Editorials
‘Paranormal Activity 3’ And What I Learned At My “Tea With Toby”
Last week Paramount held a “Tea With Toby” at The Roosevelt Hotel in celebrate today’s DVD/Blu-ray release of Paranormal Activity 3.
What was “Tea With Toby”? It was a press event where I (among other journalists) was summoned to the hotel for a late afternoon Tea. Complete with sandwiches, smoked salmon, little pastries – what I had always imagined Tea being like in England.
We were there to discuss the film (and the franchise) with Oren Peli, Katie Featherston, Micah Sloat, Christopher Smith, Chloe Csengery and Jessica Tyler Brown. While it was a breezy and enjoyable 90 minutes, the gracious and polite Peli lived up to his notoriously tight-lipped reputation in regard to any new info on the series. And the cast followed suit.
But still, fun was had and, if anything, I walked away more energized to revisit the franchise. Hit the jump for the full report!
Upon my arrival at the hotel I was escorted through the main lobby, past the famous Roosevelt pool, and into a room darkened with pitch black curtains. Awaiting me was a vast array of teas, bottled water and snacks. Beer and wine was also offered but I passed.
Pretty soon cast and creatives from the Paranormal Activity franchise (along with my fellow journalists) began to wander in and take their assigned seats. In the corner, Teddy Ruxpin was set up with his own tea set which, if you’ve seen Paranormal Activity 3, requires no explanation.
Oren Peli, Micah Sloat, Katie Featherston took seats across from me and to my left, Christopher Smith sat directly in front of me, and across to my right were Chloe Csengery and Jessica Tyler Brown.
One of the most interesting dynamics of the day to witness was the interaction between Smith, Csengery and Brown. Their time onset during the shooting (and planned re-shooting) of the film clearly brought about a familial bond. Smith seemed to take a paternal role towards them, helping them gently with their answers (without putting words in their mouth) throughout the event.
One topic that did come up was the increasing budget size for the series. Don’t get the wrong idea, these films are still made very cheaply and of course provide a huge return on investment, but the first Paranormal Activity cost only a fraction of what they spent on PA 3.
According to Peli, while of course the crew is bigger on the films now and people get paid a little more, in the case of Part 3 much of it was spent on sound design, finding and renting a house and making it 80’s authentic, and making sure the film was ready by its October release date.
“ We did do some work on it. We didn’t want to throw the 80’s thing in your face too much though. We needed to dress it up. We just wanted it to look authentic. That this is what it would look like if video cameras were rolling in the 80’s.”
Smith added, “It felt like I grew up in that house“.
Now, can we get any insight on part 4? “Of course not“, Peli laughs.
Do you know where you’re going with it? “We have some ideas“.
I turn to Csenegry and Brown, hoping they won;t be quote as circumspect. How about them? Will they be in Paranormal Activity 4? “I sure hope so!“, says Brown. Clearly she’s learned from the best at not giving away too much!
Back to Peli, what is the benefit of the quick turnaround and tight shooting schedule on these films? “You always wish you had more time. The fact that you have a release date that is immovable, you have to get the movie made no matter what. It’s both a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing because you know the studio will put their full resources into finishing it. It does force you to move quickly, which can sometimes be good. In feature development you hear stories about movies that take years and sometimes a decade to develop, but we know we’ll be out in October. But you always with you had more time. There’s always a panic that builds up when you have ten weeks until release, so you have to lock the picture four weeks before release, and you’re still shooting. It’s scary, but at the end of the day, if someone has an idea, normally you talk about it two weeks later. We talk about it that day and then shoot it two days later.”
Someone asks Csengery and Brown if they believe in ghosts. “Chris does“, they say laughing.
“Yes, that’s right“, he replies.
Someone asks Peli if its true that everyone onset is allowed to pitch ideas for sequences and scares in the film. “We definitely have an atmosphere where everyone is allowed to suggest anything no matter what their role is. And we have a ver small crew. We basically did ‘Part 2’ and ‘Part 3’ as one, so we’re kind of a ‘Paranormal Activity’ family and there’s a collaborative atmosphere. Everyone can feel free to talk to the writers, producers and directors and if it’s a cool idea we shoot it. We don’t care where it came from, only if it’s cool.”
About the home video release, do you think it’s actually more effective watching this at home? In a dark house? Peli replies, “I think it’s a different experience. To some degree there’s nothing like watching it in a theater with the energy of the crowd. It’s a much more communal experience. But watching it at home we’ve heard people say it’s scarier because it’s much more intimate. And also the subject matter is about what happens to you at hem alone at night. And people usually watch movies in the evening. So when you turn off the TV and have to go to sleep, you’re conscious of every little sound in the house!”
Watching the Blu-ray later that weekend, I have to say he’s right.
