w0rd. Solipsism.

A movie that will keep you up at night.

There is always something somewhat overbearing about the hype machine – the thing that makes mediocre sound like amazing and the ordinary extraordinary.  The hype machine works and how?  Simply by repeating the same thing over and over again, back and forth until we all want to spend the money to buy into the hype.  Advertisements, commercial spots and various tweets are all vehicles of the hype machine – the thing that helped G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra make $100 million dollars at the box office and the same hype machine spawned a season of the Ultimate Fighter with a man named, yes, Kimbo Slice.

But every now and then the hype machine yields something unexpected - something worthy of the hype.  I guess I feel a renewed sense pride in the human race when something comes even close to being worth all the attention it receives (see: Barack Obama) but you know what’s even better?  When the hype machine produces something not only worthy of the hype, but something you’d call the best thing you have ever seen.

So I praise it its support of Paranormal Activity – the scariest movie of all time and the best horror film I’ve ever seen.

Yes, I’m becoming part of the hype machine.

Paranormal Activity - a movie with a tagline like “don’t see it alone” would normally make me laugh out loud.  It had been 10 years since I’d been genuinely scared by any film, and I come upon a movie with no real advertising budget, a viral marketing campaign and production costs of $15,000 but endorsements from the likes of Steven Spielberg.

Shot in one house over two days and written and directed by one man, Paranormal Activity should have been nothing more than a cheap Blair Witch Project – an attempt to blur the lines between fiction and reality and a rehash of a genius idea brought to all of us ten years ago.  It should have been a bad movie about a couple who are disturbed by nightly flicks of light switches and door creaks, thought to be the work of a demon who had occupied their home.  The couple then sets up a video camera to record the events with the hope of finding proof of their paranormal experiences.   In all honesty it should have been a bad movie, only furthering my ill feelings towards the hype machine – but it was the exact opposite of bad.  It was deeply haunting.

What makes Paranormal Activity so horrifying is the fact that it relies on tapping into our primal fears – what happens when we are asleep.  There are no real effects and tension builds throughout the entire 96 minute runtime.  Something as simple as getting up in the middle of the night becomes a scary thing to do, and there isn’t a single boring moment throughout the entire film.  It is void of cinematic booms and bangs, blood and gore and there isn’t even a musical score, but what the film does incredibly well is immerse the viewer into what would be an unbelievably terrifying situation.  Better than Blair Witch, and better than any horror movie I’ve seen.

What really does it for me though is the fact that still, a week after watching it – I still have a little bit of trouble sleeping.  There are scenes in this film that will stay with me, and what makes that so amazing is that on their own, the scenes shouldn’t be all that scary.  Put into context however and they become mortifying.

If the measure of a good horror film is being scared, then the measure of the best horror film is one that keeps you scared.  What’s even weirder than the fact that for five minutes each night, I’m haunted by visions from Paranormal Activity… is the fact that I like it.

The hype machine wins this one, and I’ll gladly concede.