The "Paranormal Activity" Franchise

[StevePulaski]

Paranormal Activity (2009)
Directed by: Oren Peli

Strange noises are heard frequently in Paranormal Activity.

Rating: ★★★★

Paranormal Activity is not your typical horror film. There's no killer, no CGI, and thank goodness no Michael Bay. With a mere budget of $15,000 that will seemingly get you nowhere, Paranormal Activity proves wrong.

The story concerns is a young dating couple "played" by Katie Featherson and Micah Sloat. I put quotes around "played" because they are themselves in the film, and they occupy their own names. There's one flaw in their relationship. Ever since her house burned, Katie has been haunted by demons. Mainly in the late night hours. "Ghosts" slam the doors, looks of creaking sounds make up for the lack of music, and so on. The little things that make you flinch or jump in a horror film are now put in the foreground. They are the main scares of the film.

Jump scares are those little instances where one of the characters turns around or something moves really fast, usually in the night time for added effect, and you hear an effect and a loud chord from the music. Normally, I'm against them. I, however, am not against suspense. In many current horror films, jump scares come seconds before an actual murder or something along those lines. The main flaw with jump scares is now that you've jumped up and flinched two or more times, the real murder will not seem as scary.

Here's a scenario - a woman walking alone in an eerie forest in the middle of the night. Nevermind why, but imagine she turns around once and you get a jump scare that makes you flinch. Imagine afterwards she looks the other way and you get another huge jump. Then finally, the killer comes out and attacks her. The murder doesn't seem as scary as it would with no jump scares because you clearly saw it coming. No film would deliberately tease you with loud, obnoxious jump scares if nothing would happen in that scene.

But in Paranormal Activity, those jump scares are what we are waiting for. The suspense comes from the silence and the lack of music - we are waiting for something to make a loud noise so we can jump. Only in maybe two scenes I recall something actually happening that goes beyond a jump scare. It was the equivalent to a murder in a slasher film.

The way the film is shot too does nothing but add to the creepy vibe. I've always been a huge fan of shot-on-video horror films, meaning the film is shot with a handheld camcorder and no tripod. Someone in the film is holding it and filming it first person style. The same thing worked in 1999 when the horror film that shocked many The Blair Witch Project came out. While mocked now, the film is without a doubt eerie and is still filmed very realistically.

The less you know the better about Paranormal Activity the better, which is why I tried to shy away from major plot points and discoveries. I assume that maybe in ten years this will be looked seen as "silly" and "stupid," but frankly, if you think about the realism, the quality, and the acting in the film, it's all believable, captivating, and powerful. It achieves many goals in elements that can easily be ruined in films like these. It at least deserves credit for that.

Starring: Katie Featherson and Micah Sloat. Directed by: Oren Peli.

NOTE: This review was rewritten on October 21, 2011. The reason being because the original review, written after seeing this film in 2009, was highly flawed and made false statements in some parts. My original ideas and thoughts are still in this review, just upgraded heavily.

[StevePulaski]

Paranormal Activity 2 (2010)
Directed by: Tod Williams

Rating: ★★½

Paranormal Activity 2 is a perfect example of a sequel that is not necessarily bad, but simultaneously not needed as well. It stuck to the same format as the original which is already more that can be said about the sequel to Blair Witch and it tied with the original Paranormal film as well which was definitely the film's highpoint. The rest not so much. There isn't much new or surprising. The jump scares are back and at full force in this film. Do they work? Sometimes. Are they needed? Nope.

It angers me how much "jump scares" have become adapted as the primary scare in films today. Put the new Nightmare on Elm Street up to the podium. Every five minutes we get a "bang", "boom", "pow", "insert onomatopoeia here". It's hard to even think of a movie that used legitimate scares instead of some cliche synth/raise in pitch. Films in the 80's did use some essence of jump scares, but it would be one "boom" before a murder. Now it's around three or four before something happens. Though in PA2, jump scares serve as the main scare now. The loud noise is now the scare. Not just part of the suspense build up. That didn't bother me in the first one because the jumps in that film were well done and they were new and fresh, this one you see it coming twenty minutes before it occurs.

