It's that glorious time of year again where we all come together to be frightened, shocked, mortified, haunted or just plain disgusted. The spooky season is of course upon us and much like last year I've decided to embrace it by watching as many horror films as I can. I've just watched all the films in the Paranormal Activity series so that's the subject of today's entry with a more varied assortment of films planned for part two. It's all floating kitchen utensils, strange sounds and flying bodies in this series. Not to mention the unwavering commitment of its main characters to capturing all this madness on tape when they should perhaps be doing shots of holy water or relocating to sacred ground. Mild spoilers ahead...
Paranormal Activity (2007)
Back in the before times of widespread physical media I remember getting this on DVD being rather intrigued with the idea of a found footage ghost story. I had watched The Blair Witch Project in my mid teens and had always had a soft spot for this type of film even when the quality was notably lacking. Here though they pretty much nail the core idea on their first try even if there are some disclaimers to be had here.
On a modest budget they tell the story of Katie and Micah, a couple who have began to notice that something is not quite right at home. Micah is dismissive, Katie less so on account of some past events that don't get elaborated upon. So you do the natural thing and set up a multitude of cameras to capture these events. Doors open without apparent cause, there are footsteps where there shouldn't be any and a growing sense of menace as they come to realize this is no mere ghost haunting their house.
This is the film I've probably re-watched the most in this series and I think it works because of the slow, deliberate rise in tension throughout. The anomalies are plausibly deniable until they are very much not. The scares and set pieces get a lot more jarring and yet the my favoirite moment in the entire film is a blink and you miss it sign that something is not quite right with someone anymore. There are the usual horror movies issues with characters not exactly behaving as you think they would when the situation escalated but it doesn't overshadow what the film does well. Four screams in the night out of five!
Paranormal Activity 2 (2010)
Now we shift from Katie to the story of her sister Kristi in a sequel that's mostly prequel to the first film. Kristi and her family have moved into their house with their new baby boy, her husband and his daughter from a previous marriage and all is well for a whole minute before strange things start happening. The film closely follows the template of the original with cameras getting installed all over the house after they seemingly get burgled. Nothing appeared to get stolen however...
You have the patriarchal figure in the dad who doesn't quite buy into the growing strangeness unfolding in the house. You have the mom who is a little sceptical but comes around pretty quickly once it becomes apparent that she is the target of these goings on. You have the religious maid who is onto it almost immediately and the daughter who doesn't take much convincing after hearing too many strange sounds in the night. Also you have their dog who is not having any of it.
Benign strangeness becomes malevolent and centred around the baby. We start getting a drip feed of lore as what appears to be entirely random events in the first film may actually have a root cause going back a long while. History repeats or predates itself as events mirror those of the first film and the events there are put into some kind of context. Loads of questions but no time for answers as the whole thing snowballs to a finale involving demonic possession and the reappearance of a familiar face in a quiet but shocking finale.
Again this mostly works on account of the pace of unfolding events and yes you do wonder about the survival instincts of some of these people as the film proceeds. You get the beginnings of the backstory here before it really starts going places and yeah, it is what it is. Very much a product of the mindset that you don't fix what isn't broken even if you end up with a very similar film at the end of it. Best watched in tandem with the first film in any case. Three attempted exorcisms out of five!
Paranormal Activity 3 (2011)
The prequel to the prequel, we now go back to Katie and Kristi's childhood in the late eighties and a period of time that had been spoken of in somewhat vague terms up until this point. We now something happened going into this film we just know nothing of it, except don't trust grandma. So now we have the sisters with their mother Julia and boyfriend Dennis who films weddings for a living. This provides the pretense for the enthusiast camera work we see here. We also see grandma Lois for the first time and we'll, more on her later.
With some weirdly high definition camera footage for the camcorders of the late eighties we follow the family as someone seems to be talking to Kristi in the night, someone called Tobi. Assumed to be an imaginary friend at first, Tobi becomes more increasingly insistent and hostile to the family as events progress. Kitchen utensils depart and arrive in shocking fashion. A very ill-advised game of Bloody Mary goes as well as you might think. Strange symbols are cut into the wall of the closet on the girls bedroom. The situation becomes increasingly hazardous to their health and well-being so naturally they go to spend a few days with grandma. Nothing foreboding about any of that at all ...
This might be the best film of the series, retaining much of what works in earlier entries but combining it with more sophisticated set pieces for the scares. There's a touch more polish to the production but not so much as to cancel out the amateur film feel that accentuates the horror so well. The backstory gets another shot in the arm but not so much as to entirely dissipate the mystery. The old cinematic sleight of hand is well employed here. In a series not short on loud moments, once again the most unsettling moment is pretty quiet as a door is opened to a dark room in the middle of the night. A frantic ending here sets the bar for the rest of the series as they all end with a similar sequence from here on out. Four faces in the dark out of five!
