Paranormal Activity: it’s cheap but is it any good?

The US horror movie Paranormal Activity, made on a micro-budget, is the most profitable film of all time - seemingly against all odds. First-time director Oren Peli's film, which was made in 2006 for under $15,000, was only given a US-wide release this year after one million fans backed it in a frenzied viral campaign. Championed by Steven Spielberg, it then stormed to the top of the US box office, raking in $100m within weeks.

Beyond the hype it seems that most critics, like the millions who have seen the film in the US, agree that Paranormal Activity is a genuinely scary and suspenseful horror - despite the fact that it spills barely a drop of blood.

Paranormal Activity is set in the home of a young San Diego couple, day trader Micah (Micah Sloat) and his student girlfriend Katie (Katie Featherstone). Increasingly disturbed by things which go bump in the night, the couple set up a video camera to record any nocturnal disturbances. Soon, what appears to be a demonic presence terrorising the couple is captured on camera and the tension escalates.

Most film reviewers point out that Paranormal Activity's premise is not particularly original in terms of content or style - countless comparisions have been made with the 1999 low-budget horror The Blair Witch Project - but applaud Peli's film for creating a surprisingly effective sense of dread.

The Independent's Guy Adams wrote: "If you judge a movie by its ability to deliver on a promise, then Paranormal Activity, which has no ambition more lofty than to scare the living bejeezus out of you, has to go down as an unqualified success."

However, anyone expecting high-end Hollywood production values is going to be disappointed. The film was made for peanuts and it shows. The New York Times critic AO Scott said sniffily that the film sounded and looked "terrible", and complained of barely adequate acting and an illogical plot. "By any serious critical standard, Paranormal Activity is not a very good movie," he said.

However, even Scott conceded that the film "does have an ingenious, if not terribly original, formal conceit - that everything on-screen is real-life amateur video - that is executed with enough skill to make you jump and shriek".

But what most film critics are agreed on is that the film should be seen in a crowded cinema, preferably late at night. "Watched in a half-empty cinema, parts of Paranormal Activity could fall flat," Adams admits. "But at a packed midnight screening, sandwiched between gasping filmgoers, it feels impossible to escape its sheer, visceral sense of dread."

WHAT THE CRITICS ARE SAYING
Nigel Floyd, Time Out: "Even when the camera is locked on to the tripod, showing only a static shot of the bedroom, its open door and the corridor beyond, the quivering tension is maintained, our eyes combing the shadows and the edges of the frame in search of anything out of the ordinary... see it if you dare." (Verdict: four stars out of five).

Sukhdev Sandhu, Daily Telegraph: "Peli's canniest realisation is that the best horror is that which focuses on what can be imagined but can't or needn't be shown. Less is more. It’s cheaper that way - and potentially more profitable, too."

Richard Corliss, Time: "The movie keeps us in its grip because we never leave the couple's haunted property and because all we see is what the camera has recorded when held by Micah or Katie, or when left on at night to monitor their bedroom. That claustrophobia creates a bond between the couple and the audience; they can't escape, and neither can we."

Nigel Andrews, the Financial Times: "Strictly judged, didn’t the story and characters need more development? All we get to know of this couple is their suggestibility, their hyperkinetic mannerisms by day and their sound sleeping patterns at night, when not woken by Judgment Day thuds. Paranormal Activity shows how little it takes for inventive filmmakers to do a lot. With a tiny bit more invention, we just feel, they could have done a lot more." (Verdict: four stars out of five).

Peter Bradshaw, the Guardian: "This ingenious and often genuinely frightening film is a digital mocu-real nightmare, based on the idea of "found" video footage, comparable to The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield, lower in budget and humbler in scale than both – but arguably scarier than either." (Verdict: four stars out of five). ·