We get a new set of characters this time around; Kristi (Katie's sister from the original film), her husband Dan, her daughter Ali, the newborn infant Hunter, and the family dog. Just by telling someone that sentence already gives a horror movie fan the obvious information to which one will be the primary target of paranormal beings. They put a baby and a dog in the horror film, two sensitive characters that usually know and sense more than the teenagers/adults. So we already know who will get the most attention.

Kristi has had her first infant son named Hunter and they settle down in a house around the corner from Katie and her husband Micah (characters in original film). Things start getting creepy when some "paranormal activity", hint-hint, starts occurring in the house and the family begins experiencing odd events in the night, Hunter's lack of sleep, cabinets opening on cue, and many other things that provide one too many loud noises. It gets frustrating to have to keep hearing a clutter and a clank for something as easy as switching cameras.

Another thing mindblowingly frustrating is that the film keeps going from day to night much like the first film. But we have to continuously see the same exact scenery. Half the time nothing is happening and it's like watching ongoing security cameras in a closed mall. What fun! We see the hallway, pool, kitchen, living room, entrance way, then Hunter's room in that order. We see the parents room and Ali's room briefly in the beginning of the film, but why we never see it throughout the movie like the other six places is beyond me. Maybe paranormal species do not like visiting parents' bedrooms and teenagers rooms. Maybe the ghost hates posters/various stickers of Jacob of Twilight that are possibly flooding the girl's room? Anything is possible.

Upon it's release, Paranormal Activity received various positive reviews from critics/audience. Though for some reason I have not been able to find one person who found it above average. I really enjoyed the first film, and it earned a four star review from me around a year ago. The Blair Witch Project is another film that's mixed opinion. Some love it, some hate it. Rarely are there any in between reviews of the film. I enjoy both movies and call them effective Horror films that do more justice than any CGI filled heap we are usually handed to today. Paranormal Activity 2 is fine to say the least, but it's a huge disappointment coming off of the first masterpiece. Horror can go a long way, but to do the same thing twice has rarely been sufficient.

Starring: Katie Featherston, Micah Sloat, Brian Boland, Sprague Grayden, Molly Ephraim, and Tim Clemens. Directed by: Tod Williams.

[StevePulaski]

Paranormal Activity 3 (2011)
Directed by: Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman

Rating: ★½

Paranormal Activity 3 is a messy and unnecessary prequel for a franchise that didn't even need one sequel. I stated in my review of the second one that since it followed the original formula, it was better than The Blair Witch Project sequel, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2. At least Blair Witch knew it was not necessary to make a third film. Paranormal Activity still believes in itself, and will inevitably make more installments.

This is a prequel to the first films, like I mentioned. Something we all saw coming. The film takes place in the present for just a few minutes, then we see Kristi's (Grayden) house get vandalized from the second film and we see a bunch of old tapes her sister Katie (Featherson) dropped off had gone missing. The rest of the film is compiled of those VHS tapes from when Katie and Kristi were young.

It is 1988, a fairly modern version of it, and we see both Katie and Kristi growing up rather upper middle class with their mother Julie (Bittner) and her boyfriend Daniel (Boland). We learn Daniel is obsessed with taping everything, and one day catches what appears to be some "paranormal activity" on tape. He then sets up a camera in their bedroom, a camera in the girls' bedroom, and an oscillating camera on a fan in the living room/kitchen.

The rest of the film consists of ineffective jump scares, mild activity that sometimes goes unnoticed, and a lot of screaming. Not from the audience, but from the parents and the children. Not a lot of questions are answered, but the film feels like it should bring more into the picture. We never really find out the story of the baby Hunter from the second film, and many other points like the mysterious photograph are not revisited.

