The Glitch Dimension: Paranormal Activity and the Technologies of Vision
The Glitch Dimension: Paranormal Activity and the Technologies of Vision
The six Paranormal Activity movies (2007–15) explore a variety of methods for creating ‘found-footage’ horror. Produced on extremely low budgets, they devise a number of ways to generate scares and thrills without resorting to complicated, high-end special effects. They make use of sound, of temporal delay, and of the limitations and affordances of consumer video products that are both used to create the films, and actually used within the films. This self-reflexivity points up the ways that our actual world is permeated with recording and surveillance devices. The Paranormal Activity films eschew most formal principles of commercial filmmaking; their low-budget, unconventional technologies present us with a new sort of post-cinematic – and post-phenomenological – media apparatus. The last film in the series, in particular, uses glitches and breakdowns of the image in order to convey how the demonic realm it is ostensibly concerned with corresponds with new technical devices that extend outside the actual human sensorium
Keywords: Glitch, Paranormal Activity, horror, post-cinematic, post-phenomenological
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