Even by the standards of paranormal “investigations,” the garbage shown here is laughable.
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My God, does this suck.
The only question is what would suck more: if it was real, or if it was fake.
Ryan Buell is a Penn State student who claims he was haunted by demons as a child. Now that he´s older, he wants to help people battle the paranormal like he has all his life. In this pursuit, he founded the Paranormal Research Society (PRS) at Penn. Now a documentary crew tracks the team of youngsters as they "investigate" each case.
It´s amazing how many "investigations" these scrappy kids are able to dig up. It seems like every week, there´s another desperate soul calling them for help, someone who has exhausted every avenue available to them and needs a savior. And that savior is… a shitty little college club.
Each "investigation" usually consists of Ryan deciding beforehand that a house is haunted, or that someone (usually a child) is psychic and spending a mighty 2 or sometimes even 3 days finding information to confirm his hypothesis. After that, it´s "dead time." This refers to the 3 A.M. hour when allegedly paranormal activity is at its highest, and it´s also when Ryan and his assistants conduct séances.
The show takes a completely uncritical view of the paranormal. There are no skeptics on the crew to provide a check for Ryan´s infinite credulity. The team totes some cool looking equipment with them, but the show pays scant attention to these tools of the trade. Instead, the "evidence" for each haunting/possession consists of people sitting around a table calling out to spirits and claiming to hear things or, the big favorite, claiming that they feel someone touching them.
Is the show real or fake? By real, I mean, are these goofballs really trying to investigate all these cases, or is the entire show staged a la "Blair Witch"? Based on the formal qualities of the show, I´d have to guess that it´s faked. I´ll give a specific example of what I mean. In the episode "The Name," Ryan calls out to a young girl´s spirit to move on. Suddenly the bathroom door creaks open, and it just so happens that they have planted a camera on the door so we can see it happen. Perhaps this is standard operating procedure. But in the same scene, a medium called in by Ryan suddenly picks up a name from the ether. He writes it down and hands it to Ryan. Ryan looks sternly at him and flatly asks "Why did you write this name down?" It´s turn out it´s the name of the demon that has been haunting Ryan.
There are several reasons to be suspicious of the way this scene is filmed. As the medium scribbles down a name on a pad of paper, the camera tilts down to watch him do it but ever so perfectly manages to avoid showing the actual name. Then we actually cut to a close-up shot on the paper as the medium folds it and slides it across the table to Ryan. The camera also pans down Ryan´s body for another dramatic close-up of the paper. This is not the kind of editing that is typical of documentary filmmaking; these are the kind of shots you can only get when you know in advance precisely what´s going to happen. It is possible that this scene occurred and was then re-enacted for style points, but I find that unlikely. Ryan´s delivery of the line "Why did you write this name down?" also sounds like a (bad) line reading, though this is a judgment call on the part of the viewer. Certainly his muted reaction is rather odd; if someone handed me a paper with the name of a demon who was pursuing me, I would be considerably more freaked out.
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