A wealthy couple buys a camera to track paranormal activity in their massive house in Oren Peli’s 2007 snooze he should have called The Rich Bore Project.

If The Blair Witch Project was the zenith of the found footage movement, this is its nadir; a home movie too boring to show even your most hated family members. Where Blair Witch was resourceful and innovative, Paranormal Activity is cheap and lazy, filmed in the director’s home with a blue filter in place of technique. It could have been made by anyone with access to a camera and a lightswitch.

Oren Peli said the idea came to him when some laundry detergent fell off a shelf, although nothing so exciting happens in the movie, so presumably the idea was to do some laundering. Parasnoremal Inactivity is 90 minutes of arguing punctuated by a door sometimes opening by itself, which is only scary if we believe we are watching actual footage, but the only thing real about the film is Peli’s house (which somehow makes it worse). The actors are desperately unconvincing, and their characters unlikeable and inconsistent, particularly the proto-crypto bro boyfriend (Micah Sloat) who spends the entire movie insulting his partner (Katie Featherston).

The film goes out of its way to emphasise their wealth; Micah says the camera cost him “about half as much as I made today.” But if he’s so rich and tech-savvy, why only film in the bedroom rather than rig the whole house? Is it because he’s a sex pervert? Unlike in Blair Witch, his insistence on filming the whole time makes no sense, unless he is trying to gather evidence of his own abusive behaviour.

He manages to capture zero activity, paranormal or otherwise, even though the footage is fast-forwarded to the supposedly good bits. Then each morning we have to sit through the couple watching the footage back so we get to see all the nothing that happens twice over. This makes the movie less visually interesting than Derek Jarman’s Blue, more property show than horrorshow.

Contrived, obnoxious and artificial, Paranonsensical Activity is a cynical exercise in tedium. Forget laundry detergent; someone pass the bleach.