Paranormal Activity 4 (2012)
The winner of the award for 'Best Use Of A Microsoft Kinect On Film' goes to Paranormal Activity 4 and it's a well deserved winner let me tell you. I'm possibly getting a little ahead of myself here. Chronologically this is the first proper sequel, taking place a few years after the events of Paranormal Activity 1 and 2. Here we have teens Alex and Ben alongside Alex's family. Here the camera document the strange events that occur after they take in the strange boy who lives across the street after his equally strange mother has to go into hospital.
Alex and Ben pick up on the weirdness with the kid almost immediately. Something ain't quite right. He gets up in the middle and watches people in their sleep and talks to himself downstairs in the darkness. What's more he seems to be putting some troubling ideas into the head of Alex's brother and there is a distinct sense that something has moved in with the boy.
To their credit I dont think the film makers turned in a lazy cash grab sequel here. There are some neat moments throughout. The aforementioned Kinect gets a special showing as they use it's motion sensing ability with the infra red capabilities of a camera to produce a night vision effect not dissimilar to grainy video footage. This gives rise to some cool unsettling moments as figures and shapes shift amongst the points of light where there shouldn't be any movement at all.
There are some weaknesses here that aren't new to the series but feel a bit more pronounced here. The main one for me seems to be the characters just not checking the footage that they are going to so much trouble to record. The audience is a little too far ahead of the characters in seeing the calamity unfold and there's a creeping feeling of going through the motions at the end because of this. Not a bad sequel and still worth watching but you are beginning to feel the effects of producing so many sequels in so short a time at this point. Three Kinect ghost detectors out of five!
Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones (2014)
Next up is the Paranormal Activity made for the Latin American market, at least that is how it was presented at the time of its release in any case. In actual fact this turns out to be much more central to the main narrative than you might think with. We say hello to Jesse and Hector as they go about their lives in California. Life is good except for the strange woman who lives downstairs. All the strange midnight chanting piques their interest and they go looking where they weren't wanted. So a different setup and a different feel this time around which is both a good and a bad thing.
Good in that a retread of the previous four films was probably not going to work at this point and as such we get a film that is very much typical of the series whilst still trying new things. Where that is not such a great thing is in how the series starts to lose a little something of what made it good. Now its not a huge problem in this film and it becomes more of an issue later on but here we start to get the feeling that this is all a bit more polished than what we are used to from your typical found footage film.
There's special effects that happen right on camera, there's moments of dialogue and exposition that feel less like something someone would say in the unfolding situation and more like something a script writer would add in a less than artful way to bring everyone up to speed. I know there's backstory and you can't assume everyone is watching this film having watched the rest of them but as I say I think it starts to lose a little something here. It doesn't hugely impact this film but I will be coming back to this point when I talk about the next two films.
Anyhow Jesse Hector and company get in deep with what appears to be a thriving scene of local occultism. Jesse finds things in his eyes that one really doesn't want to find next to one's eyes. We get a neat little callback with a surviving character from a previous film. It's nothing outstanding but I always dig things like that. Some light gang violence seems to be setting up a wild ending involving gangsters and witches and then we have what might be the craziest, most out of left field ending to these films yet. It would be a spoiler to go on, but if you are watching this film and you are not sure if you are feeling it, please do hang on for the ending at least as I found it a fun ride.
Overall its a worthy effort at a point where most horror franchises usually run out of ideas. There is much familiar ground here but it still has energy and a forward momentum to it all. The ongoing story and lore gets a little more development. It's a decent effort is what I'm saying and if you have enjoyed everything up to this point you will probably enjoy this too. Four strange doors out of five!
Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension (2015)
Thus we arrive at the end of the 'Tobi' saga that began in the first film and comes to a conclusion of sorts here. We start at the events depicted at the end of the third film in the late eighties and then jump forward to 2013 with a new family. Ryan, Emily and daughter Leila are about to celebrate Christmas with his brother Mike and friend Skylar. Why that house looks awfully familiar doesn't it? Anyhow Ryan finds a box of old videotapes alongside an old video camera that has had some serious work done to it. For you see this is no ordinary video camera and through details that are not eleborated upon, we come to find that its a camera that can pick up ghosts on the recording.
That change in The Marked Ones, where the series starts to feel a bit more polished, a bit more 'produced' shall we say? Well that change feels much more visible here. If a large part of the appeal of these films is the thrill of unseen horror and things going bump in the night with no obvious cause, then the appeal is somewhat diluted here. Not gone completely though and to the film makers credit I feel that they still wrangle some decent moments of uneasiness out of this setup. Whether this works better than what came before is disputable however.
