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Paranormal Activity was an independent film made on a tiny budget— reportedly only $15,000 for the initial shooting – that did astonishingly well upon its release.

After it was acquired and distributed by Paramount, it brought in $108 million in the US and an additional $85 million worldwide.

The math here is worth remarking on: This film grossed about 13,000 times its initial budget. People loved this movie, leading to its repeated sequelization between 2010 and 2021.

The original film featured two unknown actors, Micah Sloat and Katie Featherston, who play eponymous characters – Micah and Katie. This choice, of course, echoes The Shining, which cast Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance and Danny Lloyd as Danny Torrance. As in The Shining, the effect of the eponymy is to blur the line between fiction and reality – though in Paranormal Activity, the effect of that blurring will serve a novel purpose, and it will be accentuated by the fact that the entire film is found footage, shot by the protagonists themselves, whose POV we are aligned with throughout.

In the film, young lovers Katie and Micah live in San Diego together. We learn early on that there are paranormal phenomena going on in their home, not because we see them, but because Micah has decided he wants to make a film about them, and about how they torment his girlfriend.

Micah wants to capture it all on film, using a home video camera. Almost immediately, we can see that Micah’s aspirations are partly to film and thereby diagnose the paranormal phenomena that bedevil Katie—a potentially laudable goal – and partly to shoot a porno with his girlfriend – substantially less laudable.

As Micah and Katie discuss Micah’s plan to film the paranormal activity in their home, Katie registers that Micah is a little too focused on the film and a little too unfocused on her.

She says, “You’re supposed to be in love with me, not the machine.” He responds, insouciantly, “Well, we are going to be sleeping with this camera, you know. We’re going to put it in the bedroom.”

Not a question, not an offer, just a statement: We will be sleeping with this camera, you know. Through his assertion, the camera becomes, in effect, a third party to their relationship, and Katie is forced to comply with the plan.

Micah may seem like a devoted partner, but he is actually a predatory filmmaker who’s about to land his girlfriend in a situation of serious domestic horror precisely through his inability to respect her wishes and boundaries about the making of this film.

The next day, a psychic comes to see them for a consultation on the paranormal disturbances that follow Katie around; Katie hopes this psychic will be able to diagnose and perhaps dispel her paranormal phenomenon.

While Katie talks to the psychic, Micah jokes that hell play a spooky soundtrack to accompany their conversation. The film doesn’t spell out Micah’s motivations for being so flip, but it’s strongly implied that he doesn’t like the idea of the psychic taking charge of what Micah sees as his film project, wresting away Micah’s authorial control. Katie explains the long history of her “haunting” to the psychic, though Micah intermittently interrupts to minimize what she’s saying or to cast doubt on the psychic. This is going to be his film, damn it, and no one else can play a significant role in how things progress.

Micah becomes more interested in the psychic, however, when he reveals that Katie is not being haunted by a ghost but by a demon. Micah’s filmmaking instincts kick into high gear. He suggests that they get a Ouija board in order to interact with the demon directly. Micah wants to remake The Exorcist, but make it as an action movie that he stars in as the hero. The psychic warns them against trying to communicate with the demon, but Micah doesn’t care; he is bound and determined to direct his own sequel to Friedkin’s 1973 film, casting himself as William Friedkin and Katie as Ellen Burstyn.

Katie wants to call a professional demonologist, but Micah tries repeatedly to talk her out of it. He minimizes her worry and questions her perceptions, much as Guy minimizes Rosemary’s concerns about the coven in their apartment building and attempts to deny her access to outside information.

And like Guy, Micah tries to paint his female partner as overly anxious, overly inflexible; he gaslights her, he manipulates her. He also violates her privacy.

At one point, she calls out from the adjacent bathroom to turn the camera off because she’s peeing – another reference to an iconic scene from The Exorcist—and he doesn’t do it immediately.

Before they go to sleep that night, he lies to her, saying the camera is turned off, while he tries to get Katie to have sex with him.

Paranormal Activity sets up Micah as a predatory domestic abuser, whose mechanism of abuse is the camera itself. Micah uses the same coercive control tactics that we saw in Polanski’s film, only here he is in the role of Polanski and Guy Woodhouse simultaneously.

In a scene relatively late in the film, we see Katie doing beadwork with a female friend when Micah aggressively intrudes upon what Katie calls their “intense girl time” with his camera. Katie says she needs a break from the camera, which angers Micah. “What the fuck?” he says. “I’m trying to show you something.” Micah doesn’t like when his control over Katie in the home is interrupted by this interloping woman, not any more than Guy liked it when Rosemary’s friends hauled her into the kitchen at the party and shut him out.

Building on the Rosemary’s Baby echoes, the scene then veers sharply toward The Exorcist as a horror touchstone when Micah says hell get an Ouija board.

Katie begins to experience disturbances more obviously akin to demon possession than any she has encountered before. Up until now, she’d heard noises at night, had things moved mysteriously around in the house.

Disturbing, but not terrifying. Not an indication of her being possessed. Now, she wakes up, stands perfectly still in front of the camera for two hours in the middle of the night, wanders down to the lower floor and out into the backyard, all without meaning to, and without remembering it the next day.

When Micah learns this by reviewing the film, he is freaked out, but he simply channels his fear into more aggressive filmmaking. He whips out his Ouija board and challenges the demon on camera, “All right, you little fucker, you got something to say?” Like Guy in Rosemary’s Baby, Micah facilitates the demon’s access to his female partner and is utterly unyielding in his refusal to listen to her protests after the demon has shown up and begun to interact with her.