The trailer is misleading beyond belief. Very few, if any scenes from the trailer exist in the film which is either because (a) the film was victim to several rewrites and reshoots, or (b) they shot much of the footage for the trailer before the actual film and now went back to film around those shots and got sidetracked. Certain scenes like the "Bloody Mary" scene from the trailer exist, but in a very different and inferior manner.

Paranormal Activity 3 is supposed to be set in 1988, but looks absolutely nothing like it. The house is too modern, the clothes are from the present, very little references to famous things in the eighties, and not to mention the film being shot with a glorious, high definition camera - the most fatal flaw of all.

Lots of the activity is very subtle as well. We are provided with maybe one effective jump scare, two or three amusing scenes, and an interesting camera angle. The ending, in-which the last fifteen minutes are supposed to "scar you for life," are rather underwhelming and very unappealing. I dare not spoil them because, while I was disappointed, I was nonetheless surprised.

The franchise itself has ran its course dry, but more sequels are inevitably on the way. We have many more questions, and fewer and fewer answers per film. No doubt this will gross many, many millions at the box office, and be seen by many fans of the first two. If you are interested in creepy stories from an interesting perspective, directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, directors of this, did an extremely immersing documentary called Catfish. That had more jumps and way more intensity that lacks in Paranormal Activity 3.

Starring: Katie Featherston, Sprague Grayden, Chloe Csengery, Jessica Tyler Brown, Brian Boland, Lauren Bittner, Christopher Nicholas Smith, and Mark Fredrichs. Directed by: Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman.

[StevePulaski]

Paranormal Activity 4 (2012)
Directed by: Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman

Something is haunting fifteen year old Alex in the fourth installment to the Paranormal Activity franchise.

Rating: ★★

It has become an unintentional October ritual that I decorate the house for Halloween, watch a few horror films, and, since 2009, see the latest installment of the Paranormal Activity franchise. When I walked out of the original film on that faithful October morning, I hoped that the wonderful picture I had just saw would be left alone, and not have the albatrosses known as sequels leaching off of it.

My hope wasn't answered, and a year later, we got the marginally decent, however, unnecessary Paranormal Activity 2. Then a year later, in 2011, we got Paranormal Activity 3, a stale, tired rendition on old formula. Walking out of that one, I was very, very weary of the concept and the franchise, but after looking at the unearthly amount of money the film took in, just from midnight showings alone, and the fact that the story didn't even seem to be coming anywhere close to full circle, I was sure we'd get at least three or four more Paranormal Activity films before this venture would be complete.

Now I'm faced with the fourth film, directed by the extremely talented directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, who made one of 2010's finest documentaries, Catfish. This installment is a small improvement over the uninspired third part, yet it has little to offer. The characters are a tad more tolerable, and some sequences, including the end, have a bit more life in them, but when the moments examine the paranormal inactivity of it all, it becomes totally vanilla.

After two films we finally reconnect with Katie from the original film, this time, living on an upper-middle class suburban block with Hunter from the second film. Only in this part, he's called "Robbie," not "Hunter" and is about six years old. Don't question. Turns out, they have moved across the street from fifteen year old Alex (Kathryn Newton), her tech-savvy boyfriend Ben, who doesn't live there but might as well (Matt Shively, of True Jackson, VP fame), her younger brother Wyatt (Aiden Lovekamp), and her parents (Stephen Dunham and Alexondra Lee). When Katie is taken to the hospital for unknown reasons, Robbie (Brady Allen), who already loves to venture into the neighbors' backyard and hang out in the treehouse, is sent to be cared for at Alex's home for the next few days.

Robbie immediately strikes up an unsettling friendship with Wyatt, and it isn't long before Alex and her goofy boyfriend become victim to the paranormal activity occurring in the household. Everything from falling chandeliers, to dining room chairs moving out abruptly, to knives falling, loud thumps, and alarms claiming "FRONT DOOR OPEN, BACK DOOR OPEN" occur and there is little consistency with anything.

