Paranormal Activity 4

If horror movies get a bad rap (and I would argue that the genre gets less respect than others), one of the reasons could be the genre’s tendency to produce so many sequels, many of them subpar. Whenever a horror film is a hit, the studio will rush out another entry seemingly every year until the franchise no longer brings in the dough. This is not a new trend: it goes from recent movies like Saw, to the slasher films of the 1980s, all the way back to the old Hammer Horror films of the late 1950s and 60s. You could even argue that this started with the classic Universal Monster movies eight decades ago.

Paranormal Activity is the perfect series for making sequels because it has a process that's easy to repeat year after year. Since it consists of supposedly found footage, all you have to do is film on a handheld camera with none of the typical movie production values. Throw in some randomly moving objects, loud noises, and fleeting shapes in the shadows, and you have a movie. Not necessarily a good or scary movie, but a cheap, economical one that will probably turn a profit on its first weekend.

Now the series is on its fourth movie in as many years, released a few weeks before Halloween. I never caught on to the Paranormal Activity phenomenon when it started, so 4 is my first foray into the series. And after sitting through it, I don’t think I’m going to go back and watch the rest of them.

By now, the series’ gimmick is well known: the viewer is supposedly watching real footage of people being tormented by supernatural forces, found some time after the fact (the series wasn’t the first to use this technique). This time, the said footage follows a normal suburban family, who take in neighbor boy Robbie (Brady Allen) when his mother Katie (Katie Featherston, who’s appeared in all four movies) is in the hospital. During Robbie’s stay, he acts rather strangely, and spooky things start happening in the house, which makes teenage daughter Alex (Kathryn Newton) suspect there’s a demonic force at work. There are apparently connections to the previous films, with a prologue establishing as much, but I wouldn’t know.

If they wanted us to believe what's onscreen is actually real, they should at least have the actors act like normal people. Instead, they play out every cliché of characters in a bad horror movie. There’s the awful dialogue, the almost lackadaisical reaction to supernatural happenings (in one scene, a kid is more excited than scared when his Big Wheel starts riding by itself), and all the typical mistakes like going off into a dark room alone. The only difference is that this time they’re holding the camera.

This doesn’t exactly doom the film, as a bad horror movie can be entertaining if it’s so ridiculous it’s funny. But what kills the experience is the simple fact that it's not scary, or even that comical in its attempts to be scary; it’s actually quite boring. Much of the meat of the picture consists of long shots of empty rooms at night, as we wait for something, anything, to be caught on camera. This goes from creating tension the first time, to slow and excruciating by the third or fourth time.

To be fair, when something does appear suddenly onscreen, yes, it does make you jump. There are several parts that at least give you a jolt to prevent you from falling asleep completely. But these are no scarier than someone jumping out of a closet in a Halloween mask, or playing this for the first time. They're also pretty few and far between among the endless shots of an empty house, and some of them are more comical than scary. All of it builds to a finale that's less frightening than just confusing (again, this could be a result of me not seeing the first three movies, but it doesn’t seem like it explains anything).

For those who want to get the experience of being startled by someone jumping out and yelling “Boo” over and over again for 90 minutes, Paranormal Activity 4 might suit you, though there are plenty of other movies that do it better and more often. For a truly terrifying cinematic experience, there are many, many better films out there.