[balmakboor]

I expanded my review of Paranormal Activity to try to better present my allegory idea. I post it here in hopes of getting comments I can use to further develop it.

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In Paranormal Activity [2007], a young woman, Katie, shares a home with her boyfriend Micah. After moving in together, she had shared with him that she’s been haunted since childhood. His response was to buy an expensive video camera and try to catch the ghosts in the act. She’s not crazy about the idea, but he’s so enthusiastic, like a boy with a new toy.

The early scenes have the slow, uneventful quality of home movies. The camera watches them sleep. A title on the screen says, “Night #1.” Nothing happens. I think a few people in the audience found the first ten minutes a bit trying. But, trust me on this, the movie is masterfully paced. It’s like placing a pot of water on a stove, calm at first, but, once the first bubbles appear, it is well on its way to a full boil.

One of the marvelous things about Paranormal Activity is that it scares you silly without showing you much. It’s like the great horror movies of the distant past such as Cat People [1942] and I Walked with a Zombie [1943]. Those drew their scares from shadows and silence. If you’re turned off by all the gore in recent horror movies, this may just be the ticket.

A friend complained about the movie. He said, “With all of the freaky things going on, why don’t the characters do something? Why don’t they go to a hotel?” “Well,” I replied, “the movie does say that the haunting goes wherever she goes, so not much point in leaving.” But later I wondered, “Maybe their inaction meant something more.”

When I was a kid, the next door neighbors were odd. They didn't leave the house much. He was a pianist, she a housewife. One night, I awoke at 3:00 a.m. and heard a faint popping sound. I went back to sleep. In the morning, my mother was distraught and there were police cars everywhere. The housewife had shot the pianist dead during the night.

It came out that he had been abusing his wife for years, gradually building over time, until she was finally pushed over the edge. But why did they continue to live in this situation? Why didn't she seek help or move out? They remained cut off from the world, until something really bad finally happened.

So, I’m asking you to consider this: Paranormal Activity is in one sense a nice, scary little demon-possession story about a guy who is a bit of an immature jerk sharing a haunted house with his girlfriend. And it is also an allegory representing something of a case studio in domestic violence.

I first noted a nice poetic symmetry between the title Paranormal Activity and the phrase “Domestic Violence.” Then I noticed a strange echo between the movie’s end titles and my childhood experience. Micah has been found dead by the police just as was the pianist. Katie has not been seen since just as was the case with the pianist’s wife – at least not by her neighbors. I then wondered what was going on, lurking just out of sight, between the beginning and the end.

As the abuser (abuse by over-zealous videoing?), Micah has no problem sleeping at night. As the abused, it is Katie who wakes up every night in fear. The abuser is in control, is the one with peace of mind. The victim is the one who suffers. Katie is always the one to awaken in the very early morning hours, sometimes screaming. Micah is such a sound sleeper that he even remains conked out after his blanket has been pulled from him.

Victims of abuse characteristically experience the feelings of there being no way out and no one to help them. The movie clearly makes the point that the demon will follow Katie wherever she goes. They could pack their bags and check into a motel, but it would be to no avail. There’s no escaping the terror. A psychic is invited into the home on two occasions. He is characterized as being ridiculously ineffective though. On his second visit, he can hardly wait to make tracks.

Abusive situations are often the latest in a long history of abuses. Both the man and the woman accept the behavior because they were taught to accept it by their parents. It is interesting how strongly the point is made that the haunting has been going on for Katie since childhood. And when her childhood photo is discovered, it has been burned around the edges. It has a similar visual effect as if she had rolled up her sleeve to reveal a cigarette burn on her arm, left there long ago by her father.

For the movie to be an allegory for an abusive relationship such as the one of my childhood experience, there are two things that must be represented: the abusive behavior of the man and the growing resistance to that abuse by the woman, her ultimately taking some final action to end it. The haunting, the demon, clearly represents the woman’s growing resistance. Along this line of thought, Katie’s final action of attacking the camera seems quite logical. It also makes sense that the demon’s entire animus is directed toward Micah – remember the photograph on the wall and Micah’s saying, “Why did it only scratch my face?”

The man's abuse is represented by the camera and how Micah wields it. In movies of this first person video type, whenever a man (so often a man) points a camera at a woman (so often a woman) and keeps filming her even after she has asked him to stop, she is being violated, abused. Paranormal Activity contains constant variations on Katie asking Micah to stop and he only complies once, to get sex. Tensions build between them steadily. The use of profanity pointedly escalates throughout the film. She almost makes him leave the bedroom and sleep elsewhere with his camera at one point before they tentatively kiss and make up. And Katie’s going downstairs and outside at night can be read as escaping from the camera's cruel gaze.

Paranormal Activity will go down in history as a movie that made countless people afraid to go to bed at night, like Psycho [1960] made people afraid to take showers. But the fear I’ll always remember is what must’ve been in the wife’s eyes as she looked into those of the pianist for the last time.