Katie, a college student, and her day-trader boyfriend Micah are a recognisably average young couple – except that Katie is troubled by a pernicious unseen presence she has felt in her life since childhood. Recently, things have been going bump in the night, and in an increasing state of distress the couple take proactive measures in their attempt to uncover just what is going on. In her desperation Katie calls in a self-proclaimed psychic to help, while Micah purchases a video camera and films what goes on in the bedroom as the pair are sleeping. An increasingly alarming series of events are caught on camera and the implacable feeling grows that the couple are not alone.

If you haven’t already heard of Paranormal Activity then you obviously possess strong immunity to its hugely successful viral campaign, online and beyond. Nor would you have heard how, like The Blair Witch Project, the film has been phenomenally successful financially. Made by fledgling Israeli-born director Oren Peli for 15,000 USD with a cast you can count on the fingers of one severed hand, the film has already raked in over 100,000,000 USD at the box office. Add to this the endorsement of Steven Spielberg (who knows a thing or two about delivering frights and who is reputed to have found the film so spooky he didn’t want it in his home) and this all makes Paranormal Activity, in marketing terms, an absolute stunner. But is it, as some blurbs have proclaimed, one of the scariest films of all time?

What we are scared by is a very subjective matter. Paranormal Activity is being released at the same time as Saw VI has its icky franchise fingers all over the multiplexes, but is predicated on more subtle primal human fears: what can the unknown night, rather than some Christmas pantomime serial killer, not do with your – or my – unguarded body? In an era of torture porn, Peli’s film stands out like someone wearing a clean white sheet over their head in an abattoir.

The point of view throughout Paranormal Activity is that of the factual medium of a video camera. This device of ‘found footage’ revealing what happens is both the film’s strength and weakness. There is no room here for the haunting subliminal images films like The Exorcist and Don’t Look Now implant with directorial and editing wizardry and the sense of nervous overload they ratchet up in your spine. Instead, tension in the viewer is created through witnessing what the two main protagonists themselves at first do not. The impulse to cry out: “Wake up! Wake up!” during what unfolds in an atmosphere of grainy reality is an extremely effective use of observer empathy. What remained problematic for me was that I felt conscious throughout, despite one overwhelming kinetic horror shock, of the man behind the curtain pulling those levers in Monster Oz Land and manipulating a demonic Munchkin. Certainly in a subtler manner than in Sidney J Furie’s 1981 The Entity, another film in which a woman is persecuted by a horny demon, which gave us full-frontal bells and whistles in more ways than one. But when Micah sprinkles powder on the floor to see whether something invisible is really roaming about barefoot at night, I couldn’t disavow the lingering thought that it was also being done because it looks cool in a movie.

Therein also lies what I personally found to be most problematic in the film: the character of Micah comes across as a post frat-boy Jackass prankster. This is crucial, as so much of the movie’s forward momentum is predicated on his monumental pig-headedness. Katie implores him not to tinker with a Ouija board. Guess what? My empathy for Katie partly stemmed from feeling sorry for her not because a demon might have the hots for her, but because Micah has. His is a dissonant presence throughout, vying with that of the paranormal entity also snuggling up to Katie in the night. And in a film which relies so much on its atmosphere of verisimilitude, being woken by some very definite noises downstairs and wobbling to the source in the dark while holding a video camera undermines vital suspension of disbelief. In Romero’s Diary of the Dead the same tendency might be excused as an agogic example of the crassness of humanity in the face of its own oblivion; Micah’s crassness by itself cannot.

The self-proclaimed psychic (is there any other kind?) disappears after a sniff or two around the place, not liking what he smells, and promising an expert in exorcisms who fails to materialise. If intended as a nod to the abandonment of good in the face of evil, this is tentative at best, and at worst breaks the rule of ‘Chekov’s gun’ in a drama (don’t introduce that gun into a story unless you intend to use it by the end). There is a parallel here with the conclusion of the film itself. After several test screenings, some with a most definite air of finality about them, the ending of the film as we have it, in some measure unresolved, was decided upon. This is great, because here a loose end creates in the film an unsettling psychological resonance in its lack of total resolution and makes of it an undoubted horror gem, one of the finest to come out of North America in the past decade, and a triumph of directorial flair using minimal means on Peli’s part. Peli is currently directing Area 51, which will also incorporate ‘found footage’. Looking forward to it. My fear for Paranormal Activity is that sooner or later the powerful and unsettling lack of resolution possessed by this brilliant debut will attract another terrifying entity – the predatory Hollywood monster, probably already poised to blot Peli’s gleaming white directorial sheet with its icky franchise fingers by spawning a dreaded sequel…