This topic discusses the haunted house subgenre of horror films. This has got to be one of my favorite subgenres in horror films. Your house is something you come home to after you have had a long day. Your house is where you feel safe and protected from the outside world. In these “haunted house” films is where something that is not of this world disturbs and I guess the best word for it is haunts the residents of the house. As a man who spends a lot of his time at home, I find these types of movies really genuinely scare me. After watching films like Poltergeist (1982) and Paranormal Activity (2007) it makes it difficult for me to sleep at night. You hear one creak and start to think, “Oh God my house is haunted just like in the movies”. This might just be me personally, but it does make you start to have slight paranoia. I have always thought there is one big plot hole in these “haunted house” films though and that is why don’t they just move out of the house? This is much more relevant in Paranormal Activity than in Poltergeist.
Poltergeist is the story of the Freeling family dealing with the poltergeist that haunts the house due to the house being built on top of graves that where not relocated along with their respective tombstones. A poltergeist is defined as a ghost or other supernatural being supposedly responsible for physical disturbances such as loud noises and objects thrown around. The Freeling family must have had one hell of a poltergeist because it was responsible for a little more than just a physical disturbance. In this film the family could not move out of the house because their daughter was trapped in another realm with the poltergeist. The family could not just leave her there because they know she was still alive and scared to death. I actually really enjoyed this film. If you can imagine yourself being put in their situation then it is a very frightening film. Also there was a happy ending, which rarely ever happens in horror films. The Freeling’s lost their house as it collapsed on itself and vanished into thin air at the end of the film, but they did save their daughter and protected the rest of their kids from harm’s way. There may have been a huge financial loss, but they saved everything near and dear to them (their family). The scariest part of this film in my opinion is all of the crazy things that happened on production and after the film. Two of the actresses from the film died after filming and the boy actor was actually strangled by the clown on set. I am sure this film taught other horror movie filmmakers to not use any real skeletons or anything else like that on set.
Paranormal Activity is a film that is all from the point of view of either the characters filming each other or security cameras capturing the paranormal occurrences. The story is of Katie and Micah and them dealing with a demon that has been following Katie since she was a child. Micah does not know this at first though and it is weird to me that they did not even attempt to move out of the house. If it was me in Micah’s situation, I would have left right after the first clear paranormal activity is seen or recorded. He does try to leave at the end of the film, but the demon had already gotten into Katie and it was too late. The next night is when he is murdered by the demon in Katie’s body. I saw this movie when I was 12 years old and it scared me to death. I do not mess with anything demon related and seeing this as a pre-teen really freaked me out. As a kid I grew up in a large house and it had a lot of creaks and I specifically remember watching this movie alone and not sleeping the night that I watched. It was definitely a lesson learned for my 12 year old self. I personally do believe that there are paranormal entities in this world, so when I watch films highlighting these occurrences it really scares me because to me it could really happen. Poltergeist and Paranormal Activity were both great films in my opinion and I will always love the “haunted house” subgenre of horror films even though they flat out scare me to death even as an adult.