Still, the film is surprisingly effective. Instead of two people being haunted, there is a whole family, including friends and a dog. Paranormal Activity 2 is a classic case of sequelitis, where the limited setting and formal technique of the original are ballooned out until it nears breaking point. It’s this manipulation of on-screen space and tension that makes the film so effective.ģ. When a blanket ghost appears in the living room, we’re curious but the camera unwittingly moves us into the kitchen, so that by the time we return to the living room, the ghost is gone. The secret weapon of Paranormal Activity 3 is the revolving fan camera set-up, where the nighttime surveillance cam is attached to a fan that pivots between the living room and the kitchen. ![]() It helps that the film has the best acting of the franchise, especially in the two girls playing younger versions of Katie and Kristi. Paring down the multiple cameras from the first sequel and moving the setting back to the late 80s, the film was innovative in its own right while advancing the story world well beyond anything imagined in the first film. Henry Joost and Ariel SchulmanĬatfishdirectors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman took over the franchise and turned it into an exploration of technology and paranoid mythology. Paranormal Activity’s greatness might be a fluke-Peli’s long-awaited follow-up, Area 51, was a boring dud-but it’s still a landmark horror film and the definitive film of horror’s found footage years.Ģ. The final 20 minutes are some of the scariest filmmaking I’ve ever seen. Most of the scares would be mundane to the point of boredom if they were removed from the story context, but context is important in a horror film and Peli plays the audience perfectly. He builds tension through floorboard creaks or slowly-opening doors. Those limitations allow director Oren Peli to explore the audience’s imagination, which makes or breaks any horror film. That camera is fixed to a tripod in the corner of the bedroom for the majority of the horror scenes. There is one camera recording the nighttime haunting. He ends up recording the activities of a demon that is terrorizing their home in escalating fashion. Micah buys a video camera and installs it in the corner of their master bedroom to try to capture whatever it is that’s tormenting him. Katie (Katie Featherston) and Micah (Micah Sloat) start noticing strange happenings in their new San Diego home. ![]() Its mixture of mundane terror and formal stiltedness could only be done so effectively once. They can’t, as Paranormal Activity’s purity and originality is what makes it so remarkable. All the sequels and spinoffs have tried to replicate the success of this film, which is the most minimal and effective use of found footage horror aside from The Blair Witch Project. In the spirit of Halloween Horror, I’ve decided to rank the six films in the franchise and discuss some of what makes each film noteworthy (and in the case of The Ghost Dimension, what makes it forgettable.)ġ. ![]() The Paranormal Activity films were financial successes but they were also noteworthy horror films in their own right. Through six films in seven years, the franchise has become the pillar of found footage, pioneered the minimisation of horror, and made hundreds of millions of dollars against miniscule production budgets. In fact, it’s definitely better than Friday the 13th, and probably better than the other two franchises if you take all the films into account. However, stacked up againstthe Halloween, Friday the 13th or Nightmare on Elm Street franchises, it holds its own. People dismiss the series because it is modern, low-budget, and found footage. It’s unlikely the Paranormal Activity series will go down in history as one of the great horror franchises, but it’s better than most.
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