The experience of going to see a Paranormal Activity movie is radically different from nearly every other movie going experience there is. What you have here is a movie that doesn’t concern itself at all with storytelling. No calories are burnt trying to develop characters. Everything comes down to the scare. There almost doesn’t need to be any narrative at all, arguably these movies could work just as well if they were unconnected vignettes of people having supernatural experiences. Going to see a Paranormal Activity movie doesn’t even feel like the usual trip to the cinema, it feels more like standing in line for a haunted house.
Often, watching these movies can even start to feel like work. They’re mostly security cam footage of empty rooms and people sleeping. The images on screen are largely still and you have to strain your eyes to pick out any little thing moving in the corner of the frame, any hint of supernatural activity that might be kicking the movie into high gear. It’s a lot like looking through a “Where’s Waldo?” book. Every once in a while it hits you that you’re essentially just watching fake recreations of people’s tossed aside, cutting room floor home video footage, and you feel ridiculous. In what other context would you agree to sit through footage like this?
Just presenting a story this way comes with its own unique set of pitfalls. The hoops that the characters have to jump through in order to explain away why they’re filming everything they do wastes a lot of time. The dialogue can never be too clever, the scenes too artfully blocked, or we won’t believe in the conceit that this is real footage shot by the real people involved and not a dramatic production of a story. It begs the question, why not just make a regular movie? What about this approach is a more effective way to present scares than telling a traditional story? The photography is, by it’s nature, pedestrian. There isn’t any room for an overt score. It seems to me that making a “found footage” movie is a way to needlessly handicap yourself. Even when this movie does go out of it’s way to subvert annoying movie tropes, when it answers the age-old question of “Why don’t these people being haunted just leave the house?” by sending the plagued family to grandma’s, it still gets tripped up by it’s own framework. Why would the mom’s boyfriend Dennis (Christopher Nicholas Smith) keep filming everything even after they leave the house? No reason; another character even brings up the fact that there’s no reason for him to be filming, yet he just does it anyway. These are problems I’ve had with every Paranormal Activity movie to this point, but unlike in the first two, I don’t think that they completely sink this third installment.
The main reason this one improves on the established formula is that it’s just better at creating tense moments and pulling off scares. I imagine the difference is that this one was directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, who made last year’s similarly creepy and documentary feeling Catfish. They just have the touch when it comes to establishing dangerous situations and then making you linger in them. This movie introduces a new conceit, that of a security camera attached to an oscillating fan, and it becomes a really effective trick for freaking out and frustrating the audience. The camera pans back and forth, from the living room to the kitchen, excruciatingly slowly. Often there is important visual information that we need, just out of the frame, and we’re left sitting there, waiting for the camera to pan back, chewing our fingernails. In one instance the mother (Lauren Bittner) is fishing around in the garbage disposal in the kitchen (with her hands!) while some unearthly force makes a hanging light sway in the living room. In another a specter is standing behind an unsuspecting babysitter while we’re stranded in the other room, with no idea what’s happening to her. Horror is all about milking the moment, about using the right timing to make a scare happen, and Paranormal Activity 3 is a lot better at it than it’s predecessors.
The other reason this third film is more palatable than the first two is that the characters are just more likable. This is a period piece where the two sisters from the first two installments are children. They live with their mother and her boyfriend Dennis, and the family unit is much more sympathetic than the bickering couple of the first film or the painfully stupid family in the second. Dennis is a likable guy, way more so than the clueless Micah of the original or the grumpy father of the second. He runs a small videography business with his friend Randy (Dustin Ingram), and the two have some fun back and forths. For the first time some humor actually bleeds into a Paranormal Activity movie, and it’s a welcome addition. Also, Katie (Katie Featherston) and Kristi (Sprague Grayden) work a lot better as children than as adults. You’re more worried about things happening to little girls than you are random people in their 20s and 30s, and whenever the girls are put in physical danger the movie gets pretty harrowing. In the first two films I got none of that. Instead I was spending most of my time cataloguing the reasons why I wanted the people to get offed. Horror movies can’t be legitimately scary when you’re cheering at the violence.
When things break loose in this one and legitimately violent things start happening, cheering with joy will be the last thing on your mind. The tension builds to a boiling point and by the time the hauntings got really dangerous there were multiple people in my audience standing, talking out loud to each other, and yelling at the screen. I’ve maybe never seen a movie that an audience was more visibly scared by, and for a movie that’s concerning itself solely with scares, I guess that’s a success. There’s a whole lot of boredom you have to get through to make it to those scares though, and it’s because of the faux documentary format. The scares work because of the build, because of the sense of timing, and they would have worked just as well if they were wrapped up in a traditionally dramatic story with well crafted, developed characters. And then this movie would have probably been really good instead of just a mild recommendation. Still, some credit needs to be given to it for making an effort to redeem the putrid first two installments. And generally these types of films are a love them or hate them type of thing anyway; you probably already know which side of the fence you come down on. As a matter of fact, why are you even reading this review? Let’s go see some more movies.
