Watched Paranormal Activity last night after Mrs. Lizard King went to bed.  Turned out all the lights and opened the windows for extra ambient background sounds.  My verdict?  It creeped the poopers out of me.  And I’m someone who never says “poopers.”  In fact, I’m pretty sure this is the first time I’ve ever used it.  Either way, I have to concede that this is a bona fide scary movie.  The best I’ve seen in a very long time.  Even for a disbeliever like me, this film is deeply affective.  That’s because it eschews exploiting ghost mania in favor of preying on good old fashioned vulnerabilities like the fear that someone might do something to you while you’re sleeping.  I kept waiting for the paranormal entity to put shaving cream on someone’s face or slip it’s penis into the dude’s ear while the camera was running.  Never happened, though.  To be honest, when the actual spooky stuff occurs it’s a relief.  The film spends most of it’s time building suspense, and it does so masterfully.  Night after night you watch the couple sleeping just anticipating something horrible happening.  Your eyes dart around the room, waiting.  Your attention is constantly drawn to the hallway outside the bedroom where you know something is lurking.  In the end, it loses some of  its punch by turning into a Japanese Horror movie.  (The ghostie kind and not the giant lizard kind.)  But, honestly, I can’t think of a better way to resolve the story than the way they did it.  Rather than keeping the viewer constantly guessing at what is actually occurring, they decide to unveil the horror and give the audience the payoff it’s been waiting for.  I have to applaud that.  Big round of applause all the way around for Paranormal Activity.  Good stuff.

The movie gave me bad dreams even.  Which NEVER happens.  I dreamed that the government was going to take away my college degrees because I never actually fulfilled all of the requirements for completing Junior High School.  I had to go back to Junior High for one complete year.  It was like I was trapped in an Adam Sandler movie.  Shiver.  Even worse, I had to go back to the same Junior High of my youth.  Inexplicably, all of the same teachers were there.  I would go up to them to work out a scheduling conflict, and they assumed I was an irate parent.  Then I had to explain to them the situation.  That really threw them off of their game.  They were such little cowards after that.  They couldn’t look me in the eye; they kept calling me “Mr.” Lizard King.  It was awesome.  What was not awesome was that they set my lunch period from 5 to 6.  Who ever heard of such a thing?  I spent that whole dream following the bureaucratic chain of command to get a decent lunch hour.  When I was supposed to be in Shop class, I was instead trying to get an appointment to see the principal.  When I was explaining to the Shop teacher why I wasn’t in class, I was missing English.  See what a nightmare it was?  I remember this one kid looking at me and scoffing, “What? Are you like ‘thirty’ or something?”  I replied, “Yes.  Yes, I am thirty.”  Since “thirty” in the eyes of a fourteen year old might as well be fifty or even seventy.  But having people think I was thirty was much less demeaning than having them know my actual age.

There you have it.  The experiment is done, thank the gods.  It took me places I never wish to revisit.  Like Home Economics.  But isn’t that what good Horror movies do?