Paranormal Activity: Who's the Real Demon Here Anyway?
Paranormal Activity (2009)
Paranormal Activity was an independent film made on an eensy-weensy budget, starring the unknown actors Micah Sloat and Katie Featherston. Significantly, each of these actors played an eponymous character—Micah and Katie. So we already have a blurring of fiction and fact in this film’s casting choices.
The film’s camerawork and soundcraft reinforce that blurry line between fiction and reality. First, the cinematography: like the ground-breaking hand-held horror film The Blair Witch Project (1999), Paranormal Activity is shot as a documentary made by its own main characters. Or, in this case, almost exclusively by Micah. As Micah shoots the film, he makes commentaries and gives direction, so that the film is both a “making of” film and a documentary in its own right. We are never allowed, for a single moment, to forget that we’re watching a film, because the narrative itself hinges on this being a home horror movie: what we see at all times is mediated by Micah’s videocamera, and often also by his voice and direction.
The film doubles down on its own realism by having a printed statement at the beginning that appears on a black screen, in stark white Arial font, confirming that “Paramount Pictures would like to thank the families of Micah Sloat and Katie Featherstone and the San Diego Police Department.” Second, the sound design is extremely spare—in keeping with the home-movie theme. There’s no soundtrack per se, except any music that the main characters might be listening to in the actual story, or the soundtracks of any television programs they might be watching.
In the film, young lovers Katie and Micah live in San Diego together. We learn early on that there are some “paranormal phenomena” going on in their home, and that they—or, really, he wants to capture it on film, using a home video camera. Almost immediately, we can see that Micah’s aspirations are partly to capture on film and thereby diagnose the paranormal phenomena that bedevil Katie—a potentially laudable goal—and partly to shoot a porno with his girlfriend—substantially less laudable. The idea of the man behind the camera taking advantage of a desperate and powerless girl? Yeah, that had quite a bit of negative cultural traction by 2009. Indeed, the idea that filmmakers could be abusers and sex offenders was becoming all-too familiar; in fact, in the same month Paranormal Activity was released, September of 2009, Roman Polanski was arrested in Switzerland in hopes of bringing him to the United States to stand trial for the 1977 multiple rapes of Samantha Geimer. The demon in Paranormal Activity may be the thing that keeps you up at night, but, if you’re paying attention, it’s the Micahs of the world that we should be scared of, because they are hiding in plain sight behind scripts and cameras and are putting women in positions of danger and dehumanization.
As Micah and Katie discuss Micah’s plan, it’s clear that she’s hesitant about all the filming, while Micah is excited about the potential for horror, danger, and drama: using a butcher knife, he makes slashing gestures at the camera, to indicate what he’ll do when he finds out who or what the bad guy in their home is. He is risibly untough looking, behaving more like a keg-standing fraternity pledge than a supportive partner, concerned for his girlfriend’s safety. Katie registers that Micah is a little too focused on the film aspect, and a little too unfocused on her needs and well-being, when he starts playfully cooing at the camera. She says, “You’re supposed to be in love with me, not the machine.” He responds, insouciantly, “Well we are going to be sleeping with this camera, you know. We’re going to put it in the bedroom.” Not a question, not an offer, just a statement: we will be sleeping with this camera, you know. Through his assertion, the camera becomes, in effect, a third-party to their relationship, and Katie is forced to comply with the plan.
Even so, Katie resists the camera jockeying in individual scenes, hiding her face from the camera, hesitating to follow Micah’s directions. When he asks her for any “tricks” to make the paranormal events happen, Katie reveals that she doesn’t want to make anything paranormal happen; she’s doing this filming for him and not for herself. Micah knows that perfectly well, and appears to get aroused by the power conferred on him by his camera: he asks her, “Can I get a little striptease?” She declines, but when the camera next lands on her, she’s in her cute pajamas, in her “Venus pose.” Micah may seem like a devoted partner, but he is actually a predatory filmmaker, who’s about to land his girlfriend in a situation of serious domestic horror, precisely through his inability to respect her wishes and boundaries.
The next day, a psychic comes to see them for a consultation on the paranormal disturbances that follow Katie around, and Micah jokes that he’ll play a spooky soundtrack. Why? Manifestly because he doesn’t like the idea that, for the moment at least, the psychic is taking charge of what Micah sees as his film project, wresting away Micah’s authorial control. Katie explains the long history of her “haunting” to the psychic, though Micah intermittently interrupts to minimize what she’s saying, or to cast doubt on the psychic. Katie reiterates that she didn’t even want to get the camera in the first place; it becomes increasingly clear that this whole expedition is Micah’s show, and that Katie is, somewhat unwillingly, along for the ride.
When the psychic arrives, he says that he thinks Katie is not being haunted by a ghost—a dead person—but by a nonhuman entity, specifically a demon. Katie is visibly shaken, but Micah cannot let go of his filmmaking schtick: “What if we just get a Ouija board, we find out what it wants, and then we just give it what it wants, and it’s gone?” Micah wants to remake The Exorcist, but make it as an action movie that he stars in as the Big Hunky Hero. The psychic warns them against trying to communicate with it, and becomes quite stern with Micah. Micah transparently resents the psychic’s interference into his authority as the man of his and Katie’s household. He is now bound and determined to make his own sequel to The Exorcist, starring his freaky and unwilling girlfriend. He’s determined, that is, to force Katie into a reboot of one of the most horrifying films of domestic violence of all time, and a film in which the female leads’ bodies were badly harmed through the shooting of the film.