Many different cameras are utilized throughout the film, mainly Alex's webcam on her laptop, which she apparently carts around with her everywhere she goes. The main camera is the one on the Xbox 360's Kinect (for those unaware, a mechanism that now comes equipped with the console, which allows the person to use the tiny sensor on the device to utilize motion control and be able to control their character without a formal controller), which, when on, creates little small, green dots that glow and showcase night-vision movement. It's a nifty little novelty, and we can at least see that Joost and Schulman have respectively tried to breed life back into the way these pictures are filmed.

Thank goodness, because there's little that can be done with the story and the scares. We get a barrage of different jump scares, many inactive nights, and lots of abrupt noises always followed up by a startled "hello?" from one of the characters. These films have gotten to be achingly predictable, and it feels like every year since 2010, I've gone on a lunch-date with a person whose intentions I like, but personality and charm I've come to loathe.

I think besides the nifty camerawork, what elevates Paranormal Activity 4 from the monotony and the drabness of the previous installment, is the fact that we have at least marginally tolerable characters to watch as well. Alex and Ben are at times, a humorous riot, and at others, dreadfully unremarkable. Easily, they are the most fun to be with since Katie and Micah, but Katie and Micah were at least trapped in a film that was fun to experience for the first time in a fresh, original manner. Here, we've become so accustomed to this formula that we continue to anticipate every twist and every turn, and we watch in plain awe to see the films border more and more on the line of self-parody.

So, let's say Joost and Schulman make the decision to direct the inevitable Paranormal Activity 5 and Paranormal Activity 6. What they should focus on, instead of repetitive, dead-end jump scares, is giving the audience some insight as to what is haunting Katie and her family and how it came to be. It seems every film, we get a different entity and no explanation surrounding it. When will we get the explanation of Katie's action during the first installment? Or her sister's spontaneous ones in the sequel? Or what about "Toby," or whoever the imaginary figure was in the third film? And don't forget about whatever the hell that was at the end of the third film, and this film, for that matter. Just another sidenote; the last fifteen minutes of this film did not scar me for life, much like its predecessor's.

Paranormal Activity 4 is effective in rustling up scare-attempt after scare-attempt on a basic level, yet shortchanges the larger questions that would offer insight to Katie's family if explored. Some viewers may not want to be bothered by lengthy explanations of the countless questions still at hand or the numerous symbols that have been associated with the demonic creatures in these films. Perhaps so, but to watch the fourth film in a series continue to be resistant in exploring the exposition of its characters doesn't seem like an ideal move. Considering audiences seem to be tiring from the bang-and-scare features the found footage genre has inspired, it would be a pity to see this franchise die before it can fully clean up its messy tracks.

Starring: Kathryn Newton, Matt Shively, Katie Featherston, Brady Allen, Aiden Lovekamp, Stephen Dunham, and Alexondra Lee. Directed by: Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman.

[StevePulaski]

Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones (2014)
Directed by: Christopher B. Landon

Hector (Jorge Diaz) and Marisol (Gabrielle Walsh) in Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones.

Rating: ★★

Halloween 2013 felt a little unremarkable this year, from the lack of spirit in my local neighborhood, the presence of only one theatrically-released horror film during the whole month of October (Carrie), and the first time since 2009 I didn't spend one Saturday morning in the theater watching an installment of the Paranormal Activity franchise. Call it a blessing, a curse, or what-have-you, I felt a tad incomplete. While each sequel to 2009's surprisingly great Paranormal Activity was significantly lacking in some way or another, I always looked forward to what exactly was in store for the next film. If that old saying was true, I'm a cat who lost all his nine lives rather quickly.