Paranormal Activity 3 is out on DVD and Blu-ray today. It boasts a host of special features including an extended cut that I prefer to the theatrical edition.
Paranormal Activity 3 Blu-ray/DVD Combo Pack: The Paranormal Activity 3 Blu-ray is presented in 1080p high definition with English 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio, French 5.1 Dolby Digital, Spanish 5.1 Dolby Digital, Portuguese 5.1 Dolby Digital and English Audio Description with English, English SDH, French, Spanish and Portuguese subtitles. The DVD in the combo pack is presented in widescreen enhanced for 16:9 televisions with English 5.1 Surround and English, French, Spanish and Portuguese subtitles. The digital copy is presented in English.
Blu-ray Special Features:
Original theatrical version of the film
Unrated version of the film
Lost tapes
DVD Special Features:
Unrated Version of the Film
Digital copy of unrated version—compatible with iTunes® and Windows Media
A trilogy DVD set will also be available on January 24th exclusively at Walmart, which includes the theatrical and unrated versions of all three films plus all previously released bonus material.
Editorials
Hidden Treasures: Rediscovering the Horror-Comedy Gems of Bob Hope and Paulette Goddard
1939 is often called Hollywood’s Greatest Year, and it is indisputable that a huge number of America’s greatest classics were produced in that single year. A usually ignored element of that greatness is that 1939 was also the year that Hollywood resumed production on horror films after a two-year pause. In late 1936 two major factors led to the practical death of the genre: the Laemmle family, of whom Carl Laemmle’s, Jr. was horror’s greatest advocate, lost control of Universal and the British Board of Censors began enforcing the “H” certificate, which for all practical purposes banned horror for its target audience in Britain. The loss of this lucrative market combined with dropping box-office receipts and mounting pressure from American religious groups, Hollywood saw no reason to continue producing horror. The phrase “horror is dead” has often been thrown around over the decades but in 1937 and 38, it was actually true.
Then in 1938, Emil Umann (surely one of horror’s great unsung heroes) of the Regina theater in Beverly Hills programed a triple feature of Frankenstein, Dracula, and Son of Kong (quickly dropping the third film to add more showings) and business boomed proving to Hollywood that horror was still in demand. In 1939, Universal broke its horror silence with the release of Son of Frankenstein. Paramount, who had also been an important voice in horror in the early thirties, opted for a different track, combining a remake of a classic silent horror film with one of its most popular comedic actors, Bob Hope, and teaming him with a rising star, Paulette Goddard. The pair appeared in two horror comedies together, The Cat and the Canary in 1939 and The Ghost Breakers in 1940. Though usually overshadowed by the string of Abbott and Costello meet the Monsters movies produced by Universal in the late forties and fifties, these films all but invented the horror-comedy as we know it.
Of course, humor had been in horror movies before, James Whale was particularly adept at this, but The Cat and the Canary is something different, combining the laughs and chills in a way that had not been seen before. It begins at an old, crumbling mansion on the Louisiana bayou where a group of relatives gather to hear the reading of Cyrus Canby Norman’s will at midnight on the tenth anniversary of his death. If that sounds cliché that is entirely the point. Hope’s character of actor Wally Campbell even points out that it is. “Midnight, the alligators…the heirs, and the family lawyer all gathering to hear the reading of the will. It reminds me of a lot of the melodramas and murder mysteries I played in.” And there are many more tropes than that including the old spinster housekeeper who believes the house is haunted, a portrait with the eyes cut out through which the villain observes the heroine, secret passageways behind bookcases, cobweb-filled cellars, a treasure hunt, an escaped maniac from a local asylum, and a couple murders here and there. The difference is that the characters in the movie know they are clichés and use them to their advantage. In fact, The Cat and the Canary is one of the first self-referential horror films—it was “meta” almost sixty years before Scream.
The story of The Cat and the Canary had been around for quite some time by 1939. It began life as a play by John Willard in 1922 and had already been made into two films, the first in 1927 under the original title, and in 1930 as The Cat Creeps (not to be confused with the 1946 film that is something else entirely), and was remade once again in 1978. Most versions of the story are straightforward murder mystery/horror stories, which is one of the reasons why the 1939 film is so special. One of the elements that makes the film brilliant is that most of the characters and situations are serious, and only Hope is the comic foil.
The visual style is very much in line with classic horror films and director Elliot Nugent seems to be taking his cues from great horror directors who came before like F.W. Murnau and James Whale. The film is absolutely dripping with the kind of atmosphere horror fans would expect and the scares are genuine. I would argue that these two films are more frightening than in the brilliant Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), which leans much more toward the comedy. In The Cat and the Canary there are huge stakes and real danger involved. The killer takes out two people and very nearly a third. Also, there is never a moment to disprove the ghosts the housekeeper Miss Lu (Gale Sondergaard) believes in, a dead body drops out of a passageway, and shadows creep and crawl over the walls like the vines and moss that cover the outside of the Norman mansion.
