Editor's Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on October 19, 2012, and we're proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
Paranormal Activity 4 is the first film in the series to be as funny as it is scary, and that’s not a bad thing, as it seems to have been intentional, and was probably the right direction at this point in the franchise.
Rather than continue in the creeping-dread mode of the previous movies, directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman and screenwriter Christopher Landon (all returning from Paranormal 3, this time working from a story by Chad Feehan) aim for a funhouse feel that encourages the audience to jump and scream, and then laugh at themselves for having jumped and screamed. (It should be noted that this review is based on having seen Paranormal Activity 4 with a packed and enthusiastic audience, without which it likely wouldn’t be quite as effective.) Sometimes the jolts are the payoff of a careful buildup of suspense and the result of precise timing and framing, at others they’re elicited via the simple (one could say cheap) trick of having a character suddenly jump-cut into the middle of the screen. The methods employed by Joost and Schulman here are sometimes old, but they still work.
Eschewing a continuation of the open ending of the previous 1988-set prequel, Paranormal Activity 4 recaps the conclusion of 2, in which the possessed Katie (Katie Featherston) was last seen spiriting away her infant nephew Hunter circa 2006. Five years later, an odd little boy is seen watching in the background as teenager Alex (Kathryn Newton) videotapes her little brother Wyatt (Aiden Lovekamp) at his soccer game. To effect these movies’ signature found-footage style, Alex, like all Paranormal protagonists, has a penchant for running her camcorder at all hours of the day, and her Skype chats with boyfriend Ben (Matt Shively) are accidentally—he says—recorded on his own laptop. When weird stuff starts happening around Alex’s house, Ben is able to set up the computers in every room to send nonstop video feeds back to his machine, where the images can be recorded and perused later.
This up-to-the-minute technology gives Paranormal Activity 4 a bit of distinction from the retro-hardware-oriented previous film. Similarly, there’s a nifty visual gimmick in which we frequently see night-vision footage of a darkened room where an Xbox Kinect is running, and its thousands of motion-tracker dots become visible, making the space resemble an eerie starfield. Otherwise, the material is tried-and-true: doors and other objects moving by themselves, people (and ghosts) appearing from the corners and a creepy kid. In this case, he’s the aforementioned soccer voyeur Robbie (Brady Allen), who has moved next door with his mother but seems to prefer lurking outside Alex’s window. His mom is taken away in an ambulance for mysterious reasons, which at first seems a convenient way to write Featherston out of the scenario and results in Alex’s parents (played by real-life married couple Stephen Dunham—who, sadly, died last month, and to whom the film is dedicated—and Alexondra Lee) taking Robbie in.
The resulting, slowly escalating terror incorporates occasional homages to past horror classics (Wyatt rides a Big Wheel around the house like Danny in The Shining), but for the most part proceeds by both honoring and having fun with the approach that worked in the past Paranormals. As often as they aim for an honest scare, Joost and Schulman seem to know that this bag of tricks has become familiar after three installments, and play with expectations in ways that draw nervous laughs of anticipation and recognition. (A setup involving a piece of kitchen cutlery is particularly good at getting you cringing and giggling as you await the payoff.) They never outright poke fun at the material, though, and they resist the frequent franchise pitfall of trying to go bigger and better. What was once achieved by Oren Peli (continuing on as producer/godfather) with his camcorder and $11,000 now has the full force of Industrial Light & Magic behind it, yet the FX and scare tactics remain modest enough to continue the homegrown veneer that gave Paranormal Activity its appeal in the first place.
There is, as always, the question of why Alex keeps carrying her camera around even after her circumstances become nightmarish, and a moment where she doesn’t take advantage of available video communication when it could save her life. If things like this have become par for the course in the found-footage subgenre, Paranormal Activity 4 also allows for reflection on the fact that these kinds of movies have helped repopularize the classic genre virtues of mood and a gradual build of tension on a horror scene that has elsewhere overdosed on sadistic gore and hollow spectacle. This sequel doesn’t have the resonant chill of the original—it probably won’t haunt your sleep—but the scary/funny high it provides, particularly at the climax, is akin to the sugar rush of a post-trick-or-treat candy binge—in other words, the perfect movie for Halloween.
