Paranormal Activity 4

                             

         Do you like scary movies or things that go bump in the night? If so then you have probably become a pretty big fan of the Paranormal Activity series. It’s been five years since the first one hit the big screen and introduced a new type of horror movie, one that relied on the tension of what was going to happen next.   No longer is there that crazed killer, now you never know where or what unseen force will show up on camera.

    We pick up five years after (Spoilers for the first films) the disappearance of Katie (Katie Featherston) and Hunter, who was last seen walking out of Hunter’s house after Katie killed her sister. Alex (Kathryn Newton) has a normal home life. She lives with her mother and father and her little brother Wyatt. Everything is normal until a little kid Robbie (Brady Allen) and his mother who move in across the street. Something happens to Robbie’s mother and Alex’s family takes Robbie in. Strange things start to happen around the house almost immediately after Robbie moves in. So being the smart kid she is, (and what would these movies be without it) Alex sets up the computers around the house to record the events that happen at night. The computers record some strange things, including Robbie walking around the house in the middle of the night talking to someone. As the nights pass, the events get more and more strange, and you start to wonder if Alex and her family will survive.

   You had to love the originality of the first Paranormal Activity. Horror movies had become stale and torture porn, it was the perfect shot in the arm that the popular genre needed. Over the last five years we have been presented with a new chapter to the ever expanding story of the original character Katie. Each new story did a great job of staying original and adding to the previous film, especially the last installment with a truly eerie ending. Well, there is a saying that all good things come to an end, and this can be said of the films in the paranormal series.  Where in the past the story added to the previous film, it seems this one is stretching to add. There were not as many moments that make you jump out of your seat, and I think that is part of what you look for now. The one thing I did like was how an Xbox Kinect was used as a great way to see things. I wanted this film to be like its predecessors, but instead the wear of four movies in five years has started to show in this series. The good thing is that the genre will reinvent it’s self again, does this mean the end of The Paranormal films?  It will carry on, I just hope it finds its magic for the next installment, and rediscovers ways to make us scared to sleep with the lights off, or your Xbox off for that matter.

Brian Taylor