Paranormal Activity 4

And with this film the Paranormal Activity series officially crashes into a brick wall. While not all the performances are bad, the plot has become an illogical mess that exists only to excuse the same story being told for the fourth time. It would be one thing if the series presented itself as an anthology, with Toby attacking different families, but they maintain just enough continuity to hint at a story they’re not telling us.

It’s the fourth film, and we’re given protagonists who know less than the characters from the first film, and far less than us. Keep in mind: the first movie started with Katie and Micah already aware that they were under attack by a demon. All subsequent films feature protagonists who begin with no idea that anything is wrong. At this point I’m ready for a film about Paranormal Investigators who’ve viewed all the previous tapes, and are actively searching for information on the fate of Hunter Rey.

Instead, we get the Nelson family: Skeptical father and mother, Doug and Holly (Stephen Dunham and Alexondra Lee), cute little son Wyatt (Aiden Lovekamp), and teenaged daughter Alex (Kathryn Newton). In short, the exact same cast from the second film, played by different actors, and with different names.

However, a mysterious boy named Robbie (Brady Allen) and his unseen mother move in across the street. We’re told Robbie’s mother has fallen ill and been taken to the hospital, so the Nelson’s agree to let Robbie stay with them…because taking in your neighbor’s kids at such times is perfectly normal. Robbie begins telling people about his imaginary friend Toby, painting weird symbols on Wyatt’s back, and generally acting creepy.

Now, given what I’ve just told you, imagine the most obvious twist that the filmmakers could possibly write. Did you come up with “Robbie is a Red Herring we’re supposed to think is Hunter, Wyatt was secretly adopted, and Robbie was sent by the coven to prepare Wyatt/Hunter?” Congratulations! You win absolutely nothing, because there wouldn’t be enough prizes to go around! Also, no extra points if you figured Robbie's “mother” was Katie (Katie Featherston).

As with 2, the teenage daughter begins to investigate, and what little of value can be found in this film is found there. I actually find Alex to be a bit more charming that Ali, and her boyfriend Ben (Matt Shively) takes an active role in the investigation. It’s a shame they never find out who Hunter Rey is, who the coven are, or any of the other information we already know. The only thing they do uncover is that a demonically possessed person will have to sacrifice a virgin, by tying virgin sacrifice to the symbol on Wyatt’s back. They may have intended us to think Robbie would sacrifice Wyatt, but by this point I already took Wyatt’s status as Hunter for granted, so it was painfully obvious it would be Alex getting axed. Mind you, we don't see the moment of sacrifice, so I can only assume the witches disabled her, and then had Hunter do the deed offscreen.

Most of the conventions of this series seem to be taken for granted now. Barely a word is given to justify the constant filming, and Toby moving things is barely noticed by the characters. Please consider: they review their videos enough to notice Robbie crawling into Alex’s bed while she’s asleep, but not enough to notice flying knives or self-starting cars.

The movie gets points for one of the more creative examples of product placement I’ve seen. The Kinect can apparently produce at least a vague image of Tobey using infrared light. It’s the first time in the series he’s been seen, so hooray!

That’s about all I have to say in this movie’s defense. The parents relation with their children is stilted and unnatural. While it’s true they’re supposed to be having marital problems, I never once believed these were people who actually knew each other. The movie has the same slow pacing as previous Paranormal Activity films, as we watch the characters fail to find out information the audience already knows.

In case you’re wondering the obvious, no, we never do find out why the coven put Hunter up for adoption. They clearly had plenty of people to take care of him, and it’s not like they’d have a lot of trouble finding a virgin for him to sacrifice. It’s just a plot contrivance to put us back with a suburban family in a story that should have moved beyond suburbia.

This film makes it clear just how much this franchise stagnated. The second film ended one night after the original, the third was a prequel. This was the film that should finally have started to move the story forward again, and tell us what happened to Hunter Rey. We technically get the answer, but it’s not a satisfying answer. Even as someone who isn’t a huge fan of the series, I think it deserves better than this.

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.

Paranormal Activity

I don't like this series. For the most part, it's boring. Just boring. The story moves forward at a snail's pace, and the plot becomes dumber with each successive film.

That said, I don't really hate the first film that much. It was made for $15,000, and looks like it cost at least six digits, Given the vague name of the film, I can't help but wonder if they considered using the franchise as an anthology series, showcasing talented horror directors working with low budgets. I imagine we would have gotten something much better if they'd gone that path.

This first movie follows Katie Featherston and Micah Sloat (all characters share their actors' names in this entry), a young couple that just moved into a large house. Katie explained to Micah shortly before the film began, and right after they moved in together, that she's been haunted by a mysterious entity since her childhood. Micah immediately becomes determined to film the entity. He claims that he wants to find a way to get rid of it, but it becomes quite obvious quite quickly that he simply wants to satisfy his own morbid curiosity.

Over the course of the film the two come into repeated conflicts over how to deal with the entity. Neither side is completely sympathetic or unsympathetic in their views. Katie seems to have simply given up, and accepted that she'd rather live with the occasional supernatural activity than try to fight the being and risk enraging it. Micah, on the other hand, often seems intent on hitting a hornets' nest with a stick. He lays out powder to see if the entity leaves footprints, films everything in the house, and even brings in a ouija board.

Katie does bring in psychic Dr. Mark Freidrichs, who recommends contacting a Demonologist. Micah objects to the Demonologist, so by the time they attempt to call him he's out of town. Micah's objection here has always baffled me. He could easily have filmed a battle between good and evil, and instead chose not to. I really have no explanation except that the film needed to be dragged out longer.

The entity, for it's part, seems as much amused by Micah's efforts as angry. It burns a message into the ouija board, and even leaves footprints, which Katie assures Micah it left only because it wanted to. I'd say that at this point in the franchise, when we still knew so little, the being was a lot scarier.

There are several endings, all of which involve Katie leaving the bedroom one night, screaming Micah's name off-screen, and then apparently killing him when he comes. I'd say the original ending, created before the movie was purchased by Paramount, was likely the best (the police arrive, and the entity spooks them into shooting Katie).

That said, the ending we're left with is still quite intense, no matter how many awful sequels it leads to. Katie throws Micah's body at the camera, then crawls over next to it, showing a demonic look on her face, and attacks the camera. We're then told by a title card that Micah's body was found, but Katie's whereabouts are unknown.

This movie is far from a masterpiece. The characters constantly bicker, and neither of them are especially smart. However, their reactions aren't unbelievable, and the actors do a decent job of portraying two people who really shouldn't be together.

There are much worse products out there (including products in this series). This movie is at least worth a try. The same cannot be said for many later entries in this franchise, which as of this writing seem to have finally run the entire series into the ground.