The first movie centers around Katie, an English major, and her partner Micah, a day trader: a young, white, middle-class couple who have just moved into what several reviewers call their “starter home,” implying that it is the first in a series of houses that they will own over the course of their lives (see Solomons). The final section looks at the incorporation of immaterial labor in the marketing of the first film in particular, through transmedia paratexts and engagement of horror fans’ social media activity in the cultural production of the Paranormal Activity brand.ĭemon Domestic: 21st-Century Horror at Home Second, a formal analysis of the movies’ post-cinematic aesthetic calls attention to their cinematography and editing, which both portray and employ digital technologies that have become commonplace in most American homes, as well as crucial in the global circulation of information and capital. To begin, I examine the ways in which gender, race, and class coalesce within the domestic space of the 21st-century American home.
This chapter reads the Paranormal Activity franchise as an ongoing post-cinematic allegory of debtor capitalism, attending to three levels of analysis and the ways in which they interpenetrate one another. Indeed, while some films explicitly take on the horrors of the housing crisis-such as Sam Raimi’s Drag Me To Hell, which premiered in early 2009-and the subsequent films in this franchise were made during the crisis, the first Paranormal movie’s housing crisis subtext is largely unintended and all the more telling for that reason. However, given that the first film was made in the last year of the housing boom, and that its wide release came at the height of the credit crisis, such a cultural interpretation is actually unavoidable-despite film critic Dana Stevens’s self-deprecating comment that her reading of the first film, as a “parable about the credit crisis” that is “all about spiritual and ethical debts coming due,” is “possibly crackpot.” I had the same interpretation of the film before reading her review, and I contend that it is decidedly not crackpot. To be clear, the Paranormal Activity franchise is not explicitly “about” the neoliberal condition of debtor capitalism there is no indication that the filmmaker consciously constructed it as an allegory, or, indeed, with any intended message beyond its overt plot about a demon terrorizing a young couple. The demon-creditor in Paranormal Activity resonates within the movie’s economic milieu, calling in its debt at the expense of all other concerns the affective experience of this horror movie aptly foreshadows the credit-crisis ‘structure of feeling’ of insecurity, helplessness, and dread in the face of enforced compliance with an economic contract. Things begin to go wrong for them when, eerily foreshadowing the housing crisis, a demon begins to toy with them, trying to collect on an ancestor’s Faustian bargain. Made just before the real estate crash and released two years after, at the height of the credit crisis, the movie centers on a young California couple in their vast new house. That year there were 2.8 million foreclosure filings and unemployment reached 10% in the United States (Adler). One of the most striking things about watching the horror movie Paranormal Activity nowadays is the way it portrays the American home just before the housing bubble burst, at the height of what President Bush called “the ownership society.” The film is set in September and October of 2006, the same year it was shot on a shoestring budget by writer, director, cinematographer, and editor Oren Peli, but it only gained wide release in 2009, when it was picked up by Paramount-DreamWorks.
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