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.

Travel Nightmare: CHERNOBYL DIARIES

Chernobyl Diaries is one of those horror movies where the entire plot hinges on one very convincing idiot who can get the whole group to go along with his ideas. In this case the idiot is Paul (Jonathan Sadowski), an American living in Kiev who has the bright idea to take his brother Chris (Jesse McCartney), who is backpacking around Europe with Natalie (Olivia Dudley), his girlfriend, and Amanda (Devin Kelley), her friend, on an extreme getaway. (The characters have these names, but it’s much easier to keep track of them as Brother 1 and Brother 2, blonde and brunette.) They show up at a hole-in-the-wall where they meet their fellow travelers (Nathan Phillips and Ingrid Bolsø Berdal) and board a sketchy van driven by Uri (Dimitri Diatchenko), a hulking tour guide. Destination: Chernobyl, site of the 1986 nuclear disaster, the worst in history.

The others weren’t too sure about this trip, but Paul (Brother 1, the aforementioned convincing idiot) talked them into it. All that remains at Chernobyl is a radioactive ghost town. What danger could there be? For a while, the trip goes just fine for these tourists. The guide reassures them that they won’t be exposed to a lethal dose of radiation since they’ll only be staying an hour or two. There are guards at a checkpoint that won’t let them in. That’s kind of weird. Even weirder, the guide drives the group in through the back way, down a rundown, woodsy path. Still, though, nothing too dangerous, they suppose. They walk around the ghost town. They see some modern day ruins. They take some pictures. They joke around. They look off into the distance and marvel at the huge nuclear reactor that now sits unused. It’s nothing out of the ordinary.

First time director Bradley Parker does some nice work with silence and the mundane, a trick he no doubt picked up from producer and co-writer Oren Peli, whose incredibly low-budget massive hit Paranormal Activity helped to ignite a new craze of found-footage films. (Funnily enough, the other writers are Carey and Shane Van Dyke, who wrote the direct-to-DVD Paranormal Entity, no relation to Peli’s hit series.) This one starts off with found footage in a smeary, consumer-grade digital montage of London and Paris, but luckily drops that conceit just before the title card, trading it in for wobbling hand-held camerawork of a more traditional kind.

For the longest time, the twenty-somethings just fumble through their tour, getting freaked out a little from time to time, but nothing they can’t handle. Most of the suspense comes from the way the blonde’s shirt has only half of the buttons fastened properly. But then cell phone reception is bad, eventually nonexistent, and batteries die and nightfall is approaching. Things get ominous real quick, but it’s hard to feel too bad about a bunch of barely developed, empty-headed, gullible characters who walk knowingly past obvious warning signs. (Travel tip: if you go to a dangerous place in a foreign country with a stranger, tell someone else where you’re going and when you’ll be back. Or, you know, don’t go.)

Somehow, the van’s wiring has been cut and so they’re stranded. Should they stay in the van and wait for sunrise? Things go bump in the night and slowly the group decides to split up and then someone inevitably disappears. The next day, splitting up once more, they go looking for the missing member of their tour group. Bad move. I’ll give you one guess as to who talks the group into most of the decisions they make. You can probably also guess that characters get injured or go missing with predictable results. Some are found dead, others alive, but either way there’s a lot of the movie spent wandering around an abandoned town shouting “Uri!” or “Natalie!” or “Chris!” over and over again. Of course they’re not alone here. Someone or something is clearly menacing them and it’s not just the loud dogs that are good for a “Boo!” or two. It turns out the place is haunted (or is that inhabited?) by people who like to stand in the background or sometimes jump out of shadows and grab at you for no real reason. They must know they’re not real characters or real specters or zombies or even much of a tangible threat. They’re just set dressing.

Obviously this is not the most respectful way to treat an all-too-real disaster, but the filmmakers don’t even have the guts to use their exploitative premise to exploit much of anything. The first half or so of the movie makes some effective use of the setting, the way the slowly crumbling buildings of the town are flash-frozen in time, eerily still and quiet. When a character hears something rattling around down the hall, it’s spooky. There shouldn’t be anyone there. When someone goes to investigate and the camera stays with those left behind, that’s genuinely creepy. As more of the characters disappear and I found myself not really caring one way or the other, the movie stopped being even slightly scary.

By the time we see more and more of the creeps limping out of the shadows, what little tension that has accrued slips away. And let’s not even talk about the ending, which is unbelievably, eye-rollingly predictable, but which I won’t reveal here because, who knows, maybe you’ll still see it at some point. I guess the way the movie ends is no more generic than the rest of it, though. This isn’t a movie out to subvert cliché, or to do the same old thing in an inventive way. It’s a movie that’s just interested in checking all the boxes, getting the obvious done and getting out. The movie’s not good enough to recommend or bad enough to hate. It just is.

