Thank The Paranormal Activity

As a horror fan, I need to take a few minutes here and really thank the Paranormal Activity franchise.  I have never recommended a single one of the films.  The first one was a breakout hit, but it left me agitated with my theatre experience.  I hated the husband of the main character, and I begged for his demise.  There was an understanding by director and writer Oren Peli as to how to create tension for what has become the modern day 'jump scare,' but there was a fragmentation when it came to character development and story telling.

Taking a look at the state of horror at the time Paranormal Activity achieved mass distribution, there was a lot of attention being paid in the horror industry to bring life back into the big named slashers that dominated the 1970s and 80s.  We had seen lifeless and impotent reincarnations of Friday the 13th, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween, and A Nightmare on Elm Street was a year away from thudding into theatres.  There was no lustre to the horror scene.  It was just attempts by studios to hold onto the past, believing that the slasher sub-genre was the way forward for fans.

How wrong they were.

Priced with a budget of only fifteen thousand dollars, Paranormal Activity hit the screens in 2009 and became a phenomenon.  It took in over one hundred million domestically, and another eighty five million from foreign markets.  Regardless of what I think of the quality of the film, it showed that there was something that movie goers were craving, and it did not have to do with nostalgia and stories from yesteryear.

The initial impact was felt right away, with a glut of cheap, found footage films.  This, however, is not the true legacy left by Paranormal Activity.  Sure, it is the most visible impact, and I may have a lot of people disagreeing with me on this, but the mark it left of movie history was something vastly different.  It showed conclusively that budget meant absolutely nothing, and that atmosphere and attention to pacing and tension could bring in the box office numbers.

This was not the first film to hit the low budget, big numbers benchmark for horrors.  In 1999, The Blair Witch Project introduced found footage to the masses and was a low budget success.  It had an immediate impact on films, but its impact was felt in the independent market, with its doppelgängers never seeing the cinema.  And then in 2004, James Wan's Saw raked in just over one hundred million world wide.  It fell in nicely with the established slasher attempts of the day, so it is less of an anomaly.

With Paranormal Activity, it's successful notes were noticed by its producer, Jason Blum.  Blum realized that it was not the fact that it was the gimmick of found footage that made it successful, something that many people equated with it, but rather the fact that a managed budget could mean success for a film whether it found its way to nationwide distribution or simply video on demand and streaming services.

This is what makes Blum a visionary.  Throw stones at me if you will for calling him a visionary, but this is exactly the word that one should use when describing him.  The success of the Paranormal Activity franchise brought him into the game, being able to wield money and not throwing it out in big chunks looking for the next big thing.  Instead, he stuck to the same financial formula that made Paranormal a success.

At first, the films that were coming from him were similar in feel as they focused around hauntings and possession, the rising fad that horror was undergoing.  But, it was his unwillingness to deviate from the movie making formula that led him to being able to branch out and begin producing different types of low budget films.  While the competition was still looking back at Paranormal Activity, Blum was looking forward and allowing directors with new and interesting stories an opportunity to get their ideas out there.

The biggest step forward for Blum and his production company, Blumhouse Productions, was with 2013's The Purge.  It showed that his formula could be completely separate from hauntings and the supernatural and still maintain success.  This is the forward thinking that I had referenced.  He knew that it was not just about recreating the same films in different formats, but by taking fresh ideas and bringing them out by keeping the budgets in check.  Made for a budget of three million, The Purge brought in eighty nine million worldwide.  Its successor, The Purge: Anarchy, had a slightly higher budget of nine million, but took in one hundred and eleven million across the planet.

While horror was the main financial driver for his production company, it allowed for a massive variety of films to be made.  From a suspense in The Creep when he teamed up with Mark Duplass, to  giving actor Joel Egerton a chance to direct The Gift, to producing the Oscar nominated Whiplash, there was a great deal of diversity coming out of Blumhouse Productions.  He even provided a fresh ground to down and out director M. Night Shyamalan with a great come back movie in The Visit.

