Paranormal Selfie: PARANORMAL ACTIVITY: THE MARKED ONES

I like the Paranormal Activity franchise’s crafty mix of repetition and experimentation in their found-footage haunted house stories that are all connected in one way or another. That audiences have so far rewarded the creative team with highly profitable box office grosses have allowed the filmmakers to have a little qualitative resurgence with every other sequel. Paranormal Activity 2 was a prematurely tired retread of the first film, but with a bigger cast and more camera angles. Then 3 came along with the best scares the series has yet seen, including a fantastic use of a video camera fastened to the top of a rotating fan. These movies are never better than when teasing scares by teaching an audience how to watch them, scrutinizing still or locked patterns of shots for the slightest tremble of variation. That the fourth film was a dull repetition of earlier scares without the satisfying crescendo while bobbling its few new ideas was a disappointment. But, hey, they’re trying.

Now here’s Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones, which takes a step sideways from the events we’ve been moving backwards and forwards through in the previous four films, circling the original haunting of Katie (Katie Featherston) and Micah (Micah Sloat). This time we’ve moved away from suburbia and into a poor, predominantly Latino neighborhood. The setting is drawn in a way that’s full of convincing, mildly stereotypical, local color with plenty of Catholic symbols, gangbangers, and untranslated Spanish. It’s a nice break from what we’ve seen so far from the series. Instead of worried suburbanites wondering about things that go bump in the night, we’ve got an 18-year-old kid (Andrew Jacobs) and his friends (Jorge Diaz and Gabrielle Walsh) messing around with a video camera, having fun, partying, playing games and goofing around. Then a secretive woman in their thin-walled apartment complex gets murdered and, poking around the crime scene, they discover her connection to, what else, Paranormal Activities.

Soon one of the kids starts finding strange events everywhere he goes and decides to capture them with his camera. He has a mysterious bite on his arm. The dog runs from him. He can do the Michael Jackson “Smooth Criminal” lean like a pro. He pulls a loose eyelash at the corner of his eye and a long, thin trail of wiry slime comes sliding out. A Simon electronic memory game seems to be trying to communicate with them. The symptoms ride a fine line between funny and creepy, but all point to all the obvious signs of having suddenly become a character in a horror movie. Thankfully, he keeps the camera pointed at his plight. Unlike the four previous hauntings, this Paranormal Activity is a straight-up possession movie, with an underlying need to solve the mystery and exorcise the evil spirits. At one point the teenage girl from the family in Paranormal Activity 2 (Molly Ephraim, nowadays pretty funny on ABC’s Last Man Standing) shows up to explain the grave stakes and make cross-sequel franchise connections, moving the overarching mystery forward ever so slightly.

The Marked Ones wouldn’t work as a stand-alone horror film, but as an entry in a franchise it’s a nice attempt to branch out. Writer-director Christopher Landon has had a hand in the screenplays for all of the sequels and here on his own finds some minor fun in the makeshift mythos. The camera work – shaky and mobile all the way through – tugs at the why-are-they-still-filming-this? question more forcefully, robbing the film of the locked-down creeping dread through total stillness that’s always been my favorite aspect of these films. It doesn’t follow the pattern of escalating thumps, choosing instead to inject creepiness more overtly, like in a dark hidden basement draped in layers of plastic sheets hanging from the ceiling, a couple visually bendy effects, and in quick pans that find mildly creepy surprises. It’s lively enough and the kids at the center have likable joking chemistry that slowly curdles into fright. In the conclusion, the film turns a tight bit of narrative surprise mixed with closure that the series perhaps didn’t need, but feels right. In finding new types of characters and new locales to spin these stories with, it proves there are still some signs of life in this franchise yet.

New Boo: PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 4

In case you haven’t been paying attention, Paranormal Activity, the very scary and wildly successful 2009 low-budget horror movie about a haunted house and the young couple living in it who decided to set up cameras to capture the evidence, has turned into an annual event. After two sequels, which in fact served as prequels that backed further and further away from the original haunting to find different vulnerable characters filming their homes at all hours, we’ve arrived at Paranormal Activity 4, the first since the first to take place in roughly present day and move the whole – at this point nearly lumbering – thing forward. Now, the narrative can has been kicked down the road a tiny bit.

What’s most surprising is how little that seems necessary at this point. After faltering with the mildly disappointing Paranormal Activity 2, producer-creator Oren Peli handed the reigns of the franchise to Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman. Their Paranormal Activity 3 is quite possibly the best movie that this concept can sustain, a movie of big scares and shocking, seamless effects, with sharp performances of sympathetic characters and inventive, playful maneuvering of the franchise’s tropes. With 4, Joost and Schulman return, but somehow in the interim their handling of the premise has grown irritating and played-out. Instead of using the locked-down camera angles and quietly accumulating dread for a good mix of suspense, humor, and scares, the movie feels tired, at once too much and not enough.

