Paranormal Activity 3 (2011)

If the Paranormal Activity series has taught us anything so far, it’s that dudes love cameras. They walk around with them wherever they go, and the moment they hear a bump in the night they will place one at every corner of their house to try and catch whatever it is that is causing the disturbance. This is particularly true of the Featherston family, which has been the focus of all three Paranormal Activity films to date. The two central sisters (Katie and Kristi) have spent their entire lives surrounded by villainous ghosts and demons, and the men if their lives have spent most of their time pointing cameras at them and freaking out every time something rattles or shakes. Paranormal Activity 3 allegedly tells the story of how these hauntings began back in the late ’80s, though it doesn’t take long for the VHS footage to just look a lot like the work of a modern hi-def digital camera. Plot-wise, there’s even less to this film than was the case with its predecessors, making it ultimately just another shallow exercise in sustained suspense. The formula has now grown familiar, and thus many sequences are now just tiresome as opposed to genuinely frightening. It would be wrong to call Paranormal Activity 3 wholly ineffective—in one respect it’s downright brilliant—but it’s impossible for all the sudden scares to have any impact if the film itself appears to simply be going through the motions.

The film follows the young Katie and Kristi as they live with their mother Julie (Lauren Bittner) and her boyfriend Daniel (Brian Boland). The reason Daniel loves cameras? 1) As said before, he’s a dude, and 2) he runs a video production company in his garage. When Kristi starts interacting with an imaginary friend named Toby, some activity (of the paranormal sort, no less) begins occurring around the house. This leads Daniel to set up cameras everywhere—like you do—and the results are indeed shocking. So shocking that I’m amazed the previous films haven’t referenced these events in more detail. I shan’t spoil anything, but a lot of things happen here that, if it were me, I wouldn’t be forgetting anytime soon. Yes, the ending may take a stab at explain that, but it wasn’t good enough for me.

While much of Paranormal Activity 3 felt like a used scare machine working on autopilot, I cannot deny one invention which turned out to be a stroke of relative genius: the great oscillating camera, or FanCam. In his attempts to capture every last nook and cranny of the house, Daniel decides to take the “fan” part off of the house fan, and thus creates a camera that swings back and forth across the ground floor of the house. This is a wonderfully frustrating trick; as the camera goes back and forth without regard for the actions it is capturing. Often it will make us look at an empty portion of the room when we know what we actually want to see is on the other side. It further proves the old belief that true horror comes from what the audience cannot see as opposed to what they can. This, after all, is the exactly philosophy that the Paranormal Activity series is based on. If it’s a burglar in the house, that’s easy enough to take care of. Head downstairs with a baseball bat and you’ll likely scare him off. A ghost or a demon that slams doors? That’s terrifying, and the FanCam fully takes advantage of what the audience cannot see.

The rest of the film is far less terrifying, and mostly because it relies on the same old tricks that we saw again and again in the first two films. Occasionally they work, but by the end any and all suspense dissipates simply because it’s all so familiar. I’m not saying creative and scary things can no longer be done with the found footage format, but if the Paranormal Activity series wants to be creatively successful down the line, it needs to find new and innovative ways to deliver the goods. That begins by ditching the Featherston family, which is a story that has more than run its course. Since viewers of the first two films know the ultimate fates of these characters, the story itself isn’t all that suspenseful. If Paranormal Activity 4—which will happen—introduces us to brand new characters and presents its story in a slightly new way, I very well may be pulled back in. The worst case scenario? The next film is just a series of haunted sonograms.

Paranormal Activity 3 was directed by Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost, who gained notoriety last year with their maybe/maybe-not documentary Catfish. While I greatly admired that film, they seemed to be chosen for PA3 simply because in the past they have, in fact, pointed cameras at things. I’m not saying they are entirely ill fit for the franchise, but little would suggest that they’d have much to bring to an actual horror film. They do a fine enough job here, particularly with the aforementioned FanCam, but they don’t add much to the Paranormal Activity formula, which continues to grow stale with each new installment. (It doesn’t help that PA3 is waaaay too reliant on red herrings, which ultimately just kills tension rather than increasing it.) There are worse and less tasteful horror franchises out there, but it’d be a shame to see the Paranormal Activity series—something with the potential to be guaranteed fun year after year—become just another example of Hollywood taking a good idea and turning it into a self-sustaining mediocrity machine. We’re going to be getting Paranormal Activity films for years to come, so we might as well be a bit more creative with them.

Grade: C+