Paranormal Activity Keeps Going, Like It or Not

Now that it appears that the Paranormal Activity series will continue later this year with a Part 6, maybe this is as good a time as any to look back at what worked and what didn't for those movies.

I really liked the first one a lot, and owing to the fact that I watched it in a dark living room late at night, it kind of scared the shit out of me. Not a lot of movies share that distinction. While I consider myself a horror fan for the most part (I was much more serious about the genre in my teens, but my enthusiasm for it has tapered off as the years have gone by), the majority of horror movies bore the shit out of me. Too silly, too tongue-in-cheek, and I've seen most of the tropes before. Actual scares like what I felt when I saw The Exorcist or Night of the Living Dead for the first time are very, very rare indeed. So when something comes along that has me looking over my shoulder days or weeks later, I tend to take it seriously. Even if, as in the case of PA and its four sequels (I know I'll probably get sick of typing the full title over and over, so it's PA from here on out) it's cheap, derivative and not up to repeat viewings.

What's funny is that if you kept up with the series, repeat viewing was exactly what you were doing. Oh I know, there's a half-assed story about a witches coven that sort of develops around Part 3, but it's just there to give the audience the illusion that they aren't watching the same thing again and again. Part 2 is virtually identical to Part 1. Part 3 travels back to the poorly-simulated 80s to fill in some backstory. Part 4 jumps back to the present day to continue the bare bones storyline.

The scares never, ever varied, and tended to use the kind of effects that don't cost very much money. Doors slowly creak open, chandeliers swing by themselves, strange thumping noises come from other rooms. Somebody always, always gets picked up and dragged around by an invisible force (okay, in Part 4 the dad gets thrown around at the end, but same difference), and a possessed person gets a case of scary monster face.

By Part 4 the endings get incredibly weak, though that was essentially true by the second film. I watched it about a week ago and I thought, Really? That's it? A crowd of evil women and more monster face? Jesus, that's lazy. Everything about the PA series feels lazy, not to mention cynical. The producers knew they didn't really have to change up anything, and didn't bother until, I assume, the fourth movie failed to perform well.

That's when the big change happened. Parts 1 through 4 deal exclusively with well-to-do white suburbanites. Then suddenly, with Part 5, the setting changes to a working class, urban Hispanic family, replete with pandering racial humor. Why? My guess is that the producers felt the series might still be viable if they switched the demographic focus. I live in Tucson, and for a few months a billboard just west of Grant and Alvernon showed an ad for PA 5. You never see movie ads on billboards in Tucson. The only reason for the sudden presence of one is that the city has a significant Hispanic population, and that was Part 5's target audience. As if they hadn't been watching the series already, along with everyone else.

I don't think that late-in-the-game change-up worked. PA movies used to come fast because they're relatively cheap and easy to make, at least one a year if not more, and it's been almost a couple of years since Part 5. I haven't looked at the numbers, but I'm betting it fell on its face. Like all the others, it's derivative, though this time it borrows from Chronicle instead of just The Blair Witch Project and the previous installments in the series.

Though I wish it were otherwise, Part 5, weak as it was, won't spell the end of the series. I bear no ill will toward the series creators (how can I have ill will toward people I don't know?), but their pessimistic money grab is a little more than insulting to its audience, even if that audience is often too young to know better. Besides, there are much better found footage movies out there, such as the two VHS movies, The Den, Lucky Bastard, and The Taking of Deborah Logan (not to mention, in no particular order, Cloverfield, Europa Report, the unfairly maligned Apollo 18, Grave Encounters 2, The Conspiracy, and probably about a dozen others). Unlike some people, I have nothing against the found footage genre in and of itself—what slasher movies were to schlocky exploitation in the 80s, found footage movies are to the present day. Some are good and some aren't, just like anything else.

That is PA's cinematic legacy. There's so much found footage stuff now, from the recent Twister remake Into the Storm to mocumentary series like Veep and Parks and Recreation, that the style is clearly fixed well into the near future of pop culture. Some of it even gets past the common mistake of expecting people to believe that a character experiencing mortal terror can shoot expertly composed video and keep their subject squarely in frame.

I doubt it'll go away any time soon. Smartphone cameras and Skyping, or something else like them, are going to be with us forever, and found footage movies make too much sense in that context. The only question is how inventively filmmakers apply the style. PA gave up on inventiveness a while back, and eventually the diminishing returns will finish if off for good.