User:HumanxAnthro/sandbox/Themes in the Paranormal Activity films

Context
Paranormal Activity was released during a cycle of supernatural horror films similar to one in the 1970s that included The Exorcist (1973) and The Amityville Horror (1979) and also was analyzed to be influenced by that period's social climate; the United States was dealing with the Watergate scandal and Vietnam War, a recession, a rise in sexual liberation and feminist movements (Leyda, p, 402). In cultural anthropologist Natasha Zaretsky's view, haunted house films of the 1970s stars families that symbolize the country. They reside in houses possessed by spirts of victims of mass killings or those were buried in cemeteries removed in favor of the building; the hauntings are meant to uncover past injustices to the privileged families that are the source of national decline in the present, with the families doing what they can to amend them (Leyda, p, 402). Zaretsky also interpreted most of these films as promoting a strong family unit, as the families survive very severe possessions in the end (Leyda, p, 402).

Techniques
"For years, the Saw films owned the Halloween movie-going season, but like a breath of slightly ethereal air, the more subtle and supernatural Paranormal Activity series replaced gory torture with sound and suggestion, providing theater-goers with a thrilling roller coaster ride of invisible demons, witches, and last-minute jump scares."

- Arnold T. Blumberg (Blumberg, 2018)

The Paranormal Activity features, like other horror films, involve typical situations becoming askew; and, as with other paranormal fiction, has its hauntings take place in a home someone would find in real-life (Leyda p. 409). However, they subvert expectations of haunted house stories in various ways (North 2015). The evil spirit doesn't just terrorize a single space but wherever a character moves; this creates an impossible dilemma, as moving out of the house won't solve the conflict and recording the paranormal demon's actions only worsens it (North 2015). Colin Dickey also notes that unlike other stories of the genre where the setting is "the creepy mansion at the edge of town", the series take place in houses in the middle of regular neighborhoods (Dickey 2016).

The film's most-incorporated scare tactics include jump scares at the end of long static scenes, normally in the form of a camera getting yanked or something popping up in front of it (Sobczynski 2015).

The Paranormal Activity films are set in McMansions, houses which their aesthetic and architecture is notorious for their lack of cohesion. The films uses this to distort the unease of the demons' torments, a method that, while not in most other films of its kind, is in literature about possessed places, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel The House of the Seven Gables (1851), Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839), and Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House (1959) (Dickey 2016). In the first film, Katie and Micah uses only one of the four bedrooms and all of the exterior, as well as some of the interior, is never seen, creating a sense of tension about what could be in those other rooms; the claustrophobia caused by the found footage cinematography only adds to it, analyzed Colin Dickey (Dickey 2016) Noah Berlatsky described the second film as less claustrophobic than the first, as well as more like a studio-produced film, due to the use of security cameras, which there are multiple angles to cut between; less shaky shots; and taking place in a longer time period (Berlatsky 2018).

The franchise's houses themselves look new and don't have a history to speak of; this is different from houses of other haunted films that source their scares from their antiquated structures and past timeline (North 2015).

Great Recession and Housing Crisis
Around the same time as the first film's wide release, the horror film industry had many products with more upfront portrayals of the housing crisis, such as Sam Raimi's Drag Me to Hell (Leyda, p, 399).

Despite no indication from any of the cast and crew that the Paranormal Activity series allegorized the 2008 Great Recession, critics and academics interpreted it that way given its setting and initial release date being at the height of housing bubble (or what then-President George W. Bush termed the "ownership society") and its wide distribution at the peak of the 2008–2009 recession (Leyda, p. 398–399). Throughout the series, the demon is going after the entire family tree for an ancestor not paying the debt of a Faustian bargain (Leyda, p, 398). The demon's actions can be interpreted as presenting the anxiety and fears of families having to fulfill economic contracts during the subprime mortgage crisis (Leyda, pp 398–399).

The homes and lifestyles of the families are usual for suburban upper-middle-class white families (Leyda, p, 409). The films are set in big, lavish Southern Californian tract homes, with the sizes increasing as the series progressed; Anna North described the house in the The Ghost Dimension (2015) as the size of a mall (North 2015). The use of newly-renovated homes the families dreamed of as locations where they die is perceived to be debunks of the American Dream (Dickey 2016), particularly the California Dream since the films are set in California (North 2015), and adds to the recession allegory as the mortgage crisis hit subdivisions in the state the hardest (North 2015).

In the first film, Katie and Micah, a white middle-class couple, buy what reviews claim to be their "starter homer" (Leyda, p 400). Whereas a family owning a house is generally seen as a sign of safety and relaxation from the outside world, the Paranormal Activity homes, according to Julia Leyda, present a more jailed and isolated picture of a home, due to the fact that most of the scenes take place in one house (Leyda, p 400).

Technology and digital tools
The films, which have been frequently described by academics as post-cinematic, used digital, home-grade technology to shoot and edit, which is also an essential part of how capital and information is spread around worldwide (Leyda, p. 399).

