The scariest things in this movie are the people who thought it was scary. Photo from http://www.paranormalactivity-movie.com/trailer.html

I watched this movie because I wanted to see what scared these people so badly. I was badly disappointed, but maybe it's because of the things I consider normal.

The movie Paranormal Activity begins with an optimistic quality in the same character as The Blair Witch Project but without the implication of reality that suckered me into that one some years ago. Katie and Micah, two people who are part of that mysterious southern Californian culture where every white person is rich without actually having to do anything for a living beyond being white, must confront a supernatural intrusion into their peaceful suburbian home. Micah, who I guess made his living telling people to buy stock when the prices were uniformly going up, and now is glad he's dead, thinks the whole thing is fascinating. Katie, his live-in girl friend, has personal experience with it and thinks it's creepy. So, for some reason, they decide to put it all on film -- maybe because that's what everybody seems to do these days.

http://www.paranormalactivity-movie.com/

We're treated to several weeks worth of selected footage from home and bedroom as Micah increasingly makes himself into a rude video-taping pest and Katie slips over the edge into New Age ritualistic physics and eventual demonic possession. The ending isn't unexpected (Katie kills Micah with the same kitchen knife we see in the beginning of the movie, and then dramatically leers into the camera lens) and comes far too late for those of us who were terribly bored with this story.

But from a paranormal viewpoint, is there anything of value here? Is any of it based on something real? Well, no. This is just a movie, and it accidentally bears some resemblance to strange events which are real, and aren't all that uncommon. It's not the sort of thing many people talk about in public, but the few who have done so have been pretty loud. Either they wrote books, made movies, or wound up in asylums.

Follow up:

I'm no stranger to nighttime visitations, and in the beginning they did scare me senseless. It's that sort of thing. If something invisible drops out of the air onto the bed in the middle of a dark night and attacks you, that's scary. You do want to know, immediately, what this is all about and how you can stop it. You do look into the possibility of alien attack and demonic possession.

And then, eh, you get used to it. Aside from the few publicized cases of people who crack under the pressure and go dangerously psychotic, people learn to just roll over and go back to sleep, and whatever was trying to make contact goes away. It's when you pay attention and begin to interact with the visitor that things happen. Then it may become a lasting relationship you'll treasure as part of your life, or a curse you can't shake.

http://www.fast-rewind.com/theentity.htm

Most of my visitors turned out to be friendly, and a few were people who physically entered my life here and there. Others I don't care to know personally, since their visits weren't friendly, or even polite. I wouldn't describe them as demons, although some of the marking phenomena that came along with them -- terrible smells, distinctive sounds -- are listed in old books as characteristics of particular demonic beings. Contact of this kind is a part of life most people don't face, but those of us who do face it can't ignore it completely. We deal with it.

I don't see very much in Paranormal Activity that's accurate. That's a shame, since if the producers had taken the subject seriously it would have been a much better story. The only part I could identify with personally was when the psychic investigator visited the house, for about two minutes, and said, oops, I don't deal with this type of thing. I deal with nearly everything, but there are a few exceptions. When I encounter them around other people, it's not my problem. I dealt with my demons; you deal with yours. That's the only real answer anyway.

If you want a good movie, with some technical accuracy, dealing with the same phenomenon -- watch The Entity. Starring Barbara Hershey, this 1981 film took inspiration from real events, using one of the best documented cases of demonic visitation as the framework of the story. For the woman who experienced those strange events, the haunting never ended. And, she never stabbed anybody because of it.