Paranormal
The haunting as a case: investigators, recordings, a true story on the poster, and evidence that keeps getting worse.
Paranormal5 to start
- 1The Amityville Horror1979
- 2Grave Encounters2011
- 3Gothika2003
- 4The Entity1982
- 5Poltergeist1982
What defines it
- Era
- 1963 to today
- Mood
- unease, evidence, doubt
Paranormal horror is the haunting with a clipboard. Somewhere in the film is a person whose job it is to find out, a parapsychologist, a medium, a TV crew, a psychiatrist, and the story is told through their evidence: the recording, the reading, the photograph, the interview with the family that keeps changing. The form's bet is that treating the impossible as a case makes it worse, because every piece of evidence is a step closer to the thing.
The rules are procedural. A haunting or a presence, reported by people who are not believed. An investigator, or a team, who arrives with equipment and a method. Evidence that accumulates: sounds on tape, temperatures, a figure in a frame. A history, researched rather than stumbled on. And a claim, often on the poster, that this happened, which the form has used since the 1970s to make the ordinary house frightening before the film starts.
The investigator arrives in The Haunting (1963), where Hill House is a study before it is a trap, but the form's true starting line is The Amityville Horror (1979), which took the Lutz family's account and Jay Anson's book and made "based on a true story" a horror sales pitch. The Entity (1982) and Poltergeist (1982) put parapsychologists on screen in the same year, one cold and one warm. The 1990s and 2000s produced the studio branch, Stir of Echoes (1999), The Mothman Prophecies (2002) and Gothika (2003), where a professional skeptic is made to see. Then the format changed: Paranormal Activity (2007) made the evidence the film, Grave Encounters (2011) made the ghost-hunting show the victim, and The Conjuring (2013) turned the Warrens' case files into a franchise, with Annabelle, Enfield and the rest following.
The signature techniques are about evidence. The playback of a recording with something in it. The night-vision frame. The temperature drop and the meter that spikes. The map of the house with marks on it. And the interview with the family, in which the child says something the parents had not told the investigator.
- unease
- evidence
- doubt
Dread with a clipboard: the paranormal film scares by treating the impossible as a case file, so every reading on the meter is a step closer to the thing.
- Axis
- Scare Score
- And
- Loved it
How it scares
This is dread through documentation. The paranormal film rarely shows you the thing; it shows you the thing's effect on a device, and lets your imagination fill in the rest, which it does badly and vividly. The jump scare arrives through the equipment, a face on the playback, a voice on the recording, and it lands harder because the film has spent an hour teaching you to trust the evidence.
The form gets to viewers who want to believe, and to viewers who want very much not to, because the investigator's doubt is their doubt. It gets to anyone who has watched a ghost-hunting show at midnight and found themselves listening to their own house. It is less effective on people who find the method silly; a meter and a flashlight can tip into comedy, and Grave Encounters knows it. Those viewers often prefer the branch where the investigator is a psychiatrist, and the case is a mind.
How to rank it in Gasper
You answer which was scarier a handful of times, and the film finds its place among everything you have ranked. Loved it? Heart it.
- 1
Paranormal films make for careful head-to-heads. You answer "How scary was it?" with Terrifying, Some scares or Barely flinched, and then "Which was scarier?" against films you gave the same answer. The Amityville Horror against a slasher is a month of suggestion against a night of knives; Grave Encounters against a found footage ghost story is a question of which corridor you would less like to be in. Answer for the one that made you check your own hallway, and the film settles in your rankings within a handful of comparisons.
- 2
Scores here depend heavily on belief. The same film can be Terrifying for a viewer who takes the case seriously and Barely flinched for one who does not, and both are honest. Your first answer sets the band and the comparisons settle the order inside it, so a true-story haunting that only mildly unsettled you is weighed only against films that did the same, and its Scare Score, 0 to 10 with one decimal, reflects that rather than the poster's claim.
- 3
The heart is useful here for the films you admire as craft rather than as fear. Poltergeist is a "Loved this?" heart for most people and a score somewhere in the middle, which is right for a film that is half family adventure. If a ghost-hunting show frightened you more than you would like the feed to know, Stealth mode keeps the rank private and still counts it toward the Taste tab, where Paranormal shows up as a Top subgenre for viewers who scare through suggestion.
- 4
In Discover, the Paranormal shelf sits beside Ghosts, Haunted Houses and Supernatural, and the Subgenre filter narrows any search to it. The Community Scare, the average of everyone who ranked a film, is interesting on this page because the crowd splits along the belief line: a middling average often hides a group that was terrified and a group that was bored, and your score tells you which group you belong to.
Where to go next
Haunted houses is the nearest neighbor, and Amityville and The Conjuring belong to both pages. Ghosts is where the presence goes when it leaves the case file. Found footage is the paranormal film with the camera as the investigator, from Paranormal Activity to Grave Encounters. Supernatural horror is the parent category. Psychological horror is the neighbor when the investigator is the one who may be unwell, as in Gothika, and possession is where the Warrens' cases end up.
For deeper cuts, try Session 9 (2001), an asbestos crew in an abandoned Massachusetts asylum, slow and sweaty and sure of itself. Hell House LLC (2015) is a found footage film about a haunted attraction built in a real hotel, with one of the great background scares. And The Changeling (1980) is the adult version of the form, a seance in a Seattle mansion and a man who follows the evidence all the way to a senator.
Questions about paranormal
- Framing. Supernatural is the whole category of things that break physical law. Paranormal is the branch that treats them as a case: investigators, recordings, meters, interviews, a true story on the poster. The Conjuring is paranormal because of the Warrens; The Others is supernatural because nobody is taking notes.
- The cases are real in the sense that people reported them. Amityville came from the Lutz family's account and Jay Anson's book, and the Warrens investigated the Perron farmhouse and the Enfield council house. What the films do with the cases is fiction, and the better ones know it.
- Because an abandoned hospital is a haunted house with a built-in history and no one to call. Grave Encounters, Session 9 and Gothika all use the institution as a place where nobody believed the patients, which is the paranormal film's favorite theme turned into architecture.
- Poltergeist, then Gothika. One is a family adventure with scares in it, and the other is a studio thriller with a ghost. The Amityville Horror is slow and mostly suggestion. Grave Encounters is for when you are ready to be locked in.
What is the difference between paranormal and supernatural horror?
Framing. Supernatural is the whole category of things that break physical law. Paranormal is the branch that treats them as a case: investigators, recordings, meters, interviews, a true story on the poster. The Conjuring is paranormal because of the Warrens; The Others is supernatural because nobody is taking notes.
Subgenres like this one
- SubgenreHaunted HousesA place remembers what happened in it, and the people who move in are made to remember too.
- SubgenreGhostsThe dead who did not leave: a presence with a history, a grievance and a patience the living cannot match.
- SubgenreFound FootageHorror presented as recovered recordings, shot by the people it happens to, with the camera as witness.
Keep reading
- FeatureHead-to-head rankingAnswer which film was scarier a few times and Gasper places it in your rankings. You never type a number.
- FeatureScare scoreA measure out of 10 of how scary a film was for you, read from your own ranked list and shown in skulls.
- GlossaryDreadDread is the sustained, building fear that something terrible is coming, the slow counterpart to the jump scare in horror.
- GlossaryJump scareA jump scare is a sudden image or sound, usually after a quiet stretch, designed to make the audience physically flinch.
- GlossaryStealth modeStealth mode is Gasper's per-rank switch that hides that activity from the feed while the film stays in your rankings with its scare score.
Rank your paranormal list.
Free on the App Store. Log a film tonight, answer which was scarier, and watch your rankings take shape.
