Paranormal Poppins

Last night I went to see the new independent horror film called Paranormal Activity. It’s about a young couple who set up a camera in their house to capture evidence of a haunting on film. I suppose one could call it another Blair Witch Project, although it’s a better film - more claustrophobic, more contained, more unsettling for its domestic setting.

Get used to this shot...

If you get the chance I’d recommend it. But don’t watch the trailer, cos it contains most of the creepy moments from the film, which mostly consists of waiting for something creepy to happen.

I also had a kind of nightmare last night. It didn’t come from Paranormal Activity though, it came from an episode of cult 90s Boosh-esque surreal sketch comedy show The Glam Metal Detectives I watched with moogdroog.

This episode involved a character called Mary ‘Pippins’ who gets kidnapped by an evil beefeater and has to be rescued by the eponymous heroes. In my dream I was trying to save two little kids from an evil version of Mary Poppins. First she blew up a petrol tanker we were using, but we managed to escape and found a place to sleep.

Then in the middle of the night she came into the room, took out a pistol, shot the kids dead and then shot me five times in the stomach and walked out. Somehow I was still alive, so I staggered to a hospital where the staff thought it was really funny that being shot five times in the stomach hadn’t killed me.

Which all goes to prove that Mary Poppins is inherently a more disturbing character than a demon from the pits of Hell.