However, the January-release of Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones continues with my other unintentional-tradition that my first theater-film of the year is a very mediocre horror film, 2013's being Texas Chainsaw 3D and 2012's being The Devil Inside. The Marked Ones is the franchise's second spinoff - if you count the Tokyo-released Paranormal Activity 2: Tokyo Night (unseen by me), but I digress - jumbling up all that we came to know before, this time concerning a Latino family in the working/middle class, Hispanic neighborhood of Oxnard, California. The film revolves around Jesse (Andrew Jacobs), his buddy Hector (Jorge Diaz), and his sister Marisol (Gabrielle Walsh) as they experience obscure "paranomalities" after their elderly apartment neighbor dies in strange circumstances. Jesse and Hector would always hear odd sounds coming from their neighbor's home, which was located directly beneath there's, but now that she's dead, they discover something even more haunting - Jesse's gradual descent into troubling behavior.

Jesse discovers bite-marks on his arm, and begins to develop anti-social, aggressive tendencies towards random people and loved ones. He loses touch with reality, and himself, similar to another neighborhood friend named Oscar (Carlos Pratts), who we often see whipping around town during the night at hyper-speeds. As with the previous four films, the friends of the victim - in this case, his buddy and his sister - desperately try to piece together what exactly is happening with Jesse and what can be done to stop it.

Jesse has got to be one of the most fortunate victims in the Paranormal Activity franchise, spinoff or not, because he is one of the few protagonists we become invested in just enough to care about when these events begin to occur. Past victims other than Katie in the original film have been difficult to sympathize with because we don't know a lot about them. Because the camera never leaves Jesse, and many scenes involve him doing pretty normal, day-to-day stuff with his equally likable buddy Hector, liking him and expressing a fondness for his character isn't an unheard of thing.

While this keeps The Marked Ones adequately afloat, the film still seems to suffer from an identity crisis, particularly with the heavy inclusion of comedy, which simultaneously makes the picture more interesting but also manages to throw it off. Consider the scene where Jesse, Hector, and Marisol screw about with a "Simon Says" toy, which only seems to utilize two of its four colors, green and red. When one of the three ask it a "yes or no" question, it replies with the corresponding colors. The scene is eerie, but because the friends make it out to be humorous throws kills the film's tone. When Jesse's descent into anti-social and borderline sociopathic tendencies come into play - about forty to fifty minutes into the film - is when the horror elements begin to make way and even those feel underwhelming.

I blame this on the commonality of these kinds of films in recent years. I hesitate greatly to rewatch the original Paranormal Activity because I fear that my extreme love and fondness for it was only so high because I hadn't seen a film like that in many years (at the time, of course). Watching The Marked Ones a surprising five years after the release of that film, I went from flinching and squirming in my seat to sitting idly by, watching everything happening on screen and never flinching or squirming once during its eighty-four minute runtime. All the scares feel perfunctory and, someone like me who has seen so many found footage films since 2009 (I reckon roughly twenty), I feel like an expert on the genre and as if I'm one step ahead of it for the entire time.

And, once more, we get little idea as to what is haunting these characters. Again, the film offers more cute little twists (I'm completely lost at what the ending we're given here is getting at and when it takes place in this series' timeline), plot-strands, and such minimal exposition as to what is haunting these characters, it's as if asking for more information is a pointless request that will do nothing but waste your breath.

I applaud Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones for three things: one, giving us a character we can like and sort of connect with two, not turning out to be the abysmal film the trailer made it look like, with its production values and editing that resembled a fan-made homage to the franchise by teenagers on Youtube, and three, giving me an opportunity to exercise my one and a half years of public school Spanish. While the film is different from its predecessors in several aspects, it still reeks of the smothering sameness of them in several areas as well. All I can say at this point is simply "next."

Starring: Andrew Jacobs, Jorge Diaz, and Gabrielle Walsh. Directed by: Christopher B. Landon.

