By Roxana Hadadi
After I saw “Paranormal Activity 3,” I went home to my house and feared getting out of my car, since it would involve walking up dark stairs. But I also didn’t want to get inside, because my basement bedroom would certainly be creepy and quiet.
Silly me! How did I not know “Paranormal Activity 3” would haunt the rest of my night?
But two days later, I’m kind of over it. Like the previous films in the series, the original “Paranormal Activity” and last year’s “Paranormal Activity 2,” this installment is overwhelmingly, amazingly tense, almost nauseatingly stressful. Immediately after “Paranormal Activity 3,” shadowy corridors and creaking floors take on terrifying, terrible meaning. But at this point, the series has exhausted all of its tricks — and instead falls into a surprisingly dissatisfying plot twist that derails the insanity of the previous films. Its predecessors were absurd and over-the-top, reinvigorating the night-vision genre that “The Blair Witch Project” championed in 1999. But “Paranormal Activity 3” is like a shrug at the end of the series, not a certified jolt. It’s scary, and then it’s over, and then you’ll forget it.
Here’s a quick recap on 2007’s “Paranormal Activity” and its sequel: In the first, Katie (Katie Featherston) and her boyfriend, Micah (Micah Sloat), are haunted by something — a demon? a ghost? — Katie says has stuck with her for years. As mysterious things happen in their house, Micah sets up cameras to record it all; weirder and weirder things keep occurring, and finally it ends in a bloody, final way. Its 2010 sequel, acting as a prequel, takes place a few months before what happened to Katie and Micah and focuses on Katie’s younger sister, Kristi (Sprague Grayden), and her husband Dan (Brian Boland), and their own dealings with a paranormal entity — oh, and that one ended in bloodshed, too. Obviously.
So here we are at “Paranormal Activity 3,” which briefly introduces us to the two grownup sisters, with Katie dropping a box of videotapes off at Kristi’s and Daniel’s house. The tapes, of the girls’ childhood — birthday parties, holidays, other events — surprise the two, who don’t seem to remember that much of their past. But after a burglary at Kristi’s and Daniel’s house, the tapes disappear — and we start watching them. Birthday parties? Yeah. Holidays? Yeah. Tapes of the pair’s trauma at the hands of an early ghost/demon/poltergeist thing? Yeah!
We’re transplanted back to 1988, when elementary school-aged Kristi (Jessica Tyler Brown) and Katie (Chloe Csengery) live with their pretty young mom, Julie (Lauren Bittner), and her new boyfriend, Dennis (Christopher Nicholas Smith), a wedding videographer. After Dennis suggests the two make a sex tape — he’s a nice guy, despite this brief sleaziness — an earthquake rocks the house, and when Dennis watches the video a little later, he notices something: dust falling from the ceiling, resting on an invisible figure in the room with them. Intrigued by the weirdness, he convinces Julie to let him set up a camera in their bedroom, a camera in the girls’ bedroom and a camera (ingeniously mounted on the base of an oscillating fan) on the first floor, panning between the living room and the kitchen.
And so, of course, it begins: Shadowy figures, inexplicably shutting doors, creaking noises. Dennis thinks it has something to do with Kristi’s imaginary (maybe?) friend Toby, but Julie is convinced it’s just a phase, and Katie mocks her younger sister’s belief. Don’t they know you never mock a ghost/demon/poltergeist thing?! That’s rule No. 1 in these kind of paranormal situations!
But we’ve seen this all before, and it’s disappointing that new-to-the-franchise directors Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost can’t veer the series away from its old tricks. They make everyday items like kitchen utensils and bedsheets seriously scary, but when your bad guy is a ghost/demon/poltergeist thing that has unlimited abilities, why not think of truly ingenious ways to use them? Also infuriating is the use of many scenes in the film’s trailer that don’t end up in the actual movie; building up hype for certain sequences and then abandoning them does your fans a major disservice. And most frustratingly, the film’s ending ruins any sense of continuity “Paranormal Activity 3” has with the other two movies — seriously. It makes no sense. At all.
Will fans wanting to scream, gasp and freak out really care about the film’s repetitive feel? Doubtful; maybe it’s comforting to think that a ghost/demon/poltergeist thing isn’t really that creative. But while the first “Paranormal Activity” catapulted the psychological horror of our childhood fears of the unknown and the unseen, without any new tricks up its sleeve, “Paranormal Activity 3” can’t bring that old magic back.