Without Jason Blum understanding the correct lessons learned from Paranormal Activity, horror would be in a much different place today.  He could have easily stuck with keeping to the same story format, believing that the success lay there, but he thought bigger.  He believed in high concept stories with low budgets, giving the creators freedom to create.  Just like the found footage success took a few years to be really felt in mainstream cinema, Blum's true formula took a while for others to understand and emulate.

Without Jason Blum, would The Shallows be getting nationwide distribution?  Would James Wan's The Conjuring and its sequel have gotten the distribution support that it received?  Would It Follows have been the modest hit that it was?  I could go on and on, but that would just become boring reading.  The important thing to focus is the fact that Blum's ability to take chances on films because of keeping the budgets low while allowing creative freedom has brought many wonderful horrors, suspenses, and thrillers to audiences, either directly or indirectly thanks to Jason Blum.

The Purge

Today's movie was supposed to be a review of the Oscar hopeful Philomena, starring Judi Dench.  Unfortunately, icy roads kept me from traveling to the theatre to see it today, and a power outage kept me from watching something else of quality from home.  Because of all this, I reach back into the vault and pull out a review for the movie The Purge which came out in June of this year.

If you have seen the trailer for The Purge, you have a good idea of the concept behind the latest film from Blumhouse Productions.  If you are not aware of Blumhouse Productions (the producers of Paranormal Activity and Insidious), there are two key pieces of relevant information about them.  First, they are masters at making low budget, high grossing movies.  Second, they are masters at repackaging the same concept and tricking audiences into spending their money.

I will not spend time going into the depths of their formula and talking about all the similarities that flow between their movies, as The Purge is at least moderately successful in being different from their other films.  The concept behind the movie is the most gripping aspect, as it tells the story of America in the near future.  It is a country with minimal crime, almost no unemployment, and it is all thanks to one night a year when crime is legal for 12 hours and people can purge the evil they have inside of them.

Normally in a Blumhouse movie, the protagonists are rich Caucasian suburban yuppies who live in a large house and are not very relatable to the average movie goer.  This movie is fresh in the fact that it is actually important to the story that the protagonist family, the Sandins, are affluent people.  As the time of the purge approaches, they are completely relaxed as there is no reason for them to fear.  Not only is their house fortified, but the father James (Ethan Hawke) sells advanced security systems, so you know the Sandins have spared no expense.  When it is time, they calmly hunker down to wait the night out.

It is not too long into the night when the son Charlie (Max Burkholder) views the security monitors and sees a man on the street who is being hunted by people who intend to kill him.  Charlie then decides to deactivate the security system, opens the door, and ushers this unknown man inside to offer him sanctuary.  It is then that the villains arrive to claim the life of the person who the Sandins have inside their house.  It is now decision time for the Sandins… deliver this stranger to the people outside who will kill him, or protect the man and have baddies on the lawn break in and kill everyone in the house.

As the movie plays out, it does so in typical Blumhouse horror style, in that you can very easily predict when all the scares will be, and what the next scene will bring.  The characters are fairly one dimensional, but are not as mind numbingly bland and stupid as they are in Blumhouse movies past, such as Dark Skies or Paranormal Activity.  As the night of the purge moves on, the members of the family are left to make decisions about morality, and as they do, it is the overall concept of the movie that can leave one feeling a bit uneasy. 

One major failing of Blumhouse Productions that is quite present in The Purge is lame baddies.  The villains in this movie are meant to be portrayed in a creepy, massively psychotic way, but it ends up seeming comical and unrealistic that someone would actually act the way they do.  But, that is not what they worry about, as they want the baddies to act in ways that unnerve you, not in ways that would actually make sense to the situation.  A large portion of the teenage girls in the theatre could not stop laughing at the ‘tense’ scenes with the baddies, so one might deduce that the attempt failed.

In all, it was the concept, mediocre characters, decent acting, a few unpredictable key scenes and gripping ‘reality footage’ of events of the purge that made this movie salvageable.  If you are a fan of all things horror, you will not find anything worthy of spending your money on here.  However, if you are intrigued by the concept, the trailers look decent to you, and you have not seen a lot of horrors, then this movie may be worth a cheap night movie ticket.  As for me, I wish I waited until it was on Netflix.

Rating – 2 out of 4 stars