Arriving on a wave of carefully orchestrated viral hype, Paranormal Activity lacks the conceptual elegance of its obvious precursor, The Blair Witch Project. The movie invites us into the home of a couple (Katie Featherston and Micah Sloat) conveniently saddled with the same names as the actors who play them. Katie suspects a haunting, so in what’s now a time-honoured tradition, they’ve grabbed a camcorder and elected to film everything. While superior to inept would-be Blairs like Open Water, Oren Peli’s horror flick often has the feel of a film-school exercise in which the object is to wring maximum suspense from rudimentary tools.

Still, there aren’t many movies that have the power to scare you with the sound of a creaking door, and it’s hard not to admire the way Paranormal Activity makes a virtue of simplicity. The opening scenes, which suggest nothing so much as a mumblecore horror flick, are eye-gougingly boring and slapdash – but that’s the point. In its most effective steal, the film makes brilliant use of a stubbornly fixed camera: As we wait, trapped with the tripod in Micah and Katie’s bedroom, wondering what happened downstairs, it’s easy to forgive the movie’s crudeness.

Ben Kenigsberg

From Time Out New York

Dir Oren Peli, Category IIB, 87 mins, opens Thursday 14