Micah asks Katie, mockingly, if she wants to call an exorcist; she shouts, “Yes, yes!” But Micah steps firmly into the paterfamilias role: “I’m taking care of this. This is my house, you’re my girlfriend. I’m going to fucking solve the problem.” No exorcist intervention, no demonologist. And definitely no Father Damien Karras. The dynamic here, with Micah programmatically rejecting professional help for his girlfriend, very strongly recalls Robert Thorn’s reaction to Father Brennan’s warnings about Damien. Robert sees Kathy as his wife, Damien as his son, and he will allow no outside interference in how he runs his household. Micah, of course, is wired the same way. Katie, like Kathy (both Katherines, perhaps not totally accidentally), is put in grave danger by her partner’s mentality.

But unlike Kathy Thorn, Katie knows there’s something supernatural going on, and, with that knowledge, she is able to make a decision on her own behalf. She finally insists on calling Dr. Averies, the demonologist, over Micah’s protests. Micah complains, saying he’s “in control” of Katie and their home. Finally fed up with his fatuous assertions, Katie says, “You’re not in control. It is in control. If you think you’re in control, then you’re being an idiot… You are absolutely powerless.” At long last, Katie takes a real stand, not only against Micah but against the fiction that patriarchy keeps women safe in the home. In so doing, Katie goes somewhere Kathy Thorn never dreamed possible.

And there’s a reason she’s able to do so. Katie has seen this movie before— The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby, The Stepford Wives, The Omen. She knows the demon is in control, and she now clearly knows Micah is facilitating the demon’s control through his cinematic ambitions.

As she puts it, “Micah, you and your stupid camera are the problem.” Katie’s realization, however, comes too late.

The demon takes possession of Katie so that she gets out of bed at night, stands creepily for a while over a sleeping Micah, then heads out into the hallway where we cannot see her anymore. Once there, she—-presumably still possessed by the demon-screams for Micah, who jumps from the bed and races to help her.

We don’t see their interaction, but we hear it off camera. She screams, Micah screams, and then there are loud thunks followed by total silence. A few seconds later, we hear heavy footsteps coming back up the stairs, and Katie appears at the doorway, hurls Micah’s corpse across the room, and reveals herself, covered in his blood. She starts sniffing Micah in an animalistic way that seems to indicate that she herself has killed him, perhaps as her prey. The sniffing continues until she registers that the camera is on and trained on her. Slowly, she lifts her gaze toward it and ultimately lunges toward it. Camera off. So Katie is possessed, Micah is slain, and the film survives to speak for both of them.

Now, the most obvious overall reading of this film is that it’s a straight-up demon possession horror, very self-consciously in a lineage with The Exorcist.

We can add to that reading that the film is a domestic horror about coercive control, very much in line with Rosemary’s Baby. It also resonates very strongly with The Omen. But what I think is fascinating about this film’s participation in the domestic horror genre is that it ends with the demon punishing the bad boyfriend, not the ostensible female victim. This demon may want to possess Katie, but it wants to kill the wannabe patriarch, the self-styled “director” of all the violence.

In fact, Katie will go on to be in five of the sequels to the original film. She winds up being a survivor, albeit a survivor possessed by a murderous demon.

Paranormal Activity reboots and revises The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby, and The Omen, then, but with a critical feminist twist. This time, the woman is not the ultimate object of attack. Instead, it’s the male abuser, punished by the demon for his predatory filmmaking aspirations.

Micah wanted to film Katie pornographically; he wanted to film her against her will; evidently, the demon didn’t much care for that. Remember that in the final, final moment of the film, the demon (housed in Katie’s body) lunges at the camera. This represents a huge swerve from the 1970s domestic horrors I’ve featured in this book. It’s almost as if, in this revisionist engagement with the demonic domestic horror that The Exorcist inaugurated, the demon is fighting for Katie, not against her.

Fascinatingly, this critique of the male gaze on female suffering threads through many of the films in the franchise. There are numerous sequels, as I said, to the original Paranormal Activity, several released in very quick succession. Parts 2 and 3, like the original, center on a male figure who takes film footage of the demon-possessed women in his family. So, for three consecutive films, we see that the demon stalking and possessing Katie (and eventually also her sister Kristi) achieves his heightened power over the women’s bodies in the domestic sphere because of a male relative (Paranormal Activity: boyfriend; Paranormal Activity 2: husband; Paranormal Activity 3: boyfriend) who decides to record their lives on video.

The series grapples with the idea that “demonic possession” of women originates in men who overextend their sense of ownership over their female partners to include those partners’ stories, images, and voices.

Indeed, there’s something quite Stepford-y about it – remember how the Men’s Association took Joanna’s pictures and her voice? That’s what Micah and the male leads of the first two sequels all do, too.

This series, then, advances a thesis that resonates loud and clear with the classic domestic horrors of the ’70s, a thesis that male domestic partners can cause horror to befall a woman through their desire to overexert their power over her through recording technology.

By doing that, on a meta level, Paranormal Activity also offers a stinging riposte to the likes of Polanski, Kubrick, and Friedkin, as if to say to a new

generation of domestic horror filmmakers that, if we are going to make horror films about the subjection of women’s bodies, minds, sexualities, and souls to patriarchal abuse in the home, let’s not rely so heavily on our male, directorial privilege as a proxy paterfamilias in so doing. No more “torture the women” in order to make a horror film. Let’s figure out a way to do things differently while maintaining all the heat of the domestic horror genre. Let’s let the Micahs get picked off for once, not the Katies.