Bursting on to the horror scene in 2007 with its inaugural film, Paranormal Activity has continued to be a popular franchise. I always enjoyed the initial trilogy of films (certainly in a very masochistic kinda way), and so I wanted to see how the rest fare in comparison. With Halloween and the spooky season of 2024 just about at an end now, I present to you a final round of horrors for the year. Strap yourselves in, it’s gonna be a bumpy ride.

Paranormal Activity (2007)
Director: Oren Peli
5/5

Micah (Micah Sloat) and Katie (Katie Featherston) are just an average young couple living in the suburbs. At least, Micah is pretty average. Katie, however, has had a presence haunting her on-and-off ever since she was a child. As the presence starts to get more and more aggressive, Micah decides they’re going to do something about it once and for all. Some people these days may consider this film pretty basic, but if you had seen it in theatres, or at home, when it was released, it was genuinely the most terrifying found footage film since The Blair Witch Project. For me, it is the perfect horror film: the pacing and building of suspense is spot on; the lack of score and intense silences are heart-pounding; and the performances are fully believable as though it is all real footage, especially the relationship between Katie and Micah. Most of all, the glimpses of the ‘presence’ and the visual effects are fantastic. Everything comes together to create an incredibly unsettling film.

Paranormal Activity 2 (2010)
Director: Tod Williams
4/5

Slightly preceding and leading up to the events of the previous film, Katie’s sister Kristi (Sprague Grayden) is living happily with her new husband, their newborn son and her step-daughter. That is, until strange things start happening about the house. As these events grow evermore violent, the family find themselves with a terrible decision to make. This one takes a step down in quality compared to the first, but it is still a solid horror movie with tons of shocking moments. It feels less claustrophobic than the previous film, and the threat doesn’t feel quite as strong, but the jump scares are much more effective and very well-timed. The performances are still great, the growing of the lore surrounding the demon that haunts Katie and Kristi’s side of the family poses more intrigue, and overall it is another decent fright fest that entwines itself very well with the first film.

Paranormal Activity 3 (2011)
Directors: Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman
3/5

Serving as a prequel, we are taken back to when Katie and Kristi were kids in the late eighties. Kristi begins communing with an apparent invisible friend named ‘Tobi’. The girls’ mum’s boyfriend Dennis (Christopher Nicholas Smith), a wedding videographer, sets up cameras around the house to capture the strange events. As things begin to seriously affect young Katie and Kristi, Dennis tries to persuade their mum that something supernatural is going on. Where this film is strong is in its pacing, jump scares, and the build-up to each occurrence and the climax, much in the same vein as the previous films, though it also has a novel way of filming the events to increase the suspense. Where it lacks however is in the weak characterisations, the lack of a presence of the entity itself, and a very basic plot that doesn’t really differentiate from what we’ve already seen. We are given a little more backstory on the origins of ‘Tobi’, but I’m guessing this film seems to act as more of a bridge than a quality film within the franchise.

Paranormal Activity 4 (2012)
Director: Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman
3/5

A few years after the events of Paranormal Activity 2, a suburban family’s life is turned upside down when they temporarily take care of their neighbour’s strange child. The child becomes friends with the family’s young son, and he encourages the son to communicate with the strange boy’s invisible friend. Much like the third film, this one continues the trend of good pacing, good build up to creepy activity, and lacks a score which makes it that much more scary. Although it takes a step away from the main family the franchise revolves around, it doesn’t work particularly hard to present anything new, other than the continuing incorporation of current technology, which does help to freshen the found footage framework a little.

Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones (2014)
Director: Christopher Landon
3/5

Elsewhere in California, Jesse (Andrew Jacobs) and his friends investigate the apartment of a neighbour, an apparent witch, after she was murdered by a boy they knew from school. As more and more eerie things happen, culminating in Jesse growing angry and violent, they try to figure out what is happening before they completely lose Jesse. This film, while still linked to the main story of the series, differs in many ways. It is full of stereotypes, degrades the series with unnecessary nudity, has a weaker story with too much exposition that leaves little to the imagination, along with some poorer dialogue. It does however boast some good subtle visual effects and fairly ok shocks. It steps away from the use of cameras in a CCTV fashion and goes full hand held, which doesn’t really work to explain away how it was all filmed without much though. I was fully prepared to disregard this one but it pulled it back in the third act and left with an ending that was good for this film but kind of took away too much intrigue from a previous film.

Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension (2015)
Director: Gregory Plotkin
3/5

A young family move into a house unaware that it was built on the ground of the coven’s farmhouse after it had burned down. When they begin to realise that a malevolent entity is after their daughter, the couple and their friends call in a priest to help them rid the house of the presence, but they come to see that much more than just an exorcism will be needed. Thankfully, this one goes back to the handheld format, making for much better action, which itself happens pretty much from the off. However, the “creepy” aspects are a little too on the nose and overexposed, making it (Tobi) less creepy overall – fear of the unknown, what we can’t see, has very much been the main horror artery of most of this franchise, but this one unfortunately severs that all important artery, allowing a lot of the lifeblood of the series to drain out of it. There’s a lot more CGI than previously, which also takes away from the fear aspect. On the whole it adds some fairly interesting new chapters to the overarching story, and the performances are good, but once again it doesn’t offer much in the way of originality from the other films.

Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin (2021
Director: William Eubank
2/5

Margot (Emily Bader) and her documentarian friend Chris (Roland Buck III) travel to an Amish community from which Margot’s birth mother, presumed dead, was originally from. While staying there, Margot and Chris discover odd things about the community and her own blood relatives, eventually putting their own lives in danger. It’s always disappointing when a franchise that started off well completely drops off by the end. The film continues the handheld format but far from the same effect, as the camera used is specifically for film use, making it feel too mainstream now. It does make for some good angles but takes something integral away from the film. It also introduces a soundtrack of sorts, both diegtic music and non-diegetic sounds used on occasions, and that destroys much of the film’s authenticity. It overuses jump scares and often pairs them with an orchestral flair that makes it just like every other try-hard horror, and both the story (supposed to be a ‘reboot’, but it hardly connects to the rest of the series) and the characters are the weakest of the whole franchise.

Like many franchises (particularly horror ones), Paranormal Activity starts off strong, plateaus, then drops off rather miserably. It began with subtlety, the first handful of films being a good study in pacing and how to create a frightening atmosphere that can leave you hiding behind your hands. But, as often happens with indie films that grow in popularity, Hollywood got its hands on it and the quality began to dip. I would probably say that the first three films, perhaps four, and maaaaybe five at a push, are worth the time to watch. The first film stands perfectly fine on its own, but for more of a binge, five is probably the furthest you should bother to go. I do not think we need any remakes/reboots/sequels/prequels in this franchise, but rather a whole new idea that utilises the framing, effects and simplicity that Oren Peli originally perfected in the first film.