Still Acting Paranormally

The film critic Vivian Sobchack once argued* that in sci-fi films like Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) viewers are forced into an unusually active role by the sheer 'minimal activity' of what we see on screen. This seduces us into 'an attentive paranoia which makes us lean forward to scan what seem like the most intentionally and deceitfully flat images for signs of aberrant alien behaviour from the most improbable of suspects'. They thus bear out Lawrence Alloway's view that suspense is nothing happening. The rationale behind both Paranormal Activity movies raise this attentive paranoia up a notch by exploiting the familiar eerie, empty, luminous world of the security camera. As we sit in the cinema we feverishly scan every nook and corner of the rooms depicted on the screen waiting for an intrusion. It's a film, in fact, which counters the conventional logic of cinema in these times of supersize TVs. Paranormal Activity is really 'made for the small-screen'.

Paranormal Activity 2, somewhat improbably, manages to repeat the same trick as the original, largely by increasing the dimensions of the scrutinized space, the number of rooms, mirrors and doors, the number of characters (including the most vulnerable person of all, an infant), and adding more adept special effects and more chilling set-pieces. This time, too, I found the 'demon' myth more persuasive. In the first movie, the uncanniness of the sudden intrusions into the tableaux of domestic ordinariness (the dramatic making-unfamiliar of the familiar, homely space) was diluted by the idea that the demon, a less uncanny horror figure than ghost or poltergeist, was living in the loft like a difficult lodger, burning photos and dragging bits and pieces upstairs. PA2 provides a more intriguing back-story, to the effect that Katie and her sister's grandmother must have made a deal with the demon in return for giving him (it?) the first-born male child from her family line. It makes Katie a much more sinister figure - and increases the uncanny feel of the demonic possession scenes involving both sisters.

The film also does an admirable job of remaining compatible with the narrative of the original film - and expanding it. PA2 is not just a sequel but a kind of prequel and 'simul-quel' too. Yet the three-weeks gap following the transfer of demonic energy from one sister to another makes me wonder even more about the demon. It asks us to imagine that a creature which has largely confined itself to living in an untidy cellar, periodically making clumsy trips upstairs to rattle pans, turn off lights and remove the pool cleaner from the pool, is capable of negotiating the busy highways from one part of California to the other in order to hatch a plot whereby he will inhabit one sister, kill her boyfriend, return to the original house, kill the other sister and her husband and then take an infant which he surely could have simply kidnapped without fuss in the first place. It is not the most efficient campaign. This demon clearly has a taste for complexity - or rather a strong aesthetic sensibility. What is curious throughout the films is not his terrifying power so much as his restraint. Why, when he is capable of subduing an Alsation in an instant or dragging an adult downstairs and possessing her within minutes, is he apparently unable to remove an unsuspecting child from his cot? Why, for that matter, is a creature who is able to manipulate teenagers into spelling out 'Hunter' on a ouija board seemingly unable to scratch out something legible on the cellar door? The only conclusion is that the demon is not just the reason for the terrible narrative but its auteur as well. He knows that Alloway is wrong. Suspense is not 'nothing happening' but lots of little things escalating over time into bigger things.

The question the film leaves us with is how the third instalment - if there is one - will unfold. My money's on a representation of a different kind of domestic normality, where the teenager Ali tracks down the Demon, Katie and Hunter to an untidy apartment somewhere else in California, where they live in dysfunctional splendour, trying to manage his demonic outbursts, and watching reruns of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.


*in Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film (1997)