License<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>When I saw the first Paranormal Activity <\/em>(2007), I knew it wasn\u2019t real. But, at the tender age of 13, I wanted it to be. Its elaborate pretension that, yes, this had all happened and that, yes, we have just been so lucky because the house\u2019s cameras were turned on, helped. It gave me permission to suspend disbelief and to enjoy what amounted to a play on the found-footage film. Under a decade earlier, The Blair Witch Project <\/em>(1999) did much the same for a prior generation. Except in that case, the filmmakers created a website, brought the broom out of storage, and shooed the actors out of the premiere. People would believe.<\/p>\nLong before these two, however, college students and men with ponytails passed around a film making similar claims with greater credence: 1989\u2019s The McPherson Tape <\/em>(also known as UFO Abduction<\/em>). Due to distribution issues, Dean Alioto\u2019s early found-footage tale of a kid\u2019s birthday party gone wrong never received a proper release. Instead, bootleg VHS copies made their way around the paranormal and cryptozoological circuits in the 90s. And you know what? People believed it. They thought it was real. UFO hunters even used the flick to prop up their own positions on the universe and whether we\u2019re alone in it.<\/p>\nEven knowing it isn\u2019t true, it still feels that way. The McPherson Tape <\/em>manages an almost anti-cinematic realism. But it never plunges over the edge into failure. It remains entertaining. How? Why?<\/p>\nThe film throws us into the middle of things. This is supposed to be a child\u2019s birthday party, and so, when it begins, we find ourselves amidst overlapping dialogue about nothing. Sure, there\u2019s the occasional comment about the guy holding the camera\u2014why don\u2019t you live in the moment?\u2014but the family mostly takes jabs at each other, teases one another, and discusses their mother\u2019s recent penchant for drinking rum and watching Johnny Carson. They play Old Maid and nitpick at quirks. For a film with no real characters, I felt I had a better idea of who these people were after an hour than I often do after 90 minutes with someone in a studio film.<\/p>\n
This narrative eccentricity never ceases. It slows at certain moments. We need the men of the family to have a reason to leave the house so they can find the aliens, for instance. But Alioto shows remarkable restraint. There are no jump scares, no act structure. The film punctuates whole scenes with long stretches of darkness broken up by small flashes of light accompanied by the sound of crushing leaves as the characters walk from one outdoor spot to another.<\/p>\n
The entire movie comes in at under 70 minutes. I can imagine it now, a guy in a Grateful Dead t-shirt getting his hands on a tape in the mid 90s: whoa, it\u2019s gotta be real. What kind of hoax comes in at under 90 minutes?<\/p>\n
Alioto\u2019s narrative approach makes the experience that much scarier. When most scenes are dimly lit or completely dark, especially once the power goes out at the house, anything and everything can be lurking out there. When no one underscores moments of tension, except insofar as the characters themselves get scared, you\u2019re always on high alert. And indeed, offering only faint glimpses of the aliens and their ship makes the movie that much more frightening.<\/p>\n
It also didn\u2019t hurt, given the cheapness of the alien costumes\u2014three little girls wearing big gray masks and black body suits with gray accents.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When I saw the first Paranormal Activity (2007), I knew it wasn\u2019t real. But, at the tender age of 13, I wanted it to be. Its elaborate pretension that, yes, this had all happened and that, yes, we have just been so lucky because the house\u2019s cameras were turned on, helped. It gave me permission […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2640,"featured_media":4081,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1731],"tags":[2422,5071,5065,5062,5068,5059],"class_list":["post-4078","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews","tag-found-footage","tag-paranormal-activity","tag-the-blair-witch-project","tag-the-mcpherson-tape","tag-the-x-files","tag-ufo-abduction"],"yoast_head":"\n
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