This Activity Just Got a Whole Lot Paranormal-er

"Bloody Mary. Bloody Mary. Bloody Mary."

So here I am with my third official movie review!  Some would say I'm practically a professional critic at this point (you know, except for pesky little things like getting paid, being able to attend advance screenings, and the like).  Oh, well... baby steps.

For those with only a passing familiarity with the Paranormal Activity franchise: the first film deals with a twentysomething couple, Katie and Micah, being tormented in their home by an unseen, apparently demonic force.  Dialogue early in the film establishes that the force has been haunting Katie and her sister since they were kids, and that it may or may not be responsible for a fire that destroyed their childhood home.  Paranormal Activity 2 takes place before the original film, and deals with the family of Katie's sister, Christy.  Christy's just had a new baby, and the family spook seems to be taking an unhealthy interest in the child.

And now we have number three, which moves the action even further back in time.  A cache of old VHS tapes provide a chronicle of the family's early experiences with the demon, as the girls' mother and her boyfriend try to protect them from Christy's increasingly ill-tempered "imaginary friend," Toby.

I'm continually impressed by the ingenuity of these films and their creators.  The obvious hook for a series like this would be to have a different group of characters being tormented by the demon or some similar creature in each film (see: The Amityville Horror and just about every other horror franchise known to man), or to keep following Katie and Micah as they struggle with the entity (like Poltergeist).  By delving into the backstory of Katie's family and their history with the demon, the Paranormal franchise has created a mythology that keeps being expanded upon and enriched in each film.  Are there inconsistencies?  Sure.  But that doesn't make the journey any less fun.
 

I also like that they keep upping the ante in each film, as far as the paranormal manifestations are concerned, but without getting totally ridiculous about it.  (Poltergeist, by contrast, has trees coming to life and lamps spinning through the air within the first thirty minutes).  Though it takes a while to get going, once it does it goes farther than either of the previous entries, but without sacrificing the subtlety or suspense of the first film.  That's an impressive achievement.

The filmmakers also keep finding new and interesting ways to change the character dynamic.  The first film featured a young couple, and the squabbling and bickering between the two was completely believable, adding an air of authenticity to the proceedings.  The second dealt with a family (parents, teenager, new baby, and so on), and this one centers on a young mother, her live-in boyfriend, and two preteen girls.  Just as putting the baby in jeopardy upped the tension in the second film, this one achieves a similar effect by putting at least one of the young girls in the line of fire.  Putting kids in danger is just scarier than it is with adults, no two ways about it.

Having said all that... the film isn't perfect.  It does what it does, and it does it well, but while it puts some interesting new spins on familar elements (characters getting dragged offscreen by unseen forces and the like), it doesn't really bring anything fundamentally new to the table.  And there are a few too many "cheap" scares during the early part of the film; red herrings, characters deliberately trying to scare each other, and so on.

My favorite aspect of the film was unquestionably the quality of the moviegoing experience itself.  As a life-long horror fan, I've read numerous accounts of watching classics like Halloween or The Exorcist on the big screen; how audiences would scream, cover their eyes, call out to the characters on screen, and so on... but I've never experienced anything remotely like that, myself.  Most of the horror films I've caught in theaters have been tried-and-true franchise efforts like Scream and Friday the 13th, where there's a higher camp factor involved, and most of the audience seems to be in on the joke.  This film gave me my first "classic" horror movie experience, and that's something that's going to stick with me for a long time.              

I give it three out of four bouts of creepy bedside staring.