Night Fright: PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 3

The reason why Oren Peli’s Paranormal Activity was so scary was the way the conceit – a man and a woman are concerned with strange things that go bump in the night, buy a camera and set it up to film while they sleep – played with the way we watch movies, specifically horror movies. With a long, locked-down shot as the crux of the film, it’s a horror movie that can’t rely on the standard technique of moving the camera to reveal a sudden blast of the unexpected or to give us supernatural point-of-view shots. Here, the deceptively simple low-tech effects of the scares more often than not happen creepily in front of a still camera while the characters are sleeping. A door swings. A sheet rustles. A light turns on, then off. My eyes scanned the frame, looking for, but kind of hoping not to find, clues to confirm the feeling of creeping dread. It’s all about the sound design, about what’s inside the frame and outside of it. The film builds to its scariest point and then drops immediately away into the end credits. Only the screams remained lodged in my brain, rattling around while I tried to sleep.

The sequel, from director Tod Williams, mistook more cameras (from a security system) and more editing for better scares. It followed the family of the woman’s sister as they experience some paranormal activity of their own in a story that turns out to be mostly prequel with a climax that lines up on the timeline with the first film’s. It was thinner and lighter, without the same lingering fright. The formula had already grown a bit too predictable. That’s the trick with any franchise. The filmmakers have to know that we think we know what we’re going to be shown, then tease us with the expected in order to startle with what new surprises they have in store. In Paranormal Activity 3, co-directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, with writer Christopher Landon, continue backing up the franchise’s story, this time to 1988, and there they have found just the right balance between predictability and novelty. They’ve made a scary movie, a quite possibly my favorite of the three.

Katie, from the first movie, and her sister Kristi, from the second, are little girls in 1988. Their stepfather Dennis (Christopher Nicholas Smith) is a wedding videographer, so he has plenty of access to bulky VHS camcorders and tapes. It’s through these tapes that the story unfolds. (Luckily, the look of the film is slightly clearer than that format.) Like the others, the film starts with a happy family. The mother (Lauren Bittner) and the girls (Chloe Csengery and Jessica Tyler Brown) alternately mug for the camera, are annoyed by its presence, and sometimes forget it’s even there, in the style of home videos everywhere. But once Dennis starts hearing strange noises, he decides to set up some cameras to monitor the house.

Directors Joost and Schulman co-directed the documentary Catfish from last year, a creepy/sad first-person account of a flirtatious situation escalating in an unexpected, though not entirely unsurprising direction. Here, they bring the same sense of a well-intentioned videographer slowly but surely getting in over his head. The cameras reveal startling sights. Dennis shows them to a coworker (Dustin Ingram). They debate what to do. Little Kristi is caught on tape getting up in the middle of the night to talk with her large, invisible imaginary friend, Toby. When confronted about it, she seems frightened. If she tells Toby’s secrets, she says, she “won’t be safe.”

You wouldn’t be surprised to hear that the cameras record more and more strange sights, strange enough to convince Dennis to set up a few more cameras, which in turn record more strange sights. But what’s surprising, or at least gratifying, is the way Joost and Schulman play visually with the film’s form. We get three vantage points: first, a camera on a tripod in the master bedroom looking over the sleeping couple, reminiscent of the first film, and is reflected in their closet mirror; second, a camera in the girls’ room looking over their beds and toys but with the closet and the bathroom permanently, agonizingly out of the frame; third, a camera attached to an oscillating fan that slowly turns to give us alternating views into the kitchen and living room. We cut between these three predictable, repetitive shots, punctuated only by moments when someone moves the cameras for some reason.

This is all we need to see the story, all we need to constantly scan to find the scare. At night, in the girls’ room, we hear a closet door creak. In the master bedroom, we hear a thump in the hall. Downstairs, the camera slowly pans back and forth, so that a sudden appearance in one room inexorably is pulled out of sight leaving a tension in its place. Did I just see what I thought I saw? Like the first film but cleverly expanded and multiplied, the scares come from what we can and can’t see. It’s the scariness of hearing a strange noise in the middle of the night without the instant release of being able to leap up and investigate.

We are literally frozen with fear. This makes it all the more startling when suddenly, over as quickly as it began, something happens. A Lite-Brite turns itself on (the scariest Lite-Brite of all time). A door slams shut. A sheet moves across a room. A light falls. A piece of furniture flips over. Paranormal Activity 3 expertly teases the audience, withholding information, causing whispered speculations, until swiftly and forcefully, the fright becomes real and present within the frame. It’s fun to hear waves of fear ripple through the audience as different people see things in the still, quiet shots that startle them, and then abruptly we are all united in one big jolt. Just like the first film, it’s a movie made by people who know how to find a good visual gimmick and put it to work pulling an audience into a hushed and nervous sense of anxiety and fear.