It’s gonna be a long and creepy night

OK, we’re back home. I’ve walked through the entire house with a flashlight, checking for … anything unnatural.

And other than our stuffed cat Pooky, who loves dressing up in MP’s underwear, I can find nothing particularly strange. So I guess we’re safe.

For the moment anyway.

What put me in this paranoid mood? “Paranormal Activity,” of course. We attended the 6:50 p.m. showing of the neo-horror movie, along with several dozen other film fans, and we’re still feeling the full level of the film’s creepiness.

Never heard of the movie? Well, it’s a Slamdance special, directed by a virtually unknown filmmaker named Oren Peli, that uses the same methods created by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez for the 1999 shocker “The Blair Witch Project.”

Myrick and Sanchez used a mock-documentary style to tell the purported story of a film crew that gets lost in the woods, only to disappear. The footage, found later, tells some of the story … but not all. And it’s what the footage doesn’t tell, what the shots don’t show, that creates the horror.

Same with “Paranormal Activity.” This time the protagonists are Katie (Katie Featherston) and Micah (Micah Sloat), a loving couple in what appears to be their mid-to-late-20s. They live together in a San Diego suburban house, he working as a day trader, she studying to be a schoolteacher.

Everything about their life is ordinary – except for the nagging fact that, since she was 8 years old, Katie has been bothered by some sort of entity. That same entitiy, she believes, burned her parents’ house down when she was 13. And it continues to follow her now that she’s living with Micah.

Micah, though, is both a guy and a man. As a guy, he’s a natural joker, before and behind his video camera. As a man, he’s protective of his girlfriend and dismissive of her fears. As both, he’s massively over his head.

Because as he continues to film their day-to-day existence, both challenging and confronting an unseen entity, his camera begins to pick up weird happenings. Noises in the night, shadows on the wall, doors that move on their own, sheets that blow in a windless room all precide Katie’s slow disintegration and Micah’s slow realization that something is terribly wrong. And that he’s powerless to do anything about it.

All the “Blair Witch Project” stylisms are there: mock-documentary style, low-tech special effects, unknown actors (even the third actor, Mark Fredrichs, who plays a psychic), off-camera villainous creatures, the gradual rise in tension and a shocker of an ending.

But “Paranormal Activity” isn’t merely a ripoff of “Blair Witch.” It’s complementary, sure, and it mines the same cinematic style. But Peli’s film boasts a chilling sense that is all its own, one that is an enduring mote in Hollywood’s EFX-loving eye.

Made for a reported $11,000, “Paranormal Activity” shows just how good a film can be when imagination trumps technology. I’m so glad that we decided to …

Excuse me. I just heard something go bump in the bedroom. Now, where the hell did I leave that flashlight?