Review #383: Paranormal Activity (2007)

October 2026 Horror Reviews #11 - Paranormal Activity (2007)

[This series does not appear to be streaming anywhere for free, but should be included in a subscription to several streaming services, most notably Paramount+.]

While every official listing says Paranormal Activity released in 2007, this is a bit misleading- it was filmed in 2006 and made the film festival circuit the following year, but didn't get a theatrical release until 2009. I remember really liking it when it came out- it was one of the most genuinely terrifying movies I had seen in a long time- but I am sad to say I don't think it has quite held up as much as I expected.

Paranormal Activity is a found footage movie that follows Katie and Micah, an inexplicably wealthy couple living in an inexplicably huge and empty house, who have started recording their day-to-day lives on video because of a recent series of seemingly supernatural occurrences. Katie has been living with these occurrences (mostly strange noises and minor unexplained phenomena) since she was a child, when she and her sister used to see a dark force or entity at the foot of their beds at night. Katie and Micah get some advice from a psychic who explains that it's not the house that's haunted, but rather, Katie herself- and over the course of the film, the entity haunting her seems to get more and more aggressive until it all comes to a head at the end of the movie.

The main thing I need to address is the whole artifice of this being a found footage movie. I've gone on record many times in the past saying that I'm not really crazy about found footage movies, and while I will fully acknowledge that this is one of the better ones out there (and undoubtedly revitalized the subgenre with its runaway success), there's still a lot of things this one does that I really think are indicative of why found footage is usually bad.

One example is the pacing. I don't think it's controversial to point out that most found footage follows a very, VERY similar plot structure to every other found footage movie, this one being no exception. The movie follows a very slow ramp-up over its ~90-minute runtime, with very defined spikes whenever it goes to a nighttime bedroom scene. These types of movies will never have anything overtly supernatural happen in the first ~40 minutes, you'll get a few little snippets of something weird happening (a door moving when it shouldn't, a shadow lingering a bit too long, someone sleepwalking unexpectedly), until the movie has hit a quota for how much time needs to pass before the horror can start ramping up for real. Then people start acting more serious- the psychic refuses to enter the house because the negative energy is too powerful, the characters start making plans to just leave and go to a hotel, and then something horrible happens to one or more of the main characters, and then credits roll. 

For the first half of the film most of what you see on the screen is kind of superfluous- this particular movie has some character development and exposition that gets thrown out (like Katie's backstory and the discovery of the burned photo in the attic), but apart from some innate need to have seen the characters on-screen for enough minutes to feel attached to them, the movie really could have just started at the halfway point and nothing of consequence would have been lost. This is even shown blatantly in the first fifteen minutes or so when some shots will begin with characters talking in mid-sentence, showing that even what's being said is so unnecessary to follow that we didn't need the whole conversation or even the whole sentence- they're literally just filling screen time until they feel justified in making something spooky happen.

On that same note, the production value for this movie is pretty disappointing on a rewatch, because most of it looks and sounds pretty cheap and bad. I'm not really going to dock it points for this- it WAS a low-budget movie and it's justified in-universe as being recorded on someone's home camcorder by a person who isn't a professional filmmaker (as far as I know)- but that just means that the experience of watching it in the modern day can be pretty rough. I had to crank the volume WAYYY up on my TV to hear what the characters were saying most of the time, and the majority of that dialogue ended up being superfluous due to the pacing and structure of the movie. This is just another part of why I think found footage is overrated- it engenders laziness and cheapness, in a way that makes it age poorly, all in service of a gimmick that only works some of the time anyway (that being, trying to make it feel more like a real event that occurred).

Another issue I have with this particular movie is that they make the recording and reviewing (and possibly editing) of the movie's footage into a plot point. The story happens across several days (something like two weeks' worth of events) and periodically, Micah will have been watching the recorded footage and then drawing Katie's attention to some of the spooky things that we've already seen. On one hand this is nice- the whole point is to catch these spooky things on video and then figure out what's causing them, right? It makes sense that he would be reviewing it. But on the other hand, there's a few times where it just doesn't make any sense. One scene has Micah borrow a friend's Ouija board, and he sets up a camera to watch him use it. Katie gets upset so he doesn't actually use the board, and they leave the house (with the cameras still rolling). Once they leave, the ghost or demon or whatever starts moving the planchette! Except... it also causes the board to burst into flames, and throughout the rest of the film, Micah never acknowledges this incredibly noteworthy event, despite making a point of reviewing the footage of the Ouija board (because he's trying to figure out what the planchette spelled out). My assumption is that these scenes were filmed out of order, and the fire wasn't written into the script yet when they filmed the later scene- but since this is being presented as a real recording of actual events (complete with title cards wishing condolences to the families of the people in the film) it invites a higher level of scrutiny than a conventionally-shot film, and so a huge discrepancy like this draws attention to the artifice of it all.

I will say that the performances of the actors in this movie are very, very good. Katie and Micah do stellar jobs (outside of one scene near the end where I feel the two of them start fighting very abruptly, which felt forced to me, or perhaps there was more lead-up that got cut from the final version), and I especially liked the scene where they're discussing the strange occurrences with the psychic. That scene's dialogue all felt very real and believable, which is good- however, it also fell victim to another trope that bothers me in supernatural horror, where every source of information on well-tread supernatural phenomena always ends up being correct. (What I mean is, in the real world, if you got five psychics in a room and asked them how to deal with a haunting or a demon, you would get five different instructions. Same thing if you got five books about demons, or five websites about past hauntings. You would gets tons of conflicting information, because every culture and even every community has different stories of these things. But in a movie, you can bet any expert, any book, and any website consulted will end up being 100% accurate and helpful to the protagonists.) So it's nice that the conversation with the psychic felt real, but it would have been a nice touch if his advice was only partly correct, as would certainly end up being the case if ghosts and demons were actually real!

Overall I think this movie was pretty good for its time, but having seen so many better movies come out in the time since, and seeing how poorly it's aged in the nearly twenty years since it was made, I really don't think this one holds up as much as it could have. Since I plan on watching the whole series, let's see how they evolve and adapt as time goes on.

Overall Rating: 6/10 Dogs that Wouldn't Settle Down and Let Me Watch the Movie

Money Money Money MO-NAYYY: The two lead actors, Katie Featherston and Micah Sloat, were reportedly paid a mere $500 for their performances in this movie. However, once the film became a runaway success (making nearly $200 million worldwide), they were able to renegotiate their pay later on.

Next Up: Paranormal Activity 2 (2010)!