Cinema Suicide

I love paranormal shows. If I’m channel surfing and see something related to ghosts, ghost hunting or ghost stories, I will stop and watch it. Scariest Places On Earth, Ghostly Encounters, A Haunting, whatever. My wife and I are both devoted followers of the Sci-Fi channel’s runaway success, Ghost Hunters, but with TAPS’ spotty broadcast schedule, I’m left wanting more and A&E was more than happy to step in and feed my hunger. I’d been seeing the ads for this show for some time and they really grabbed my attention. Last night, December 10th, Paranormal State hit the air and I was left strongly conflicted.

Paranormal State shows so much promise and then promptly crushes it beneath tons of absurd garbage. It’s unfair to compare this show to Ghost Hunters, but TAPS being the only game in town, it’s the best I can do. The goals of the Penn State team and the TAPS crew couldn’t possibly be any different. While TAPS is out to find quantifiable proof of the existence of ghosts, Penn State seems comfortable with their own system of belief and whether or not you follow that system is irrelevant. They’re going to wage their lofty war against unseen evil forces whether you want to come along or not. Unfortunately, coming along for the ride requires you to buy what they’re selling at least a little bit or you’ll spend the whole episode snickering.

The premier episode pits Ryan Buell and his team of paranormal investigators against forces haunting the home of a couple and their eight year old son, who claims to see black misty shapes in the house as well as the apparition of a man named Timmy. No one else can see the shapes and the little boy lives in fear that they’re out to get him. The team goes to work doing their research and turns up some rather strange findings. Timmy was a former resident of the house, found dead in the nearby woods with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. The plot thickens when the team goes to a friend of Timmy’s and comes back to present the little boy with a wedding photo showing Timmy among the group. The boy immediately picks him out of the photo and then specifies some other things about him that he probably shouldn’t know and is then confirmed by people who knew him in life. Meanwhile, a psychologist with the Penn State team talks to the boy about what he sees and analyzes him accordingly.

The episode starts out with so much promise. There are a couple of chilling moments as the boy explains to the psychologist what Timmy does and where he sees him (in the basement) and then when asked if he’s in the room now, the boy casually replies yes. They spend a lot of time building credibility and the family seems extremely distressed over the behavior of their son and his claims. Unlike Ghost Hunters, though, the actual investigation seems to take a back seat to the rest of the action. They have cameras and tape rolling to capture any audio/visual phenomena but it’s really not the money shot that Ghost Hunters makes their findings out to be. Strange things are captured and shown but there is no grand reveal. The episode ends as the team performs a house blessing.

The set up is fantastic but there are a few things going against it. There’s a lot going on in each episode and with so much emphasis on research and building a strong case in favor of a haunting, they leave very little time for the actual observation stage which they call “dead time”, a period around 3am when ghosts are supposed to be most active. Where anyone comes up with this shit is beyond me. With a single episode running at a half hour, everything is set up and broken down in no time. All the while, Ryan Buell has the personality of a beer-soaked napkin. It’s clear from the outset that he takes this very seriously as he should, but there is an importance to what he and his team does that puts everything into question. The Penn State team makes no bones about it, they’re out to find evidence but they’re also out to fight the forces of darkness that they believe hide in people’s homes and try to destroy them. The word demon is tossed around a lot in a single episode of Paranormal State and the stone-faced sincerity makes it hard not to laugh. Matters only worsen when the team is shown going room to room reading from a bible and writing holy symbols above doors with holy water. The classy touch of a psychologist lending some skepticism to the quest and attempting to debunk the haunting with the science of the mind is reduced to hokum when the same psychologist is later shown distressed by a being that he says doesn’t want him to continue with the house blessing. He nearly collapses.

And if things couldn’t get any worse, the follow-up episode dives even deeper into the absurd.

A mother son pair experience a malicious presence in their house as well as the apparitions of children. The research turns up a story about a murder in the house and the bodies are found buried in a private gravesite across the street. Things go batshit crazy when the Penn State team flies a psychic in from Georgia who suggests that there is something very dark and angry there and matters only worsen when the team rolls out crusty old Lorraine Warren, the psychic half of the demonologist couple responsible for perpetuating some of the worlds most egregious haunting hoaxes, the Smurl haunting and the DiFeo house, aka The Amityville Horror. Throughout the episode, the word Belial is flashed on the screen and Ryan explains that he fears the worst and that he has faced this being down before. He doesn’t elaborate, but out of fear, he sends most of the team home. Later on, the psychic writes the name down on a piece of paper and gives it to Ryan saying that it just came to him and the tone gets nasty.

I have a real hard time with psychics on these kinds of shows because what they claim to do deals with feelings and intuition. There’s nothing you can measure about that. If you’re to believe what they say, you have to take it on face value. If someone were to come to my house and tell me that there is an evill, demonic presence there and that it’s out to get me, I’d probably laugh the guy out of my house but the Penn State team takes it very seriously.

I’m willing to give the show another chance, but I fear the worst. The whole thing is drenched in the same heavy Catholic fear that made people so afraid of The Exorcist. In order to buy into the show’s line, you already have to be afraid of unseen evil forces. With emphasis on the more esoteric, ridiculous aspects of paranormal investigation and less on the technological means of capturing evidence, I have a real hard time taking it seriously and the portrayal of every haunting as dire and frightening quickly got under my skin. The show seems to be aimless at this point and at a half hour, it doesn’t feel long enough. It stays long enough to dangle a rubber spider in your face and leave.  It’s also no problem for any mildly skeptical viewer to poke holes in the stories presented.  In the story of Matthew, the kid who sees ghosts, the parents seem less frightened of spirits in the house and several times, they more or less state that they’re afraid of their son’s behavior.  He speaks with a stunted, bizarre cadence, lisps like a four year old and doesn’t look anyone in the eye.  Ghosts?  Sounds more like autism to me.  In the second case, son is angry at his mother because his adoptive father cut off contact with him and his birth father wants nothing to do with him.  My best friend in high school lived in a home like that and I can say first hand, it results in a lot of bad, deviant behavior on the part of the child and shit-ton of stress on the parent.  Demons?  Could be.  It could also be the extremely stressful symptoms of a particularly broken home.

Unless it cuts out the Catholic mysticism and tones down the idea that demons in the Christian sense are out to get you, this show will wind up in the same bin as Most Haunted and Haunting Evidence.