Film and Media Studies: The Horror Film

In Hamlet Act 1, Scene 4, Shakespeare wrote, “Angels, and ministers of grace, defend us! Be thou a spirit of health, or goblin damn'd. Bring with thee airs from heaven, or blasts from hell. Be thy intents wicked or charitable. Thou com'st in such a questionable shape, That I will speak to thee’(Shakespeare, William). During this class, the topic of paranormal actions and ghosts was discussed as being a constant amongst our word and our technologies. Though technology was mentioned as a way of allowing paranormal ghosts and creatures to enter our world, there has been a history of paranormal activities and interactions with an alternative spiritual world. The term ‘white noise’ was defined as a type of noise that is produced by the sound of all of the different frequencies together. Thus, if all the imaginable tones that are detectable to the human eye are combined together, it would be known as white noise. Which bring about the question: what are we blocking out due to the activities that we go through in our everyday lives? Are we pushing away the negativities and various internal demons that we are haunted by on a daily basis? Are we negating the lessons that our supposed “guardian angels” are trying to teach us as they attempt to give us aid in our day to day live? However, the use of paranormal activities in horror films are often used as a way to depict the connection between reality and the haunted poltergeist and/or spirit located in the place where the current family resides. Understanding that the life and location that an individual knows now is not what is has always been allows the audience to see that our reality is not what is always appears to be. Though the Poltergeist manages to explain tragedies that are associated with the urban legend, there are several other examples that can be seen when the filmmakers used real bones and artifacts that were related to the film. Unexplainable images and death surrounding these movies give people a reason to believe that the actual signs and dimensions that are occurring in the movie might not actually be as fictional as the movie allows them to be. This can make us question whether we have the ability through the use of science to determine what is actually behind the white noise. Movies, such as The Poltergeist and The Paranormal Activity series, shows how there are aspects of our life that we could indulge and dive into, but maybe we should just leave where it is. Being that the actual characters in these movies attempted to use technology to sort of “cross the veil”, it ultimately pushed them deeper into the realm of the unknown. After listening to this lecture and viewing these films, I began to question the aspects of life involving the spiritual realm and technology. Realizing that I am blissfully ignorant in my own right provided a sense of relief, yet also made me feel somewhat fearful as there could be an entirely different existence in my day to day life if I somehow managed to look past the “white noise”.

When you think of home, you generally feel a warm feeling in your chest, and you would describe your house as safe and it almost exists in a separate plane from the realities to bog the world down today. However, the ‘haunted house’ sub-genre flips this notion on its head and finds terror inside the house. Both Poltergeist and Paranormal Activity achieved this sensation as it seemingly consumed both Katie and Micah by the end of Paranormal Activity and drove the Freeling family from their house.

Chiefly, a house can be a symbol for many things, and in Paranormal Activity, I believe that it operated as a way to show the degradation of a relationship between Katie and Micah. At the beginning of the movie, we see that Katie and Micah take a huge step in their relationship by moving in together. In this stage of a relationship, often people decide if they want to stay together or go separate ways and the hauntings that the audience sees may be problems that are starting to arise within their relationship now that they are living together. Furthermore, Katie mentions that she has lived with these entities her entire life. Personally, I believe that these demons may represent a mental health issue. Moreover, Micah is dismissive of these “hauntings” and feeds into the stigma that surrounds mental health disorders just as people who claim that their house is haunted are often laughed at in the public sphere. Therefore, the problems get worse and lead to the ultimate breakdown of their relationship.

Something that I found interesting in both Poltergeist and Paranormal Activity was that they both use technology as the forefront of their stories. In Poltergeist, Carol Anne is sucked into the television and can only be heard on a specific channel. Similarly, the entire premise of Paranormal Activity was the reliance on a camera to record the activity that happens when both Katie and Micah fell asleep. Personally, I believe that this might be a commentary on the world in which we live in today. We rely on technology, but very few of us truly understand all the working pieces that are involved with technology and in some sense that can have the same mysticism surrounding it as ghosts living in your home does.

Another similarity I found between the two was the idea that the supernatural is attracted to perceived innocence and helplessness. As a society, we generally agree with the notion that children are the most innocent and helpless amongst us and that (from a societal paradigm) women are also inherently more helpless and innocent than men. In both movies, the ghosts are drawn to the most helpless of both families, Katie for Paranormal Activity and Carol Anne in Poltergeist. In both these movies, the ghosts grow stronger from this innocence and the more helpless these characters are, the stronger the ghosts become. This is best seen as Katie becomes more resigned to the ghosts toward the end of the movie and allows it to go from small oddities at the beginning of the movie to Micah’s murder by the end.

                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.     

I think the idea of the haunted house is one of the strongest places to set a ghost story. Home, and by extension the house you live at is often seen as  a private safe haven. It’s seen as a place that not only protects you from the danger of nature, but can also act as an escape from the dangers prevalent in society. Because of this the idea of your house being haunted is very effective in being unnerving, and makes a good setup for horror stories. When the danger is coming from your own home, where do you run too? Often you can’t, so you’re left with no option but to confront the danger. I think both of these movies have good 

elements of the haunted house format 

I Really enjoyed Poltergeist. I think it really captured the fear of your home becoming unsafe. I think it also uses the haunted in an interesting way to make commentary on TV. I think the film was commenting on the dangers of tv or media in general, and how we don’t know who's on the other side or what their motives in speaking to us are. We see this diluted in scenes like when the mom turns the tv off static and on to a war show without realizing what she's showing to her kid.

