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Movie Review: Paranormal Activity 3

via hollywoodreporter.com

There’s a moment early in Paranormal Activity 3 where Julie (Lauren Bittner), the young and newly remarried mother of beleaguered series stars Katie and Kristie, is convinced to have sex on camera by her wedding videographer husband, Dennis (Christopher Nicholas Smith). The two set the camera in a place steady enough to film the whole sordid affair and get ready to get busy. The sex tape doesn’t have a chance to even begin filming the duo (and though Paranormal Activity 3 is a R-rated film, it clearly isn’t reaching for a hard R-rating). This scene is eerily reminiscent of a scene in Paranormal Activity wherein adult Katie fends off boyfriend Micah’s attempt to make the same kind of tape.

As a prequel to first film in the series, this kind of callback is interesting and manages to give broader context to the earlier film in the series, but going beyond that, it’s also emblematic of the chief problem with Paranormal Activity: it’s hard to shake the feeling that we’ve seen this all before.

My feelings on the found footage film genre are fairly obvious. I love the damned things. And I love Halloween. The only thing better than Halloween for me is watching a good scary movie during the season and I’ve got to admit, having a yearly installment in the Paranormal Activity series every year has scratched that itch for me but good. But is that really a good thing?

I loved the first Saw movie, but once that was turned in a dumb, annual torture-porn event every year, I checked out. I have worries that this kind of annualization will dilute and ruin the Paranormal brand, which managed to revitalize the found-footage genre in a smart way (no shaky camera work like in The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield) while being a genuinely creepy horror movie without resorting to gore or fake jump scares.

I know I’m starting to sound like I disliked Paranormal Activity 3, but it’s quite the contrary—I kinda loved it. Aside from a few glaring issues, PA 3 manages to live up to the first film quite easily and even surpasses PA 2 on a couple of levels. But with the film grossing $52 million dollars USD and breaking the Fall opening record (not to mention besting the Law of Diminishing Returns) on a budget of around five million dollars—we’re bound to see Paranormal Activity 4 next Halloween. And while I’m certainly going to see it, my fear is that we may have seen all the ingenuity that the brand can squeeze out of this concept.

Paranormal Activity 3 is a prequel to the previous two films, showing us, as the trailer so eloquently put is, “how the activity began.” This time around we get to follow young Katie (Chloe Csengery) and Kristi (Jessica Tyler Brown) as they experience what I presume is their first haunting (Katie mentions in the first film that she was haunted twice, so I’m guessing PA 4 will end up being an account of her next haunting).

As a prequel set in 1988, the directors, Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, have a little more flexibility in the quality of the cameras. Namely, it doesn’t look super clean all the time. PA 2 had too clean a look, with the fancy new security cameras used to capture the majority of the action. While this film is supposedly shot on an ’80s VHS camcorder, it can look a little dirtier which lends to the realism and makes some of the scare gags way more effective.

Other than the lower quality of the film stock, the only other thing that PA 3 really brings to the table in terms of differentiation from it’s predecessors is a moving camera. At one point Dennis mounts a camera on an oscillating fan to capture footage in two rooms. It might sound gimmicky or lame but this camera actually manages to instill the most sense of dread in the film. Waiting for the camera to pan back and forth to see if anything is there or if anything has changed since the last pan is incredible and brings some fantastic tension to those scenes.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the young actresses playing Katie and Kristi. Both of these girls are great and manage to jump from playful kid moments to moments of terror without missing a beat. Not to mention the creepiness of Kristi when she is playing with her “imaginary” friend Toby. In my notes from the theater I simply wrote “little girl=creepy.”

Bittner as the girls’ mother is almost a non-entity, you don’t learn much about the character beyond the surface level. Bittner is fine with what she is given, but for most of the movie what she is given is the film equivalent of plugging your ears and humming loudly to ignore something. Smith is given the bulk of the work as the person documenting the haunting and it’s interesting that they cast someone who looks so much like Micah from Paranormal Activity.

The worst part of the film, and one of the reasons I dread seeing Paramount continue the series with the same characters, comes in the last 15 minutes of the film. I’m not going to spoil what happens, but essentially the writer, Christopher Landon, tacks on needless explanation of things that simply didn’t need elucidated. What’s more—these items don’t exactly sync up with the grander narrative that was introduced in PA 2. Considering that Landon wrote PA 2, that is unacceptable. Ambiguity is one thing, but the path of the narrative deviates off towards something you might see on an amateur Youtube channel. It’s quite possible that some of the gripes I have about this ending might be cleared up in the next (still unannounced, but most assuredly forthcoming) installment of the series, but if that is the case it’s a serious misstep for the franchise.

In the end all that matters is whether or not the film was scary. Yes, yes it is. It still provides the best Halloween scares at the box office and, while it might not be the most original film series any longer, it’s still the reigning champ of clever and spooky horror.

On a slightly unrelated note, I want to give credit to whomever edited the trailers for this film. Previous Paranormal Activity trailers had a tendency to…well, spoil a lot of the scares. Both of the official trailers for PA 3 are comprised of mostly footage that doesn’t even appear in the film. I’m not sure of why this happened (several of the scenes seem to take the narrative in very distinctly different directions). My best speculation would be reshoots that left the filmmakers with extra footage that wasn’t used. Whatever the reason, Paramount, I commend you.