Pondering PARANORMAL ACTIVITY Before I See It...

Even after that last entry, I can't seem to stay away from the blog, lol.

Actually, I just want to jot down a few thoughts before I see Paranormal Activity so that I can compare these notes to my thoughts and feelings afterward.

My big question is this: Will Paranormal Activity's scare scenes -- designed to work for a mainstream audience -- actually work against the experience of the paranormal audience?

Here's what I mean...

If you were on an investigation, and you experienced all the stuff that the kids in Blair Witch experienced, it really would freak you the hell out. Everyone investigating would flip out, because 98% of the stuff you experience in an actual investigation just isn't as overtly inexplicable as the things those characters experience.

And I was thinking about how mainstream audiences responded to Blair Witch because (I speculate) the scares weren't nearly as "hard-core" as mainstream Horror scares, right?

So...

If Paranormal Activity has as many scares as a mainstream audience needs to be scared by a movie, will that prove to be too much to hold the Suspension of Disbelief from folks who actually study this stuff?

Like I said, if you read enough accounts of actual haunting activity (never mind actually going out and investigating these claims, I'm just talking about reading 2nd- or 3rd-hand accounts in books) The Blair Witch Project is convincingly realistic.

By comparison, consider this:

Rambo: First Blood, Part II is basically a Western from the '60s or '70s. (The former gunslinger strolls into a corrupt town, then ends up shooting up all the rustler outlaws.) But the Action elements (the stunts, the reason you watch the movie) are designed to be bigger and more intense than what you've seen in previous movies of this type.

However, when you watch the movie now (well... and back then, if you weren't a 15-year-old when you watched it, lol) you laugh, because in pursuit of bigger and more intense action the writers/director/stunt coordinators/et. al. sort of ignore basic physics, lol. Yeah, you've never seen action like that before, but that's mostly because previous filmmakers were concerned with realism.

So my query, going into Paranormal Activity, is whether or not the film will go over-the-top in order to satisfy Horror film-goers' expectations, and whether that (if it is the case) will actually detract from the believability of those who study this stuff.

Now, on the other hand, The Exorcist stands up to the scrutiny of clergy and others who have actually witnessed exorcisms, and the movie scares the bejeebers out of just about everyone who watches it. It manages to be believable AND monumentally scary at the same time.

And the titular "activity" of the movie will undoubtedly be "inhuman" (or, as it is popularly known, "demonic"), so there is a great possibility that the flick will be both believable and mind-numbingly scary. (Everything I've heard first-, second-, or eighth-hand about "inhuman" activity is just mind-pummelingly disturbing, so I'll probably scream like a little girl at the flick.)

Anyway, like I said, I just wanted to jot these thoughts down -- for myself, really -- before I see the movie so that I can compare notes afterward.