Paranormal Activity 2

Paranormal Activity 2, while far from the worst Found Footage movie I've seen, is practically an essay on everything that is wrong with the genre. Who is presenting us with this footage, and why did the person think that this was the format that made the most sense? The film starts well before the original movie, and ends a few hours later. The events are intimately tied together. So, why are we being shown these events as a separate film, when the in-universe filmmaker should have had access to this footage while making the original?

It's clear that there was editing done here. We're given text telling us what night it is, and at one point when Micah (Micah Sloat) appears we're even told by the text how many days until he dies. So, who is this bizarre documentarian who thinks this is a good format for informing the audience about these events?

For this film, the story revolves around the family of Katie's (Katie Featherston) sister Kristi (Sprague Gayden). This movie drops the pretense of naming characters after their actors. It works for a standalone film, but when expanding the world to include relatives and more characters it obviously becomes impractical.

Kristi is married to an older man named Daniel (Brian Boland). The two have just had their first child, Hunter (William Juan Prieto and Jackson Xenia Prieto). They share their house with an Hispanic nanny named Martine (Vivis Cortez) and Daniel's daughter from a previous relationship, Ali (Molly Ephraim). The dynamic here is actually pretty good. Rather than the drama and constant arguments of the previous film, we get a real sense that all of the people in this movie like each other. They disagree at times, but it's clear that they do so because they care.

This time the footage is from several sources. At the beginning of the film Daniel is documenting his new family. Shortly after Hunter's birth someone breaks in and vandalizes the house, causing Daniel to install security cameras to give us another perspective. Later in the film, as events become stranger and stranger, Ali takes it upon herself to document the events, and we get a perspective more focused on the supernatural.

The film actually starts out even more ambiguous than the first installment, and for a while it does work. We get a period of focusing on why the pool cleaner is coming out of the pool every night, and it's genuinely unclear if this is something the machine is capable of doing on it's own when the settings are wrong, or if this is a supernatural occurrence. I'm actually still not sure, having seen the movie twice in the past week.

By the end of the film, however, subtlety is thrown out the window. We've seen a baby levitated out of his crib, walk around the house, and go right back to where he started. We also get a detailed explanation of exactly how this curse got started: Katie and Kristi's grandmother made a deal with a demon for wealth, promising the first-born male child in her lineage. Given the amount of lore about demons, the idea that Ali was able to stumble onto the correct conclusion on her first time surfing the internet for answers is jaw-dropping...oh, and it also completely spoils the third film, but I don't want to get ahead of myself.

The climax of the film actually seems to exist to spell out in pain-staking detail exactly what happened in the previous film and why. Apparently the demonic possession was intended for Kristi, so that she could abduct her son for the demon's purposes. However, Daniel found out from his house-keeper that the possession could be transferred to a blood relative, and so he cursed Katie, leading to the events of the original movie. However, after killing Micah, Katie came to Kristi and Daniel's home the next night, murders them both with her super-strength, and abducts Hunter herself. Ali, being away from the house at the time, survives to return several movies later.

This brings me full-circle back to my complaint: the previous film ended by telling us that Katie's whereabouts are unknown. If a documentary was made about these events, wouldn't “she killed her sister and brother-and-law and abducted their son before disappearing” have been a very relevant detail to include in the original?

As I said, this movie is far from the worst of this genre, or even this series. This is a point where effort still seems to have been made to provide us with something of quality. However, it also provides us with a textbook case of why this genre so rarely works well. Honestly, if you want to see Found Footage done correctly, see The Last Broadcast, a film that understands that the editor is a character within the story, and uses that to it's advantage.