The marketing of the first film is noted for its use of digital immaterial labor, such as social media engagement, and how it was a multi-media paratext of the film itself (Leyda, p. 399).

Gender
Leyda interprets the films as a depiction of postfeminism, due to its gender-normative families, domesticity, and dominance of consumer goods which was a prominent part of the 1990s economy (Leyda, p. 402). Particularly, the present-time adult woman characters, like Katie and Kristi, are an example of retreatism in postfeminist eras, where women chose to stay out of the workforce to enjoy the benefits of home life entirely supported by the male partner while at the same time holding the family together (Leyda pp. 404–405). Reproductive labor is practiced by the women, even those not raising a child like Katie and the second film's caretaker Martine; and, in Leyda's eye, Katie acts like a foster mother of the demon coven seen at the end of the fourth film (Leyda p. 407).

Leyda also noted Martine as portraying "ironic hierarchies" of not just gender but also race and class (Leyda 408). She teeters the "public/private divide," a feminist concept that women are oppressed under working in a private sector where leaders aren't held accountable and civil society not valuing their work; Martine does waged work for Kristi and Dan, with a mixture of both physical house work and affective labor in bonding with the children, yet the family derogatorily calls her a "nanny" (Leyda 407). Dan, the patriarch, fires Martine after learning she is going against his instructions of not burning dried herbs to rid the spirits of the house (Leyda 408). Leyda also perceived Martine getting paid for her work as an example of popular media's commodification of the domestic labor of United States immigrants, which sociologist Mary Romero that it increase social inequities (Leyda 408).

These behaviors are in line with female characters of other media released post-recession, a trend noticed by professors such as Tim Snelson, Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra; Snelson particularly interpreted women preventing repossession of a house as reinforcing female domesticity (Leyda p. 403–404).

In the third film, set in the late 1980s before a postfeminist era, mother Julie has a career that entirely supports her husband and kids, a structure not taken well by her mother Lois, who signed the Demonic hereditary obligation that haunts her future offspring which they are not aware of. (Leyda p. 405)

Most of the demon's possession takes place in areas of homes with a connotation of femininity, such as a baby's bedroom, a couple's bedroom, and the kitchen (Leyda p. 405).

In the Paranormal Activity franchise, the wife and girlfriend characters are more passive than females of most other 21st-century horror films which have masculine and virginal traits originating from the final girls of slasher flicks of the late 20th century (Leyda, p. 402–403). In Leyda's view, the wives are maternal and very protective, while their male partners ignore advice from their partners and unknowingly place the family in danger, especially through enforcing their bad actions with economic power over their loved ones;(Leyda p. 403) in the third film, Dennis risks the lives of his partner and her two daughters by hiding recorded footage of the demon out of fear it'll scare his girlfriend (Leyda pp. 403–404). Noah Berlatsky finds the relationship of the first film to be abusive, describing it as exposing the problems of the ideal suburban family lifestyle; whereas the second movie depicts a more stable couple haunted by the demon due to no fault of their own (Berlatsky 2018). Berlatsky also interpreted partner Dan unknowingly sending the demon to Katie to solve Kristi's issue, only resulting in Katie killing Kristi and Dan in the end, as a moral that suppressing problems in a family only causes them to be worse in the end (Berlatsky 2018).

The teenage girl characters, such as Ali and Alex, differ from the adult women in that they are independent and play a more active role in stopping the demon, characteristic of final girls (Leyda p. 403).

Linda Liu, in page 82, suspects the third and fourth film to scapegoat the destruction of "affluent heteronormative" families on women-filled covens, in a similar way nonheteronormative individuals and their lifestyles are blamed by conservative politicians for the decline of morality and traditional family values.

According to Liu's source in page 82, the woman figures in the films (who are also witches) have motivations which are known and, as a result, are a threat to what film theorist Laura Mulvey terms the "male gaze." This is also true of femme fatales. However, where witches differ from femme fatales is how they mess with the male gaze, with hidden rituals and supernatural beliefs instead of visual sexually-enticing bodies.

Liu, Page 83: There are moments where the husband character asks his wife to either take off clothes or do sexual activities while on tape, all ending up with the wife refusing to do it. Liu interprets this as the women taking control and going against heternormative portrayals of them typical in mainstream films, as well as adding to their secretive nature that intimidates the male gaze.

Human reactions of paranormal experiences
Benjamin Radford, an investigator and expert of the paranormal, claimed that while in the first film, the ghost is not real, it keeps true to how humans react to what they perceive to be ghosts; this includes them thinking a ghost kicked them off the bed when it's like they were hallucinating and fell off due to a leg spasm, and thinking slight movements of doors, objects, and lights are caused by ghosts when in actuality subtle winds, poor wall painting, or electric malfunction may have caused them (Redford 2009).