as:

The Last Broadcast
REC
Quarantine
The Poughkeepsie Tapes
The Blair Witch Project
Amateur Porn Star Killer
Cloverfield
Paranormal Activity
The Fourth Kind

As a filmmaker, I'm naturally attracted to the concept; I appreciate its grassroots, guerilla sensibility married perfectly to lofty goals and a wide vision. At the same time, it's got this fragility, a kind of precariously teetering insecurity best analogized to The Emperor's New Clothes. Basically, once you acknowledge the "realism" as "frugality," disbelief becomes unsuspended and suddenly you realize that you're watching a talented filmmaker stretch a budget in ways that seem more underhanded than clever. Whichever intention rings true, it's being given more attention than necessary. If you can manage to avoid the pessimistic outlook of "cheap and dirty," the outlook we're left with is that it's just another way to tell a story, like first vs. third-person perspective in a novel.

To that end, the best way to think of these films (whatever name we decide upon for them) is as the visual equivalent of the epistolary novel. It has all the strengths: a more relatable perspective, a more naturalistic approach to characterization, and a heightened sense of realism. Sadly, while it may not exactly have all the weaknesses as well, it's got a whole new set of them to overcome.

The biggest point of contention that's probably going to arise during a viewing of Paranormal Activity is one of scale and subtlety.

This leads to the inevitable comparison to The Blair Witch Project. Yes, it seems unfair to hold every "Found, First-Person Film" to Blair Witch, but that's because there's a lot of things that Blair Witch does right, and a lot to admire as well. Chief among these is its ambiguity. While the film ultimately speaks for itself, so to, er... speak, it really doesn't have a lot to say. Is it a witch? Is it a cult? Is it an elaborate hoax? Is it a conspiracy to commit murder motivated by a sexual power struggle? The point is, it's open to interpretation, and we're really not sure just what it is we've seen.
With Paranormal Activity, there's no question about what's happening. I won't spoil it, but I'll tell you the exact moment in the film when several things happen, among them getting a clear and solid sense of this movie's "reality," and myself nearly bursting out laughing, ready to dismiss the film as cheap and gimmicky.

The scene in two words: Ouija Board.

That'll be the extent of the description, but you'll know the moment when you come to it, and hopefully you'll see what I mean when I'm talking about subtlety and a sense of scope. At first, I honestly found myself fighting back a laugh, along with an overwhelming sense of disappointment. It's my own fault for expecting ambiguity and instead getting something that very clearly and blatantly spells out just what type of horror movie this is. It is not, in fact, a psychological thriller as these "Discovered Video Diaries (Hmm, DVD...?)" might lend themselves to, but something more straightforward. Don't let that deter you; again, we won't spoil it, but just because we know what is causing the hauntings doesn't make it any less effective.

To sum up, the best way to describe just what kind of horror movie Paranormal Activity is in relation to other horror films you might have seen is this: on one end of the spectrum is Poltergeist with The Blair Witch Project on the other, and Paranormal Activity is exactly halfway between them.

NOTE: If you rent this movie on disc, you're presented with two menu options at the start, one being to see the film with its original, theatrical ending, the other to see an alternative ending, which, in the film's complex production and distribution history, is more akin to the director's original cut of the film. While you're probably going to watch both endings anyway, I strongly recommend seeing the theatrical cut first before checking out the alternative ending.