In typical P.A. fashion, the movie introduces us to a normal suburban family, living in a house that’s suddenly filled with things that go bump in the night. A little boy (Aiden Lovekamp), his teenage sister (Kathryn Newton) and her boyfriend from across the street (Matt Shively) are the ones who notice weird noises and strange movements and decide to set up cameras to capture the action. (This family has, rather conveniently, something like a half-dozen MacBooks around the house.) This time we get Skype chats and iPhones added to the mix of video sources, as well as a novel use of an Xbox’s Kinect motion sensors that somehow works to both reveal creepy disembodied movement and make it all seem so depressingly tangible. Instead of real innovation, these new sources of footage merely recycle the techniques of the preceding films to lesser effect.

All of this allows for the typical long-stretches-of-still-silence that is so familiar from the series, but unlike the third film, which put objects like an oscillating fan or a sheet to great visual effect, this film grows static in ways that feel like missed opportunities. I was ready for a big scare, or at least a bit of visual trickery, when a refrigerator door blocks most of the frame on several occasions, but no such luck. Rather than building creative illusions and eerie how’d-they-do-that freakouts around likable characters, we’ve got a generic bunch of mildly curious people wondering why sometimes they hear footsteps in an empty house or why the creepy kid (Brady Allen) across the street is so insistent that his imaginary friend has it out for his neighbors. There’s no sense of build or connection between the low-functioning scares.

After something like 70 minutes of sporadic sudden noises and quick movements, any one of which would be just about the least scary thing in any of the previous Paranormal Activity movies, there’s the typical climactic explosion of malevolent psychic energy, only this time it’s pushed so far that it’s loud, sustained, and over-the-top. This is clearly an attempt to fold large pieces of the narrative of the previous three together – the brief return of the possessed Katie (Katie Featherston) makes that intent more than clear – but it’s a nice try that falls flat. It’s an attempt to hint at explanations and provide big splashy shocks with people flung this way and that, sudden deaths, and all manner of abrupt appearances and rapid movements. But it’s such an overwhelming pile-up of nonsense that it’s underwhelming. The final image is most shocking for how completely miscalculated it feels, expanding the scope of it all to a comical extent. I still have a great deal of affection for this series, so the good news is that this fourth installment is not irreparably, franchise-killing bad. It’s simply the least effective of its kind, functional without working up the energy or imagination to really entertain.

PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 2: Same as the First, a Little Bit Louder and a Little Bit Worse

Last year’s Paranormal Activity, from writer-director Oren Peli, was scary, but it also got under the skin. It was creepy with its slow building dread and its escalating freak-outs. Its simplicity was its greatest virtue. It was no more than a gimmick, but it was a surprisingly effective gimmick. It was also produced cheaply and made hundreds of millions of dollars. Thus we have the inevitable Paranormal Activity 2, a quickly produced combination prequel and sequel directed by Tod Williams and written by Michael R. Perry.

If you saw the first movie, you will remember that it focused on Katie and Micah (Katie Featherston and Micah Sloat), a young couple that turned on a video camera to capture proof that things were going bump in the night. The new film follows a different and expanded cast of characters in the house that belongs to Katie’s sister (Sprague Grayden), who has a one-year-old son with her husband (Brian Boland). Also in the house are her stepdaughter (Molly Ephraim) and a maid (Vivis Cortez). The movie barely starts before the maid knows that an evil spirit haunts the house. She must be related to the security guard from Devil who knew all about spotting demons from the most innocuous of signs. Or maybe she was just paying attention to the dog, for, as any horror fan knows, it always means trouble when a dog barks at nothing.

The film plays like a dull echo of its predecessor. Once again this is “found footage,” though this time the source is a handful of security cameras placed strategically around the house after a real-world break-in that gets the family spooked. The first film’s single camera provided much better scares by playing with our fixed viewpoint and teasing us with what we couldn’t see and what we could barely hear. In this film, the editing is more pronounced, bouncing between different angles trying to capture the full extent of the flickering lights, the clattering pans and the creaking doors. It’s just not as scary that way, though adding a baby to the mix immediately enhances the dread.

The cast is up to the task of getting gradually more and more freaked out. It’s not boring to watch them go from denial to suspicion to rattled jumpiness. What is boring is the predictability of the scares, which crop up far too infrequently. There’s no sense of building menace. The film goes straight from weird, but mostly explainable, occurrences to the full manifestation of paranormal supernatural horror. By the time of the scariest moment of the film, a moment of genuine chills nearly two-thirds of the way through the runtime, I found myself eager to see how the filmmakers were going to top themselves. They didn’t.

It’s certainly a good effort. The film is true to what made the first film so successful. The characters seem more or less real. The use of silence and stillness is still appealing. It’s unnerving to watch a shadowy image of a dark room waiting, just waiting, for that other shoe to drop. Too often, nothing happens or, even worse, a Very Loud Noise smashes against the soundtrack. This is a horror movie that managed to startle me a handful of times, but it never truly unnerved me the way it should have.