[StevePulaski]

Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension (2015)
Directed by: Gregory Plotkin

Rating: ★★½

"So, let's say Joost and Schulman make the decision to direct the inevitable Paranormal Activity 5 and Paranormal Activity 6. What they should focus on, instead of repetitive, dead-end jump scares, is giving the audience some insight as to what is haunting Katie and her family and how it came to be."

Above is a direct quote from my review of Paranormal Activity 4, which began my streak of lamenting every new Paranormal Activity installment for neglecting the elephant in the room - what was haunting the family and the characters in this series and why? I became frustrated that, with each new installment, the focus was on some sort of technological gimmick or the increased quantity of jump-scares which, in turn, diminished the quality of them, and that there seemed to be no interest in wrapping up the loose-ends and plot-strands that Oren Peli, Henry Joost, Ariel Schulman, and numerous other writers/directors of the series had created.

With Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension, which is billed to be the franchise's conclusion, I can finally rest easy knowing with most of my questions answered rather than panning a slew of open-ended circumstances. Director Gregory Plotkin and a quartet of screenwriters - Jason Harry Pagan, Andrew Deutschmann, Adam Robitel, and Gavin Heffernan - do their best to give audiences new characters with this final installment and provide a coherent timeline of events for the life of Katie, who we saw haunted in the first three films, in addition to other minor characters liker her sister and even "Paranormal Activity 2"'s baby Hunter.

The Ghost Dimension focuses on the young couple of Ryan (Chris J. Murray) and Emily (Brit Shaw), who live in a lavish home with their young daughter Leila (Ivy George). Also living with them temporarily is Ryan's brother Mike (Dan Gill) and Emily's friend Skyler (Olivia Taylor Dudley) while they get their own lives together. Shortly after being acquainted with the home, Ryan finds a large box of tapes and a highly customized, one-of-a-kind video-camera and begins seeing strange apparitions when using it throughout the house. Extensive research into the tapes, which belonged to the mother and father of young Katie and Kristi, shows questionable occurrences and what looks to be demonic activity throughout the home. Overtime, Ryan and Mike notice Leila's increasingly strange behavior, from simple anti-social attitudes to believing her imaginary friend Toby, a memorable name for any fan or follower of this franchise, is real.

Every Paranormal Activity convention is on display here: jump-scares, long, somewhat listless documents of the night through the use of many camera setups, smart-ass characters, strange behavior amongst children, the knowledgeable priest showing up in the nick of time. By now, you should know how you feel about these conventions (I always keep an open mind, though after the second film, I've found them to be as grating as most people). About thirty minutes into this installment, I was mentally preparing a more negative review, saying that this series was going to end on a shrug and a head-shake, until the narrative became more concerned with piecing together the childhoods of Katie and Kristi, even tying in the brainless ending of Paranormal Activity 3.

This is where The Ghost Dimension becomes a fiercely watchable film, and upon piecing together the old, it formulates new inclusions by giving us some seriously strong jump-scares in this film. The 3D doesn't add a lot to the experience, but it furthers the surprising notion that home-video footage looks quite good when it's digitally rendered. With all that, this film goes from the same old conventions done in a mediocre manner to making an earnest attempt at concluding the franchise in a way that makes sense and answers most of our burning questions.

The problem, however, is at this point, I don't think people really care. The saturation of these films and the massive amounts of parodies have made this franchise the laughingstock of the horror world, and the significantly decreased theater counts - due to Cinemark and Regal Cinemas refusing to show the film because of Paramount's plan to digitally distribute the film once it falls below three-hundred theaters (the same will be done with Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse next weekend) - people have moved on, much like they did with the Saw series, which also found itself concluding pretty abruptly. The Ghost Dimension is arguably the best conclusion to this wheezy franchise we could've asked for, and I found myself being in a state I haven't been in with these films since 2010 - satisfied and content.

Starring: Chris J. Murray, Brit Shaw, Ivy George, Dan Gill, and Olivia Taylor Dudley. Directed by: Gregory Plotkin.