Paranormal Activity 3 (Henry Joost & Ariel Schulman, 2011)
Joost & Schulman, who caused a bit of a sensation with Catfish last year take the helm of the Paranormal Activity franchise and offer the best installment yet. Telling the story of Katie and Kristi’s childhood haunting (referred to multiple times in the two previous films), Paranormal Activity 3 gloriously recreates the 80’s, from the video format which the film tries (and somewhat succeeds) at emulating digitally to the babysitter trope, exploited brilliantly in the film’s best scene, but also in offering a more playful tone and aesthetic, providing a whole new setting, which will recall, also in atmosphere, Ti West’s much-loved retro-80s The House of the Devil. Scarier and more endearing than its predecessors - in part due to the all-new cast - Paranormal Activity 3 elaborates slightly on the mythology, leaving the viewers to connect some dots and giving itself plenty of space for a 3rd sequel - in fact, leaving much of the questions raised by the sequel unanswered. While the torture-porn genre, as set into motion by Saw, superseded the slasher film as the franchise material of the new millennium, I’m glad to see the mockumentary reality horror genre is finding a way to serialize itself in the form of an interesting, generation-spanning story of familial disintegration and obsessive use of technology. Paranormal Activity 4, which, after this great interlude of sorts, should pick up right where 2 left off, can’t come soon enough. In the meantime, I shall find time to watch the Japanese spin-off/ripoff Paranormal Activity 2: Tokyo Night, which came out last year.
