![]() Certainly, insofar as the main conflict in any Paranormal Activity film is "something goes bang at night, and nobody can figure out what it is", that's something PA4 completely lacks. The film is, in fact, fairly transparently trying to stitch the end of the second movie together with the inevitable fifth movie, and is so concerned with clarifying more of the storyline that, to repeat myself only because it is a very important point, never should have been complicated in the first place, that it largely fails to tell its own story. ![]() PA4 could have just sat on top of that mythology and allowed it to be in the background but now. It is a film that does an immaculate job of training the viewer how to watch it, showing us how and where scares are going to happen, and then letting the camera roll while we anticipate those things happening, and in the best tradition of psychological imprinting, they only happen sometimes, which makes it much more rattling than if they happened always, metronomically.īut being a machine designed solely to go "BANG" and shock a healthy portion of its audience was, apparently, too unfussy for the producers of the series, and that is why we got huge piles of exposition and mythology in Paranormal Activity 2, a couple-months prequel that starts to complicate the straightforward "evil ghost is evil" scenario of the first movie, and Paranormal Activity 3, a two-decades prequel that explains a great deal of things we already knew while also turning the whole franchise into an epic family drama about the sins of the parents falling onto children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and leaving those of us who just wanted to be freaked out by inexplicable things - AKA "paranormal activity" - wondering how it is that a scenario about a young couple having the dickens scared out of them turned into a franchise with a mythology convoluted enough that you have to diagram it. In every subsequent scene, we're waiting for the ghost to happen. In the first scene, one of them says, "oho, we've got a ghost". This is supposed to be a simply concept, and simplicity is the reason I still like the first Paranormal Activity, even after everything: it presents two people. On paper, at least, PA4 has potential: it is the first of these putative sequels to the original Paranormal Activity that predominately takes place later than it, and thus can actually advance the story whatsoever, instead of just filling in the gaps in a convoluted mythology that has literally no fucking excuse in the world to be convoluted. And if that person does exist, they're too busy wanking to The Devil Inside on a constant loop to bother seeing new movies. And when you've stripped the last shred of shocking scary moments out of the Paranormal Activity franchise, there is nothing left whatsoever, unless there exists somewhere a viewer who genuinely enjoys conceptually dubious found footage pictures on their own merits. ![]() ![]() In fact, there is nothing in PA4 that I'd say meets the definition of any kind of scare, and not in the "I, the sophisticated blogger, am jaded" sense, but in the "no, for real, they actually forgot to put shocking scary moments in their demonic possession horror movie" sense. It's also not in PA4, and there is not a singe moment that is in the film that's trying to replicate that kind of jump scare. It's not the scariest thing you've ever seen, unless you are very young, but it gets the job done right. But Paranormal Activity 4 is something different and exciting: a movie with the trailer that includes the best part not in the movie: a shot of a teenage girl Skyping with her boyfriend, the image gets garbled and distorted, and when it comes back, there's a Someone in the background. We're all familiar, I'm sure, with the movie trailer that includes all of the best parts: the funniest gags in a comedy, the loudest explosions in an action film, the spookiest jump scare in a horror film. ![]()
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