Commenting on the critics with Simon Columb…
Stuart Heritage writes about Paranormal Activity 4 in The Guardian… with a very pessimistic attitude:
“The problem is, the wheels might fall off at any minute. The Paranormal Activity formula is now so slick that the films pretty much write themselves. There is a family. They set up cameras all around their house. Nothing happens for 45 minutes. Something goes bang. Nothing happens for another 45 minutes. Someone falls over. The end. That’s essentially been the gist of all three existing Paranormal Activity films, with just the lightest of tweakings (there was a baby in the second one, the third one was set in the 1980s and filmed on VHS cameras). If the fourth film continues in this vein, there’s a real chance that audiences might just turn up for the last ten minutes to see who falls over, and then go home again.”
Heritage seems to be missing a few cameras which haven’t been ‘touched’ yet. What about CCTV rather than cameras which have a personal ‘touch’ (e.g. the baby sitter in Paranormal Activity 3 ‘jumping’ out to scare us/the Father)? It always has restrictions – the camera operator is using it handheld (Paranormal Activity, Paranormal Activity 3) or the specific locations whereby the home-cameras were set-up (Paranormal Activity 2). Even the rotating-camera in Paranormal Activity 3, though different, it purposefully restricted the options as to how we could be scared. CCTV, YouTube videos and phone cameras all give a little more scope as to how the franchise could carry on. I was not a big fan of the latest installment, I happily looked at the corner of the screen when I knew scares were coming up (telling myself “I’m still looking at the screen … just a part of the screen that won’t jump out at me”). I even began to become bored by the too-often ‘jumps’ that happened but, as a rebuttal to Heritage’s article, many of these ‘jump-scares’ were within the first 45 minutes and therefore changed the tone a little from the previous two films.
At any rate, I have an idea of pseudo-documentary-footage being collected. Maybe a modern-day documentary crew in an editing suite/building (CCTV) trying to piece the ‘found-footage’ caught since the chronologically-latest point in Paranormal Activity 2. We obviously see the ‘rare’ footage of Hunter and Katie which has been found/sent to the documentary crew (camera phones, YouTube videos, fake-films, etc). You could even start with a classic horror staple whereby the opening ‘sequence’ is an explicit death which the documentary crew found via CCTV, before plunging into the tension of the crew actually piecing it together – will they manage to piece together their documentary before the demons “get” them? Hire me and I’ll give you hundreds of alternate ideas.
Personally, unlike Heritage, I think that they have managed to create the last three films incredibly well and the same passion, if it is put into the next film, should ensure an ongoing success. Yes, there is only so far you can go now we know how it started and so ‘explaining’ things seems a little redundant. As a fan of the Saw franchise, the fact that they killed off the most important character in the third installment and still managed to continue until a seventh installment, simply shows how much you can add to a good concept and an interesting horror franchise. Furthermore, I would argue that Saw IV and Saw VI are potentially in my top 3 installments! Who knows, maybe Paranormal Activity 5 and Paranormal Activity 8 will be the best episodes in the low-budget film-series…
Originally published January 12, 2012. Updated April 10, 2018.
