Found footage movies are rather polarizing, more so than other styles within in the horror genre. This is especially evident in the very successful ones; I know people who to this day will still argue whether or not The Blair Witch Project was good or bad. The same can be said for more recent fare like the Paranormal Activity movies.
When Paramount Pictures gave the first Paranormal Activity a wide theatrical release after its two-year stint on the film festival circuit, it was an unexpected hit. It was so successful, in fact, that one could argue that it's what killed the Saw franchise, its Halloween weekend competition.
But it's been the subject of a lot of heated debates since then. One side argues that the bulk of the movie is just some douchebag and his freaked-out girlfriend sitting around waiting for something to happen. The other argues that it's a suspenseful haunted house story that did the best it could with limited means. What do I think? I personally thought that both it and the sequel that followed it last year were, at the very least, really effective in establishing a dreadful, spooky atmosphere with some genuine scares.
In any event, the movies still proved to be financially successful and found an audience who actually enjoyed them. And that's what leads us to Paranormal Activity 3. Seemingly having fully supplanted Saw as the new annual Halloween tradition, the franchise borrows an idea from the second movie by taking another step back into the past to show us just where the demonic forces from the previous movies got its start. And even though it isn't quite as good as the first two, I still enjoyed the hell out of it.
Let me take you back to the year that was 1988. George H.W. Bush was elected into the White House, DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince's parents just didn't understand, and yours truly was only six years old. The sisters depicted in the first two Paranormal Activity movies are just kids themselves, too. Young Katie (Chloe Cserngey) and Kristi (Jessica Tyler Brown) have recently moved with their mother, Julie (Lauren Bittner), into the home of Julie's boyfriend Dennis (Chris Smith). It isn't long, however, before bizarre incidents start happening around the house.
It begins when, during an earthquake, Dennis notices some falling dust silhouetting what appears to be an invisible figure in he and Julie's bedroom. A wedding videographer by trade, he installs his cache of camcorders around the house as surveillance devices to keep an eye on what's happening. Furniture moves around the house, household objects start levitating, a babysitter is accosted by an unseen being. As these events escalate, everything seems to focus on Kristi's new imaginary friend, "Toby." But as these occurrences become much more sinister in nature, it quickly comes to light that Toby is neither as imaginary nor as friendly as originally perceived.
If you've read my reviews, you're aware that I absolutely loved the first two Paranormal Activity movies. So I was naturally pretty excited to see the third movie. And I walked out of the theater disappointed that practically none of what appears in the trailers and commercials is actually in the movie. That's really the only problem I had with it. It's like they were advertising a completely different version of the movie. I wanted to see the movie from the commercials, because it looked awesome. But the actual Paranormal Activity 3 is not the one that the advertising campaign is promising. That's kind of a shame, though I must say that I still enjoyed the movie a lot.
Sitting in the director's chair are Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, the directors of the (allegedly fake) documentary Catfish. The way they put Catfish together made them a perfect fit for the "found footage" genre, and their work here is fantastic. Not a single frame of the movie is wasted. Everything is building to something, whether it's a scare of an advancement of the plot. This buildup fosters a level of suspense and dread that makes the frightening moments way more effective.
I especially liked their use of a camera that's ostensibly mounted on an oscillating fan. It pans back and forth across the living room and kitchen in twenty-second increments, allowing things to sneak up on us. It actually sets up two of the best scares in the movie. It was a novel idea on Joost and Schulman's part, a bit of creativity that really makes the movie that much scarier. I do think, though, that Joost and Schulman could have gotten away with stealing the split-screen concept from the Japanese Paranormal Activity. They could have pulled it off.
My only problem with their direction is that the movie looks way too crisp. For everything about the 1988 setting Joost and Schulman get right, the movie still looks like it was shot with high-definition digital cameras. My family used to own one of those big VHS camcorders, and none of the videos we shot ever looked half as good as this movie does. And I sincerely doubt that camcorders in the '80s recorded in 16:9 widescreen either. This whole paragraph, though, is basically just nitpicking. It's an incredibly minor gripe that doesn't even really matter in the grand scheme of things. Joost and Schulman did an otherwise great job, and they should be proud of themselves.
