So the wife and I finally got to see Paranormal Activity.

(We don’t go to the movies much, partially because of scheduling but mostly because, seriously, you can’t go two hours without talking on the phone or texting? You’re not a trauma surgeon, you know. Other people exist. For shame.)

I’ve gotta say, we liked-bordering-on-loved it. I’d heard all the muttering about doors being pulled closed with fishing line, and it seems to me that this little movie provides a perfect opportunity to talk about suspension of disbelief. Everybody knows horror films aren’t real, and PA didn’t even go through the Blair Witch rigmarole about pretending to be real “found” footage or whatever. No, there aren’t any big gags. But it’s surprisingly well acted (Katie Featherston, in particular, makes us forget we’re watching a movie), and if you’re not in it to judge–if you’re sincerely looking to get your neck hair raised, rather than to sit around and take a film apart and mention how much better you’d do if it was your flick–then the movie does a great job of getting under your skin.

In Danse Macabre, Stephen King talks about how, as we get older, we have to want to help suspend that disbelief, that the imagination of childhood erodes, that after a while it starts to need a little conscious leg up. Maybe that’s why horror fiction and film offer fewer surprises and chills for fans in the new millennium–to butcher a cliche, kids have seen it all these days. Nobody’s a fan, everybody’s a critic.

But Rebecca and I went into Paranormal Activity excited, and willing to be chilled as well as charmed, and by the time Katie got dragged out of bed by her leg, we’d traded cynicism for that wide-eyed what’s-going-to-happen-next immersion. Yeah, it took setting aside that seen-it-all attitude, and reminding ourselves of the excitement we’d felt since first hearing about the movie. But the payoff was so much better than sitting through what some people see as an hour and a half of faux-real shaky-cam footage and picking it apart. We met the movie halfway, and got back much more than our investment.