Katie wants to call the psychic’s demonologist colleague, but Micah tries repeatedly to talk her out of it. He minimizes her worry; he questions her perceptions. Micah says he’s “not putting up with, like, a team, a legion, of Jesus freaks.” He’s not putting up with what she feels she needs to do to preserve her physical safety. He tries to paint her as overly anxious, overly inflexible; he gaslights her, he manipulates her.
In the very next scene, he suggests some “extracurricular activity” with the camera; once again, Micah is trying to turn this situation into a porno—eager to record Katie in sexual situations against her will. She repeatedly instructs him to “turn it off,” and he repeatedly mocks her and refuses. Moreover, he often films things after she’s told him not to; this film is explicitly concerned with ideas of consent, sex, and recording.
But the film’s greatest act of feminism is how it frames Micah’s controllingness and abuse. Throughout the film, the dynamic between Katie and Micah is supposed to read as cute; their relationship is warm and generally affectionate. Katie does a lot of flirting and smiling at Micah; she doesn’t look like she’s being domestically abused. But, at the same time, there’s a pattern in which he rides roughshod over her feelings, needs, and wishes. Repeatedly, he minimizes the danger she’s in and the fear she feels. He keeps putting his filmmaker dreams—be they documentarian, pornographic, horror-film or stand-up comedian—ahead of her truth. We, as the viewers, have to figure out how to respond to Micah’s coercion and control, and how to square it with the fact that he otherwise presents as a cute boyfriend.
Micah does some research, and learns that demons are a serious business, and relatively rare. From this newfound knowledge, he fails to come to the conclusion that maybe, just maybe, he should start respecting Katie’s boundaries and stop filming. Instead, his discovery of the seriousness and rarity of demonic possession only fans the flames of his own megalomaniacal fantasies about filmmaking: “So this could be a really rare phenomenon, and it’s cool we got it on tape.” Katie flags this as an inappropriate and interpersonally disappointing response, saying, “I’m surprisingly not as excited as you, considering that I’m the one being terrified.” And later: “I think this thing could be very dangerous,” in reference to Micah’s filming, “if things progress, or get worse in any way, I don’t want to mess with the camera stuff anymore. I don’t want to make it mad.” Micah’s profoundly self-centered response, while he has the camera trained on her face, is this: “You didn’t exactly warn me about this kind of stuff before we moved in together. So I think I have a little bit of a say in what we do.” Oh, really, my friend? Is that how it works?
Micah is getting hot for the nocturnal events that seem to follow Katie around, as the film programmatically conflates his would-be pornographer tendencies with his would-be horror filmmaker tendencies. He says he hopes they’ll see a little more “action.” He talks about how they got “good” footage—“grade-A shit!” When Katie desperately tries to get him to stop making the film—now convinced that the film is putting her in significant peril—Micah instead starts trying to interview the demon. He has no capacity to actually feel Katie’s fear. No empathy. No compassion. All he can think about is what he understands as his right to film her—thereby objectifying her and endangering her in the domestic space of their home.
As the film progresses and the dangers ramps up, Micah steps more firmly into the paterfamilias role: “I’m taking care of this. This is my house, you’re my girlfriend. I’m going to fucking solve the problem.” No interference from outside authorities: Micah’s house is his castle, and Katie is his girlfriend. But Katie finally insists on calling Dr. Averies, the demonologist. Micah protests, saying he’s “in control” of Katie and their home. Finally fed up with his fatuous assertions of paterfamilias privilege, Katie says, “You’re not in control. It is in control. If you think you’re in control, then you’re being an idiot…You are absolutely powerless.” At long last, Katie takes a real stand, not only against Micah, but against the fiction that patriarchy keeps women safe in the home. As she puts it, “Micah, you and your stupid camera are the problem.” Her realization, however, comes too late: the demon takes possession of her and kills off Micah, leaving the film he’s made to speak for both of them.
Now, the most obvious overall reading of this film is that it’s a straight-up demon possession horror, very self-consciously in a lineage with The Exorcist. But what I think is fascinating about this film’s participation in the domestic horror genre is that the demon doesn’t kill Katie, but only Micah. In fact, Katie will go on to be in all four of the sequels to the original film. She winds up being a survivor, albeit a survivor possessed by a murderous demon. So, from a certain vantage point, the film suggests that the demon is trying to help Katie, to protect her from a controlling boyfriend. To help her get away from him, and get out of the boyfriend’s house. Which, in the end, she does. It’s an interesting twist on the domestic horror of The Exorcist, for sure. Katie remains possessed; no Father Damien can purge the demon from her body now. But, at the same time, the demon gives her strength to stop Micah’s abuse and dehumanization, and then to leave.