I also thought the script by Christopher Landon was very good. Both sequels have been about escalation; Paranormal Activity 2 escalated the scares, while this one escalates the scope of the franchise's mythology. The first two movies set up that Katie and Kristi have been haunted since their childhoods, and that one of their ancestors may have made some kind of deal with the devil. Without going into spoiler territory here, Landon expands upon this in a rather frightening way, one that could change how one would view the other two movies in retrospect.
While I will confess that part of the movie's concept — that we're watching VHS tapes the adult Katie gave to Kristi shortly before the events of the second movie — seems to only exist to shoehorn in cameos from Katie Featherston and Sprague Grayden, I thought Landon did an awesome job in expanding on the hauntings from the first two movies. Though the movie's status as a prequel means there was no forward movement in the franchise's overall arc, and we still don't know just where the hell things are going after Paranormal Activity 2's ending, Landon has still written a terrifying movie that both shakes up and adds to the franchise's ability to scare the pants off its fans.
London also manages to avoid a trap that a lot of found footage movies fall in by not having the characters argue over whether or not they should keep filming. More often than not, I've seen at least one scene in a found footage movie where someone will be justifiably pissed off at the cameraman and angrily demand that he stop filming. But not here! Everyone's pretty much cool with the cameras. And without those arguing scenes, the movie moves a lot smoother. It doesn't make any logical sense, since as in other found footage movies, the climax would make much more sense had whomever filming just dropped the camera and ran for the hills. But then the movie would just kinda stop and we'd have no ending, unless they started using footage from security cameras or even ditched the found footage gimmick and transitioned into a regular movie like in the climax of Behind the Mask.
He gives a group of characters that are all very likable as well. The first two movies both featured at least one character that you'd probably be justified in disliking. Pretty much everyone who saw the first movie thought Micah was an annoying douchebag and Brian Boland's character in the second one was kind of a prick. But everyone in Paranormal Activity 3 is someone you can root for, someone whose story you'll hope has a happy ending. It's a large part of what makes the movie so good. While it's certainly cathartic to see annoying characters face the monster's wrath in most horror movies, it can be just as scary to take a bunch of sympathetic characters and place them in peril. That's the kind of movie Landon has written, and I applaud his efforts.
It helps that the characters are all played by fantastic actors. Everyone in the movie puts forth their absolute best. Lauren Bittner gives us a credible, believable performance, while Dustin Ingram — who plays a friend of Dennis's and provides some of the movie's lighter moments — steals a lot of the scenes he's in. I got a real kick out of Chris Smith too. His performance is funny, enjoyable, and entertaining.
Of the child actors, Chloe Cserngey aces her role as the young Katie, but she's outshined by Jessica Tyler Brown. Brown alternates between sweet and spooky, giving us a lot of moments that are simultaneously cute and disturbing. She plays the role very mysteriously; you know that something is going on with her, but you're never quite sure what. In particular, the scenes where she wakes up in the middle of the night so she can have one-sided conversations with "Toby" are very creepy and foreboding. It's a great performance, one that actually helps add to the movie's feeling of dread.
Although I didn't like it as much as the first two, Paranormal Activity 3 is still a great flick. It's suspenseful and scary, and fills in some of the blanks in the overall story that may or may not have been created by the other two. But it raises just as many questions as it answers, more than likely just so they can have something to do in the next movie. (And if you think they aren't going to make Paranormal Activity 4, you're out of your mind.) That's something that can be overlooked, though, because it's still a damn find movie. You probably won't like the movie if you weren't a fan of the first two, but I am and I enjoyed it. I do wonder, though, what they'll do with Paranormal Activity 4. Do they do another prequel? Do they follow up on the ending of the second one? I guess we'll have to wait a year and see.
Final Rating: ***½
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