What is it that makes supernatural horror the genre of choice today? This is not just any horror but a new kind, one that is less gratuitous than a ‘slasher’ leaving more to the imagination and dealing with an external fear surpassing the microcosmic interior world of the psychological thriller? The unequaled success of the PARANORMAL ACTIVITY franchise is prime example. This isn’t just an old fashioned ghost story with haunted souls disturbing the living; no, the lurking paranormal presence in these films suggests a cumulative fear of the unknown and something dark and uncontrollable ever burgeoning beneath the surface, above and all around us.

What is it? Could this be society's collective subconscious facing an unspeakable horror that is just about to expose itself and change everything we know? Could this be our unconscious forcing us to face what we have long tried to push away and ignore? What is happening today in the world? Over population, exhausting of resources, terminal disease, greater rifts between rampant poverty and the ridiculously rich, onslaught of natural disasters and the world besieged by and drowning itself in toxic and material waste...hmm, those are all pretty terrifying things. But we continue to turn our gaze away and live in a childlike naivete, as if we don’t look then it doesn’t exist. Well, all of this is happening and we know it. Prince Prospero sealed himself away in his tower far and safe from The Mask of the Red Death (Poe) but the latter came and took the former with a vengeance in the end.

So, could it be that the trend for supernatural horror films where something big and scary, not a ghost but an angry unseen force lurks in the shadows tapping into the collective psyche for us to finally face the inevitable? Well, you decide. But there is something to be said for the unparalleled success of PARANORMAL ACTIVITY.

written by Vanessa McMahon

NEWS FLASH! 

PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 3 made history this weekend as the highest grossing opening weekend for a horror film ever, raking in $54million!!!