Paranormal Activity will scare the shit out of you.

If you're sitting at home watching it in the dark on your couch. At least, that's what I assume; in theaters it's a tense, enjoyable horror movie that loses the thread right in the final moments, but it doesn't have the kind of impact you might hope. But since the film is about feeling incredibly not at home while at home, I bet that watching it while at home will give you the willies that the advertising implies you'll be getting in theaters.

It's rare that I would recommend "wait for DVD" as a positive thing, but it's the case with Paranormal Activity. A little film - it has just four actors, and one of those actors has about two lines - it's swamped by big screen expectations. And because the movie is not interested in overwhelming you, it's easy to be underwhelmed in a big theatrical setting.

What's really great about Paranormal Activity is the way that it uses the oldest haunted house tricks in the book - strange noises, lights that turn on and off, doors that close of their own accord - and makes them work. There are some very nice scares in the film that use nothing more than a bump on the soundtrack. It's just old-fashioned scaremongering that proves you don't need fancy effects or to spend lots of money to get an audience. All you need is timing and atmosphere.

The film's main conceit is that a young couple has been experiencing weird shit in their house, so the guy buys a high end video camera to document the goings on. But it turns out to be much more than just a haunted house - the activity has been centered around his girlfriend since she was 8, and the entity is entirely too interested in her. And seems to be entirely too jealous of the boyfriend. Over the course of 20 days and nights they experience a steadily escalating series of weird, scary and threatening events, many of which are shot from a stationary camera using night vision, giving the whole thing a verite, sort of Ghost Hunters look.

The small scope keeps things nice and claustrophobic, but it also limits the story. There's probably about 15 minutes of the runtime devoted to the girl and the guy arguing about the camera, which is 13 minutes too many. But writer/director Oren Peli needs to fill in the gaps between scares, and he needs to keep the personal tension up, so we get a lot of that kind of stuff. The film makes the guy, Micah, almost completely unlikable. A douchey day trader, Micah goes from being skeptical about his girlfriend's demon problem to being moronically aggressive, going out of his way to rile up the entity despite multiple scenes where he's begged not to do so. Katie, the girlfriend, is a very sympathetic character, and I wish that Micah had been allowed to be as sympathetic. I understand where his character is coming from - he feels utterly threatened on a deep level by this entity over whom he has no power, but he could still have that struggle without being a dick a lot of the time.

As the film ups the ante towards the end I worried that it wouldn't be able to stick the landing, and it totally doesn't. The ending of the film is the equivalent of one of those pictures a friend sends you in your email, saying you should look closely to see what's wrong with the image. You, of course, didn't notice that it was a .gif and when a scary face suddenly appears you jump back in your chair. But it's a cheap, shoddy, Photoshopped scare, and that's what Paranormal Activity gives us at the end. Apparently the ending has been a problem for the film for a while, and the finale you'll see in theaters is quite different from what played at Slamdance two years ago.

I ended up respecting the film more than really liking it; it's well made in a very small film sort of way, and it's impressive that Paramount is giving this a theatrical release. They obviously see Blair Witch in their futures, and while this movie shares the 'We swear this is real footage' gimmick (helped in Paranormal Activity's case by the fact that neither of the leads seems to have found much career success since making the film in 2006) with that seminal movie, it's a much better film in nearly every way. For one thing, shit actually happens in the film - Peli's got a nice sense of pacing, and he spreads out the scares with grace and finesse. And while Paranormal Activity has the characters holding the camera, none of them seem to be as Parkinsonian as Blair Witch's crew.

Paranormal Activity is a small film that can't quite bear the weight of the praise heaped upon it. While the film is well worth seeing, you might consider skipping it in theaters and renting the DVD on a night when it's dark, quiet and a little scary in your own house.

7 out of 10