Quote of the Day

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Over at Chez Final Girl, the super-gal that calls herself Stacie Ponder went and wrote up her thoughts on last night's Midnight screening of Paranormal Activity, which like me she attended only she's out on that Other Coast. She does a sound drubbing on disappointments based off of over-hyped expectations that some people have found themselves voicing - I may be a tad guilty of this in my own review but when it kept getting compared to Blair Witch I couldn't keep from comparing them a little bit - and argues that taken solely as a fright flick, on its own, it's a keeper, and for the most part I completely agree. Especially with this:

"Paranormal Activity absolutely accomplishes what it sets out to do, which is to scare the shit out of you. Horror movies these days seem to forget that scaring the audience should be, you know, a goal...but not this one." (emphasis mine)

So many dull not-scary big-budget horror flicks of the past dozen years just streamed through my head at that second sentence, and for some reason David Goyer's The Unborn played a big part in the visualization I had, almost as if it's become the poster child for bloated, over-CG'd horror flicks. You know, the ones that have rely on reams and reams of endless silly story and contort themselves into logistical knots to get to a point that ends up nowhere in the end, when really all we need is something that makes us lean forward in our chair and press our ear ahead straining for the sound of a footstep that shouldn't exist somewhere down the hall to completely and utterly terrify us.

So yeah. On that basest of levels, Paranormal Activity does totally succeed, and that is something to be championed. I jumped, I shivered, I sunk down in my seat and even grabbed the boyfriend's arm at one point. There are nits to be picked but just on the level of this thing being a good time had at the movies, doing what a fun horror movie can do, it does it great.
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