Found footage By now it can hardly have
Found footage ‘By now, it can hardly have escaped attention that surveillance, primarily visual surveillance, has become a frequent contemporary narrative figuration. ’ Catherine Zimmer Briefel, Aviva and Sam J. Miller editors. Horror after 9/11: World of Fear, Cinema of Terror.
The rise of Reality Television is reflected in popular culture including films • • Documentary Style Dating Lifestyle Changes Celebrity Hidden Camera ‘Voyeuristic’ Game Shows Occupational
Paranormal Activity 2 Director: Tod Williams 2010
Paranormal Activity (Oren Peli, 2007) Katie: ‘You are absolutely powerless. Get over it. ’
The film presents a well-off young couple with a nice car, large home, a pool and lots of electronic equipment. The arrival of the monster disrupts their lives, but also takes everything away from them. It is a take down of middle class values. The monster annihilates the relationship but all the stuff (consumer goods, possessions) that these two people have.
‘One of the most striking things about watching the horror movie Paranormal Activity nowadays is the way it portrays the U. S. home just before the housing bubble burst, at the height of what President Bush called “the ownership society. ” The film is set in September and October of 2006, the same year it was shot on a shoestring budget by writer, director, cinematographer, and editor Oren Peli, but it only gained wide release in 2009 when it was picked up by Paramount-Dream. Works. That year there were 2. 8 million foreclosure filings and unemployment reached 10% in the United States (Adler). Made just before the real estate crash and released two years after, at the height of the credit crisis, the movie centers on a young California couple in their large new house. Things begin to go wrong for them when, eerily foreshadowing the housing crisis, a demon begins to toy with them, trying to collect on an ancestor’s Faustian bargain. ’ Julia Leyda Jump Cut Demon debt: Paranormal Activity as recessionary post-cinema allegory.
Reevaluating style The Paranormal Activity series, especially 1 -3, are not about the beautiful cinematic image. The films work against the aesthetic. Currently, the ubiquitous high resolution image is most prized. Dirty, gritty, ‘uncinematic’ images are less appreciated.
One thing found footage fiction films feature is blurring clear distinctions between shots as the camera is often on the move and handheld. Classical Hollywood narrative cinema uses continuity to make us as viewers focus on the story of the film rather than on how it was made. For example, the camera is ‘invisible’ in classic films. Here, it is the monster that is mostly invisible and the formal elements visible.
‘In all of these films, there is a sense that turning on the camera sets the events in motion, that the camera does not merely record events but actually makes things happen. Control over the camera and the events it films passes from the human subjects to a force emanating from the film/image itself, so that the filming seems to create the monsters that plague their human counterparts. ’ (Kimberly Jackson, 55) Jackson, Kimberly. Technology, Monstrosity and Reproduction in Twenty-First Century Horror. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
In many found footage films, the actors and characters share the same name. In Paranormal Activity, Micah sees the camera as an extension of himself (he asks Katie to kiss it). Katie, on the other hand, refuses to be intimate with it or in front of it.
Paranormal Activity 2 is a prequel that begins 2 months before the events depicted in 1. ‘It is the intrusive presence of the camera, and not the demon (who refuses to reveal itself), that is monstrous and scary in these scenes. The audience waits for, anticipates, and finally begins to long for movement, for something to see. ’ Kimberley Jackson
We scrutinize every image Notice that the film begins with a shot of a car pulling up to a large suburban house on a nice street. Paranormal Activity featured Katie pulling up in a nice car to the suburban home shares with Micah. We are taken on a tour of the house by the father. They are a comfortable, well-off family who have a nanny for their baby, a boy named Hunter.
The pool cleaning ‘bot’ leaps up
‘That the demon eschews violence except when severely provoked—preferring intimidation, coercion, and possession— further underscores what it has in common with the consumer finance industry. It doesn’t seem to derive pleasure from causing physical pain— setting these movies apart from recent body horror movie subgenres such as torture porn. ’ Julia Leyda
The films from the Paranormal franchise could fit with a few documentary modes as outlined by Bill Nichols: Observational Mode –the camera used as surveillance Participatory Mode – characters engage from behind the camera as it is their story Reflexive Mode – the films are about filming
Katie pre-transformation We see Katie from Paranormal Activity again. Her arrival brings discomfort and, because we are aware of the events, the potential for evil. What we have witnessed in the first film makes us suspicious of her, or at least suspicious of what happens when she is around. She even has a line to the extent that she ‘can be evil’. The family is robbed. Hunter’s room is untouched. Video surveillance cameras are installed in the house.
We are repeatedly shown different vantage points of video cameras (with motion detectors)
The shaky quality of found footage films is somewhat minimized here because the images are from anchored cameras with specific vantage points. Dogs and children. They get us because they are both vulnerable and supposedly ‘see’ and ‘feel’ what adults might not. The nanny and housekeeper, Martine, is depicted as someone who does rituals and is superstitious. She is ultimately let go, but we side with her because she has knowledge.
Martine (on the right ) is presented as a classic ‘other’, coming possibly from Mexico, speaking primarily Spanish and demonstrating nonrational behaviour.
This film is about the divide between rational, evidence-based thought and superstition, magic and the supernatural. The film is about the divide between privilege and race as epitomized by a white family and working class (Mexican).
In a way, surveillance itself becomes the monster. Since the demon is implied (we don’t see a physical form), it is about the capturing of events that could be paranormal.
The monster is everything and everywhere Following this, the monster is everywhere. It acts upon things. In this case, the things are a middle class home and all of its trappings. The swimming pool (an echo of the first film), beds, living room furniture, kitchen appliances and cooking utensils. The simplest most common items become uncanny.
A horror-of-things is perpetuated as we are presented with a riot of objects, status, class, consumption.
Percy Bysshe Shelley And on the pedestal, these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains.
The horror of stuff The monster penetrates, slipping through all defenses. The search for the monster is ongoing –it becomes people, it becomes objects. The onset discovery plot as outlined by Noël Carroll exists here, but the Paranormal films subvert the ‘proof’ section.
Ballast Writer Grant Mc. Cracken underscores the sense of consumerism as culture.
Domestic space is terrorized in: Night of the Living Dead (1968)
Domestic space is terrorized in: The Amityville Horror (1979)
The nuclear family breeds monstrosity in: The Amityville Horror (1979)
The nuclear family breeds monstrosity in: The Omen (1976)
The family finally IS monster in: The Hills Have Eyes (1977)
The family finally IS monster in: Near Dark (1987)
The problem with the men In Paranormal Activity and in tonight’s film, the male characters discount what the female characters say, ignore their entreaties to stop certain actions and insist on rationality. If we cast them as the perpetrators of a demonic Ponzi scheme, they sell a faulty bill of goods to the women they are claiming to protect.
‘Like when we were little’ Notice that each camera has a different sound environment associated with it.
The film tends to be made up of long takes - shots that last longer than average.
When the lights go out and it is nightshot, the camera is extremely shaky and the shots are quick. This is a break or rupture with the rest of the film.
The monster is hard to define as it often does not have a physical presence. The definition of a monster is often that which is impure. However, this monster is pure in that we only assume its essence as it manifests through objects and or occurrences.
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