I don’t care much for scary movies (they tend to bore me), but I do enjoy watching other people reacting to them. That’s why I love the new trailer for Paranormal Activity, a $10,000-budget horror flick that’s been frightening film festival attendees since 2007 and which finally opens in regular theaters next week.
The trailer focuses on footage of the audience of a recent screening of the film while showing very little of the film itself. The idea is to show us that people are indeed scared silly. But what I appreciate, as a strong advocate of moviegoing, is that it kind of tells us we need to see this thing in a theater with a large crowd for the optimum experience.
I guess you could still wait for the film to hit DVD and do your screaming and jumping from your couch, but doesn’t it look more fun with a bunch of strangers? Personally, the trailer makes me want to watch the rest of the night-vision audience-cam footage more than the actual film, but hopefully going to the cinema to see this will be just as good. As long as nobody minds me sitting in a lawn chair in front of the auditorium, facing the seats instead of the screen.
Unfortunately, on September 25, Paranormal Activity is only opening in 13 cities and the closest to my home of NYC is State College, PA (and that’s a very long bike ride to see a movie!). But so far only myself and 429 others have “demanded” it play here, so I’ll probably never get the chance to experience the film as it should be. Maybe I can sneak into the homes of people who’ve rented it, though, and watch their reactions?
Check out what other film blogs are saying about the trailer after the jump:
Let’s talk about my insatiable appetite for pre-postmodern horror. I don’t care about sorority girls getting slaughtered because they ran the wrong way up the stairs; I basically don’t care about anything that’s not in black and white. I like stuff that takes place in creepy laboratories, where some desperate soul is trying to violate the natural boundaries between life and death. The Universal monster movies of the 30s, the Val Lewton stuff of the 40s, the nuclear panic stuff of the late 50s/early 60s. So it’s a given that my favorite part about the weeks leading up to Halloween is that Turner Classic Movies floods their schedule with ancient, half-forgotten horror films. Halloween itself is kind of a letdown, because it means the well of stuff I love is about to dry up.
But as usual, YouTube makes it all better. As a child of the 80s, I think I always had some awareness of of the Boris Karloff films, particularly Bride of Frankenstein, but it was filtered through Young Frankenstein, Elvira and “Weird Science” (the Oingo Boingo song, which I definitely heard years before I saw the movie). Above, you’ll find a clip of the creation of the bride from the 1935 sequel to Frankenstein; below the jump, the various cultural detritus that led me to it. Happy Halloween!
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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