What happens when you sleep? Paranormal Activity, that’s what.

Katie and Micah spot some Paranormal Activity

It’s been ten years since the premiere of The Blair Witch Project: the tiny indie-horror-film-that-could terrified the beejusus out of us on a mere $100,000 budget simply by throwing three sadsacks into the woods with a few handheld cameras, offering them bloodied bundled sticks as creepy daily gifts, and most horrifying of all… sticking a guy in a corner.

Now we’ve got another indie horror flick made on an even smaller budget (an impressive $11,000).While Paranormal Activity capitalizes on its predecessors’ success with the home-movie genre (though the steadiness and clear shots of a tripod replace the nauseating herky-jerky camera movements of Blair Witch), it also throws in a great deal of The Exorcist for chilling measure. Instead of witches, director-screenwriter Oren Peli offers a demon that nightly terrorize a young San Dieogan couple in their two-story home. Blair Witch smartly taps into our psychological fear of deep, dark woods by not showing us anything except the pitch black night and close-ups of tear-stained faces. Not so here: we see  exactly what’s happening to adorable girl-next-door Katie (Katie Featherston) and her obnoxious but endearing boyfriend, Micah (Micah Sloat) in their bedroom at night, and without throwing out any spoilers, it’s more than sufficient to say that seeing the demon at work is just as petrifying as not being able to see a darned thing. While the film within a film device (we see the nightly terrors through the lens of Katie and Micah’s camera, never just through Peli’s eye) does offer a modicum of protective distancing for the audience, there’s no denying the primordial fear it induces: the gut-tightening, hairs-standing on end, sleeping-with-the-light-on paranoia.

Audiences were divided on the scare tactics of Blair Witch, and  they’ll either love or hate Paranormal Activity too. The new fright flick is coasting nicely on the groundwork  established by its predecessor, both in cinematic form and clever marketing — including the false “based-on-a-true-story” tagline and a slow buzz-building release of  midnight-only showings that will swiftly guarantee it a  cult following. A lack of formal innovation, however, doesn’t detract from Paranormal’s super-freaky effectiveness, as it asks the unnerving question “what happens when you sleep?” The terrifying answer plunges  and roots itself into your psyche, ensuring countless sleepless nights and a raising of the bar for all low-budget frightfests to come.

Masked Murderers

Masks are creepy.  Whether it protects a noggin from the effects of a fierce slapshot, hides those pesky facial deformities, or shields a 

surgeon from a myriad of deadly diseases, donned under just the right circumstances, a mask is unnerving at best, terrifying at worst.  Actually, 

it’s creepy any time, and The Strangers takes full and frisky advantage of this haunting horror flick staple.  

James (Scott Speedman) and Kristen (Liv Tyler) are meant to have a romantic weekend away, but after a bit of a tiff that takes up too much – unnecessary – expository time, they find themselves unhappily stuck together in the family summer home that is conveniently located in the middle of nowhere, aka in a dark, scary wood.  

And then, a knock at the door.  

What ensues is an unexplained and brutally bloody harassment of the couple by three eerily masked individuals – “inspired by true events,” no less – as the estranged couple pluckily attempts to survive the night.  Bryan Bertino’s script (and direction) gamely accounts for any possible viewer skepticism of how the couple mismanaged to contact help and get away (land line?  cut.  cell phone?  burned, baby, burned in the cozy cabin fire), but the film fails to fully immerse the audience in the horrors portrayed onscreen.  The couple’s inessential backstory gives us little to grasp onto, and we never have an inkling as to why these carnival killers are, well, killing.  Is a complex and clever plot necessary for the average, jump-out-of-your-skin horror flick?  Absolutely not, and there are more than a handful of cowering, face-behind-hands (albeit, fairly predictable) frights accompanied by spooky, old-school recordplayer music that make The Strangers solid, good Friday night fun.  The question remains, however, that if that suited, strangely wheezing figure wasn’t capped with a ghastly burlap sack of a face, would his freakish image, or the movie he infiltrated, haunt and startle us so?

Then again…does it matter?