Bob Hope is then dropped into this scenario and offers a performance that in itself balances realism, fear, and humor. Wally Campbell is a classic scaredy-cat that pretends to be a heroic lead, a tradition that would carry on in more exaggerated forms with actors like Jerry Lewis and Don Knotts, and in characters like Shaggy from Scooby-Doo. Campbell even draws attention to this fact with the line “I always joke when I’m scared. I kind of kid myself into being brave.” He is also a voice for the audience, pointing the clichés out to his fellow characters before the audience can groan at them, thereby subverting the tropes and keeping the mystery engaging. Again, a similar idea to Randy (Jamie Kennedy) in the Scream films. Hope even has something of a “straight man” in several scenes in the character of Cicily (Nydia Westman) who sets up several punchlines for the comedian. “Don’t big empty houses scare you?” she asks. “Not me, I used to be in Vaudeville,” comes his quick response. Another great exchange as the two are making their way into the darkened cellar is “Do you believe in reincarnation? You know, that dead people come back?” she asks. “You mean like Republicans?” he quips.
In the film’s vein of commenting on its own plot, just as Hope asks where his leading lady is, she enters—Joyce Norman, played by Paulette Goddard. At the time, Goddard was best known as Charlie Chaplin’s co-star in Modern Times (1936) and as his wife in real life. She also starred in George Cukor’s The Women earlier in 1939 and would go on to co-star in Chaplin’s The Great Dictator the following year. In The Cat and the Canary, she is a classic leading lady of the thirties—beautiful, sometimes in distress, but more often modern, self-possessed, and perfectly capable of taking care of herself. Though Hope is not the classically handsome leading man, the two have an undeniable chemistry and it is believable that they would fall for each other in the world of the film. Her role is not particularly comedic, but the audience is easily won over by her considerable warmth and charm.
Hope and Goddard were reunited for The Ghost Breakers the next year. Despite its title and trailer featuring “Chief Exterminator” Bob Hope behind a desk full of phones answering one with “Ghost Breakers. You make ‘em, we shake ‘em,” bears practically no resemblance to the Ghostbusters films. In it, Mary Carter (Goddard) has inherited a supposedly haunted mansion off the coast of Cuba. Hope plays Lawrence “Larry” Lawrence (“my middle name is Lawrence too. My folks had no imagination.”), a radio personality who runs afoul of some gangsters and stows away in Mary’s trunk on the ship to Cuba along with his valet, Alex (Willie Best). Once in the Cuban mansion, the three of them meet up with zombies, ghosts, and voodoo curses. The sequences in the house are most effective, filled with plenty of laughs but also genuine chills. The comic timing between Hope and Best is impeccable, rivaling the best comedy teams of the age. However, the film is marred by some of the racial attitudes and stereotypes of the voodoo religion of the time which make portions of the film difficult to watch. This is unfortunate considering how truly brilliant much of the film is.
The success of these films led to one more pairing of the two stars in Nothing but the Truth in 1941, a comedy without any horror elements in the mix. It is often said that horror and comedy are perhaps the hardest genres to do well and doing them well at the same time is nearly impossible. In the history of film there is Abbott and Costello, Joe Dante, John Landis, Sam Raimi, and a handful of others that have really been able to pull off truly great horror comedies. Unfortunately, The Cat and the Canary and The Ghost Breakers have too often been overlooked for their ingenuity and influence (the latter with some reason) but are worthy of being rediscovered 85 years after their release. Fortunately, they are more available now than they have been with Blu-ray releases available through Kino and on some streaming platforms.
There is a sequence in The Cat and the Canary in which Hope and Goddard follow a series of clues to discover a diamond necklace, the true Norman family treasure, hidden away in a secret compartment. Finding hidden gems among the dust and cobwebs is a bit what a movie lover feels discovering new favorites. I had that feeling discovering these treasures, and what a joy they were to find. There have been very few masters of the horror-comedy subgenre, either in front of or behind the camera, but Hope and Goddard deserve to be mentioned alongside the greats.
In Bride of Frankenstein, Dr. Pretorius, played by the inimitable Ernest Thesiger, raises his glass and proposes a toast to Colin Clive’s Henry Frankenstein—“to a new world of Gods and Monsters.” I invite you to join me in exploring this world, focusing on horror films from the dawn of the Universal Monster movies in 1931 to the collapse of the studio system and the rise of the new Hollywood rebels in the late 1960’s. With this period as our focus, and occasional ventures beyond, we will explore this magnificent world of classic horror. So, I raise my glass to you and invite you to join me in the toast.
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