Behind the door of a seemingly normal American home lies something evil. Something that’s been waiting. No, it’s not a demon – it’s a heteronormative relationship with a total douchebag!
Join Alex and Andrea for a dive into the murky waters of demonology, tech bros, and home security with Oren Peli’s feature film debut.
REQUIRED READING
Paranormal Activity. Dir. Oren Peli, 2007.
EXTRA CREDIT
The Faculty of Horror: Episode 26. Mother Lover: Matriarchy in The Wicker Man (1973 & 2006) and Paranormal Activity 3 (2011).
Horror’s New Wave: 15 Years of Blumhouse. In which Jason Blum break’s down PA’s long road to theatrical release.
Horror’s New Wave: 15 Years of Blumhouse. In which Jason Blum break’s down PA’s long road to theatrical release.
With Paranormal Activity, Paramount Sets New Marketing Model. An overview of the grassroots marketing campaign.
Surveillance Tech is Changing Our Behaviour and Our Brains. How our rapidly evolving technology is taking over our domestic and public spaces.
I Love My Husband (Who Hates Me). The Cut’s piece on the socially acceptable misogyny in heteronormative relationships.
“Understanding Home Video” from Home Truths? Video Production and Domestic Life: Tracing the home video industry from America’s Funniest Home Videos to FailArmy.
The right-wing roots of Silicon Valley: traces the roots of the techbro boom in the ’90s to the “free thinkers” of the modern manosphere.
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Paranormal Activity strikes me as one of the worst movies to have spawned a franchise (The Purge is another). It’s not scary, and the idiot protagonist is just annoying. The Blair Witch Project works because getting lost in the woods actually is scary, even aside from the supernatural aspect.
My understanding is that actual historians regard Foucault as peddling innaccurate history. The idea that power is what ultimately matters has led to some reactionaries embracing Foucault, and I find them completely insufferable.
Day traders are definitely classified as “finance” rather than “tech” (Leigh Whanell’s Invisible Man is actually about tech). You said that while geographically the Bay Area overwhelmingly votes Democratic, the donations of the tech sector are more toward Republicans. This is false. OpenSecrets keeps track of donations, including by industry, and “Internet” shows up as one of those with the highest partisan skew (specifically, toward Democrats): https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus?ind=B13&cycle=2024 If you aren’t satisfied with “Internet” as representing tech, the same page has a link to “Computer software”, with most of the top firms again skewing Democrat in their donations. If it doesn’t seem that way to you, it’s because outlets like the Guardian aren’t reporting on data by industry but instead famous individuals, who in cases like Thiel (really more of a venture capitalist than an entrepreneur himself) are notable for their distinct politics rather than actually being representative. But since, as I noted, the film is actually about finance rather than tech, it’s worth noting how donations from that sector stack up. That industry was ranked as the #1 source of donations for 2023-2024, and their donations were $280,655,465 “To Democrats & Liberal Groups” vs $211,935,947 “To Republicans & Conservative Groups”.
I may not have my finger on the pulse of contemporary Hollywood, but I’m pretty sure Kristin Bell is a bigger star with more “power” than Dax Shepard (who as far as I can tell is mostly just a podcaster riding on her coattails). If she actually thought his behavior was abusive, she could leave him and have plenty of resources. She’s not in a situation like Paranormal Activity depending on a male breadwinner in the slightest. It’s people outside the relationship, with a parasocial relationship to it, who think she has a terrible taste in a partner.
You make a good point about the demon not having a motive to kill its host. I believe in one alternate ending the police kill her, which could still fit with that.