Word: horror
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...will keep expanding through the pre-Halloween fright season, trying to hold off other horror pictures - The Stepfather, Saw VI, The House of the Devil and Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant - at least until the last weekend of October. That's when we get the one back-from-the dead movie that won't be stopped: Michael Jackson's This...
...hairy deal, say cynics who were bred on gross-out horror movies. Show us heads exploding, chests busting, legs sawed off. Yet the packed audience at a late-night screening of Paranormal Activity in Times Square this past week didn't need gore effects to be scared witless. Yes, they knew it was only a movie - one that, like The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield and plenty others before it, used "found footage" to give a patina of realism to the fanciful events that were dreamed up by writer-director Oren Peli and are endured by actors Micah Sloat...
Beyond the viral ingenuity of the marketing, what's cool about PA is that it's not just a fun thrill ride; it's an instructive artistic experience. A horror-movie revisionist, Peli follows a less-is-more strategy. He knows that waiting for the big scary jolt does more damage to the nervous system than getting it. The tension builds slowly, as the apprehensive Katie, a student, and the skeptical Micah, a day trader, feel the first emotional tremors. The movie keeps us in its grip because we never leave the couple's haunted property and because...
...found someone else? Why hasn't our kid come home yet? What's that strange rash?) Movies take that anxiety, crystallize it and, because fiction demands an ending, resolve it. The threat is provided, the fear made flesh, the monster confronted. All gone - feel better? Horror movies provide vicarious psychotherapy in an hour and a half. PA is different. At the end, it doesn't let viewers off the hook. It leaves them hanging and dares them to turn that last shiver into a laugh of relief that the delicious ordeal is over. (See the top 10 movie gimmicks...
...horror-movie fraidy cat, know that most of the spooky stuff occurs in the bedroom, so - as with The Exorcist back in 1973 - you can steel yourself when the couple goes to sleep. Then too, you may not be scared at all by Paranormal Activity; but as you sit in a movie house, you should feel some fraternal pleasure in noticing that the folks around you are preparing or pretending to be scared. And you should be heartened to realize that - in an age of YouTube, iPod and DVR, where people get their visual media one by one - watching...