I might be overthinking thinking this, but a part of the movie that plays into this idea well is when the neighbor turns the tv to Mister Rogers. Fred Rogers was someone who always advocated for the importance and influence tv can have on kids. He was even adopted to work in television by the church after he was ordained. He’s show was always praised for feeling like you were talked to and not talked at. Having shown Mr. Rogers, a person who used tv for good, at the beginning of the movie makes a good contrast to the ghost, who used the tv for evil. 

To be frank, I wasn’t a big fan of paranormal activity. I think it had a very strong premium, but I think the execution falls a little flat. The idea of someone recording home videos of their haunting could lend itself really well for horror. The low budget handheld style gives a sense of realism to the film, and it gives us a chance to have some more personal down to earth moments with our characters. This format also gives the perfect setup for having mundane activists being infiltrated by horror, giving us good surprise scares. I don’t think the movie ever uses these elements to its full advantage.  

The movie does a good job building tension and unease, but it never goes anywhere with it. It never esculatets to new levels of terror. An analogy to explain this is  It's like watching a candle burn near a loss curtain. There's that tension that the curtain could catch flame and start a house fire, and we sit on the edge of our seat waiting for it to happen . But the issue is only so dire, and eventually our interest is going to wane. I feel that the problem with Paranormal activity. We have all of these little scares, and it gets slightly more intense as the movie goes on, but the curtain doesn't catch fire like the last mins of the movie, and even then the payoff is only a mild jump scare.

This topic explored movies that showcased the horror being brought inside the house. When most people think of haunted houses, they picture a house that isn’t their own. Haunted houses have become a place outside of your own home that is known to bring our fears to life. People see haunted houses the same as horror movies. It is a way for people to see fears play out, getting a taste of the experience but knowing it will end soon. You go to a haunted house to get scared but you reassure yourself that it isn’t real and when you go home it won’t happen. Both of these movies bring fears into actual homes of families and makes the experience more personal. As we spectate horror movies to see experiences without experiencing them ourselves, we notice the importance of spectatorship in the movies. Spectatorship in Paranormal Activity is seen through Micah’s obsession of film. Micah feels the need to constantly film in hopes that he records paranormal activity on camera. He tries to live through spectatorship rather than experience. For as interested, as he is to “catch it” on camera, he seems to treat it as a joke instead of reality. Katie calls him out for not taking it seriously and he apologizes because he doesn’t want to upset her but he doesn’t truly realize the wrong in his actions. As Katie seems to deteriorate, he continues to be obsessed with filming rather than taking care of her. He lives so much through the spectatorship that he doesn’t handle reality very well. In Poltergeist, spectatorship is what connects the two worlds. Carol Ann is the family member interested in watching the television. While other family members pay no attention to the white noise, she is sucked in mentally and eventually literally. She was so intensely focused on the television, she not only gets lost in it but becomes part of the television. After Carol Ann starts talking through the television, that’s when the other family members become interested in the media and start to spectate in hopes of finding Carol Ann. Spectatorship in this film is seen on both sides. The people spectate the ghosts while the ghosts do the same to the people. The reading says “Spectatorial pleasure for one is displeasure for another” which is shown in this movie. While the two parties spectate one another, both suffer when the other gets what they desire - whether that’s the people living their suburban lifestyle or the ghosts taking Carol Ann because they see her as the light.

How did an invisible spectator act as a character in the film? In Paranormal Activity, the demon is never seen but the actions are. We see covers moved at night, pictures placed in attics, doors being slammed, or even people being thrown. We never see anyone doing this but we see the reality of them happening. Oddly, we don’t try to put a person behind the actions because we accept the invisible character being the culprit. In Poltergeist, we actually see monsters and ghosts but at those times, they aren’t actually doing any acts. When we see objects move around the house or unexplainable occurrences, there is no visible culprit. The poltergeist prefers to act as the invisible spectator rather than a visible one.

How did technology amplify the paranormal occurrences? Can you describe if it was just the technology, the ideals of the people behind it, or both? In Paranormal Activity, it is more of the ideals of the person behind the technology that amplifies the occurrences. It is Micah’s nonchalant attitude and mocking actions, not the camera, that leads to the demon becoming more violent. 

Define how the values of the characters changed through the films by naming each point which they swayed to another direction. In Paranormal Activity, Micah didn’t initially take the situation seriously and that lead to him not valuing Katie’s feelings and thoughts about how to handle the situation. As things escalated, he began to realize the seriousness and valued her opinion more. While it wasn’t evident that he completely changed his values, he was forced to accept the reality of the situation. At the beginning of Poltergeist, the children are seeking the comfort of their parents but both parents are caught up in pleasure and enjoying themselves more than seeking to take care of their kids. By the end, the parents are seeking their children to protect and comfort them.