Again as with the earlier film, I understand the need to take things forward as much as you can and that you can't endlessly retread what worked previously. This film was marketed as the 'final' Paranormal Activity film and whilst some contrived steps are required to get to the big ending, you do very much get the big ending. There does feel like there was something of a struggle to get to this point without making some big changes to the formula and in the end, I'm not entirely sure if it worked out or not. That we can now see the shadowy presence is a novelty to be sure, I just don't think it adds to the horror.
So anyhow in an echo of earlier films we have the child talking to their imaginary friend at night. We have a dad wondering about the strange events captured on tape from decades before and we have the growing, creeping dread that something very bad has them in its sights. A certain character who is a fixture of these films does not appear in this one but there is a neat allusion to the person to their presence within the story. Events have been set in motion, schemes are afoot and a grand design is about to come together in a highly dramatic way. Again the ending is probably the best part of these as things get more than mildly disconcerting and escalate into full blown mania. Not a bad ending but not great. In a series which generally leaves much to the imagination, this one lays it all out for us to see and its a mixed bag as a result. Three summoning circles out of five!
Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin (2021)
Of course the most abused word in horror film history is the word 'final' because as much as it is used to denote the final film in a series, that rarely turns out to be the case and almost everything makes a comeback eventually. So was the case with this, a 'soft reboot' of the series according to what I've read online not that much of this film essentially needed the reset at all. New characters, new setting and a film that provoked some reflections on my part about what a found footage film is when you boil it down to its essential components.
Meet Margot, her cameraman Chris and sound guy Dale as they head into the old country to find the true story behind Margot's mother and why she abandoned her daughter at birth. They go to this old settlement in the middle of nowhere populated by old-school fundamentalists. It's all life on the farm, toiling the soil, communing with God and so on. With the help of an ex-member of the locals, Margot wants to document the whole process of learning the truth about her mother but in documenting her interactions with the locals it soon becomes apparent that not all is as it seems.
Whilst totally separate from the previous two films in terms of plot and character, this film does feel like something of a natural evolution of those films in terms of presentation. By and large this is Paranormal Activity through the lens of a modern content creator with all the bells and whistles that come with it. The camera work is slick, the lighting and presentation very much in keeping with something you'd see on a decently produced Youtube channel. At times it feels like it abandons the form of found footage entirely. Certainly there was a moment or two of non-diegetic sound there towards the end. None of it is bad but a with the previous film, I'm less convinced that it adds to the horror here.
Anyhow, things get demonic as they do in all of these films. There is always one person on hand to record events long past the point that sanity permits and everything goes hella crazy for the ending. They always generally stick the landing in these films and it's another strong effort here. It's just that the more polished these films get, the less effective they become as horror films for me. This film feels a long way removed from the first one and it just feels less immersive, less involving as a result. Two deep dark holes to nowhere out of five!
...
But wait...
This film got me thinking about found footage films generally and the challenges in making such films now. You see, in terms of mood-building and structure all of these films owe a huge debt to The Blair Witch Project. I was 15 when I watched that and looking back it was quite the formative experience for me when it comes to horror movies. Not just Paranormal Activity but the whole genre of found footage as a rule owes much to that film.
Blair Witch felt immediate and compelling in the main because despite the ambitions of its would-be filmmaker characters, its very much a scrappy amateur production that shows you very little of what is going on. Yes the camera shakes and it induces nausea in some but this helped more than hindered the film. The films's low budget shines through and accentuates the creative direction. One or two scenes aside the lack of polish is perhaps is foremost quality above everything else.
Now this was perhaps easier to pull off back in the pre-HD, pre-4K era of standard definition and VHS tape but much of this formula survives in the Paranormal Activity series even if it doesn't land quite so well. The slow build of tension, unaccountable sights and sounds in the night, a growing feeling that the characters are not in control of the situation. The presentation was critical in sustaining the disbelief and building the scares. This still happens but it gets harder to sustain in an era where the barriers to high quality production are lower than ever and we can all do aerial drone shots if we really want to.
There is still room for the amateur home movie maker here but if you have been to that well a few too many times already where else do you take it? As in the case of Next of Kin, the documentary maker is a valid choice but I feel like it has to be done thoughtfully and that didn't happen here. Neither audiences nor the studio appeared to be too taken with film upon its release and as a result we might not be seeing another one of these films for quite some time. I mean there's an obvious prequel for grandma there, as well as for what comes after Ghost Dimension but I suspect the world is not screaming out for it.
Anyhow this all got rather more thought provoking than I thought it would. Join me next time as I explore the impact of the Saw movies on the NATO pact...
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