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Stylistic influencesBy Thomas Hall

Directors

Oren Peli is probably one of my favorite films directors, he worked on the block-buster “Paranormal activity” in which he was the director, writer, cinematographer and editor. After its wild success worldwide, he went to work on the sequels PA2, in which he was the producer and writer and PA3 in which he was the producer. He has quite a unique way of working on his movies, he often films them in a “low-budget” kind of way, often not taking long to shoot his films, here is a short description of how he works when working on movies;

“Attempting to focus on believability rather than action and gore, Peli chose to shoot the picture with a home video camera. In deciding on a more raw and stationary format (the camera was almost always sitting on a tripod or something else) and eliminating the need for a camera crew, a "higher degree of plausibility" was created for the audience as they were "more invested in the story and the characters”. Peli says that the dialogue was "natural" because there was no real script. Instead, the actors were given outlines of the story and situations to improvise, a technique known as “Retroscripting” which was used in “The Blair Witch Project”.

Documentary-Style movies

“A documentary, is a type of film or television show in which fictitious events are presented in documentary format.” I’m quite interested in the documentary-style genre of movies (Movies such as “Cloverfield” ) They have a very unique of getting across the feelings and emotions of characters and scenes. They a give an interesting feeling of the viewers being in the scene with the characters and being part of the movie, which, if used in conjunction with the horror movie genre, then it can increase the horror to a horror film, so to speak.

The Paranormal activity movie series

My choice in movie style was heavily influenced by the paranormal activity movies, they have sometimes been called some of the scariest films in 10 years, which I think is a major accomplishment. Considering that the movies themselves are only small budget and yet they have managed to scare millions of people around the world, in their homes and in cinemas.

I think some of the success of the movies is tied to the “Realism” involved in shooting the movies, there was not big budget to work with, so the temptation to lash out on large CGI monsters and special effects wasn’t there giving it more real feel to it than most horror/ Sci-fi films have these days.

The use of the camera in these movies is also quite well done, they treat the camera like it is another person there, and when the movies is viewed it gives the feeling of being in the movie itself, with the character and in the setting with them.