The witching hour: different perspectives, sans mosca, in PARANORMAL ACTIVITY

Psychological torment is what I look for in a good movie. That people have different fears is obvious by some of the imdb responses to message boards of movies like Paranormal activity and Blair witch. This movie is being compared to The Blare witch project, so after you see this film, know that the possibility that it is bullshit is very high. But it's movies like these, mixing truth and fiction, that makes me wonder if these kind of poltergeist incidents really do happen. Scary? I thought so, but then, I get scared whenever I wake up at 3:15AM. If I wake up in the middle of the night, I try to immediately get back to sleep before I am impelled to look at the clock. It is when my clock reads 3 o'clock, or any denomination of that entire hour, that I find myself listening for paranormal activity.

The reason I behave this way is attributed to my childhood, when I picked up a book called Amityville Horror. A true story; what caught my attention in this book were the flies. When I was about six or seven, my parents moved us all into a house in another part of town. The garage was always oddly filled with flies, and they would accumulate against the window facing the eastern horizon. I assume they did this because that's the side of the house that received direct sunlight, but I had never seen so many flies almost immobilized in the same area before, unless they were feeding off a pile of dung. Anyway, if you know the story, you might also know that 3:15AM, or so, was the magical hour in which all kinds of scary things would happen.

In my lifetime I have seen ghosts (as an adolescent), experienced out-of-body events, dreamed of being dead, dreamed of being struck by lightening, or maybe abducted by a UFO and, again, dreaming of being shot in the head. When these nightmares occur, and force me to wake up at night, I'm always conscious of the hour of night and whether I'd be better off going back to sleep immediately or trying to stay awake so that I don't dream that kind of stuff anymore. Paranormal activity has quite a few oddities occur around that time, 3AM. What people should ask themselves, before they watch this film, is whether Katie Featherston is sexy because, although most of the scenes take place in the bedroom, there's never any bedroom action.

Special effects are insanely realistic. They force me to search for explanations of the various noises, drafts, sleepwalking. The only thing missing from this movie's dialog is the reference to sulfur as substantial evidence that what this couple is battling is in fact an evil entity. Things really begin to get crazier after Katie mentions something about using powder to Mica, a day trader, who anybody watching that's trying to interpret what the powder thing could be in reference to might be misguided into thinking that there is an ongoing drug problem being kept under wraps.

And finally, as always, try to watch this flick sober. There are many scenes that I just wanted to take my remote and replay it over and over. It's the perfect flick for Halloween AND the later in the evening this film is viewed the better. It's 1:17AM and I'm still cautiously thinking about it. If I learned anything at all, it's don't laugh in the face of evil AND think sacred trinkets like Ouija boards were invented for non-believers to be amused.