Hola all. Massawyrm here.
When I was in High School, I became involved in the local Halloween Haunted House and spent a few years scaring the crap out of people while learning the ins and outs of how to set one up. The end result of that experience is that I can never go to a haunted house again. Once you know all the tricks and gags, it just isn’t scary anymore. But films don’t work like that. They invest you in characters, tell you detailed stories and control your mood with score and cinematography. But what happens when you remove these four elements from a movie? You get PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 2.
There is a meme that has been running around the internet for years that is just a hair more sophisticated than a Rickroll. The idea is to link someone to a picture and tell them that something is amiss, often highlighted with the phrase “When you see it, you’ll shit.” The gag is that there’s nothing out of place. The picture is fine – except that it is an animated gif or flash object that suddenly changes to something frightening and might even scream at you. It’s supposed to scare you – but what it really does is just startle you by distracting your mind long enough to leave you susceptible to being caught off guard. It’s a cheap gimmick that works once or twice before it wears out its welcome; it is also the fundamental principle upon which PARANORMAL ACTIVITY and its sequel are based.
The PARANORMAL ACTIVITY series is nothing more than a cinematic supernatural WHERE’S WALDO in which we are shown long, static shots of a room before a light turns on and off or a chandelier swings. And since these “spooky” sequences are the only thing the movie has going on, you are forced to look around the screen constantly, trying to find what the gag is before the Mensa members in the audience ooh, ahh and verbally announce it to the rest of the crowd. “Oh! Did you see that? The chandelier is moving!” Sometimes someone off camera opens a door; sometimes someone bangs on a wall after a minute of solid silence. Once the movie gets going, the characters begin seeing the activity and reacting to it, followed by two minutes of “Oh shit, wasn’t that freaky?”
PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 2 and its predecessor are the bottom of the barrel of the Found Footage genre, falling lazily upon the format to avoid needing any kind of talent behind the camera. The scripts are non-existent, the dialog nothing more than the mindless babble of average, uninteresting reality television personalities and the characters are built out of Scotch Tape and cardboard. The most character background you can glean out of anyone here is the job one of them has; outside of that there is nothing. These people like cameras and carry them around at the most inappropriate times – that’s the most I can tell you. When the movie needs to explain a relevant piece of information, someone sets a camera down next to themselves and uses the internet, and reads to us.
In order for these films to work, you *really* have to buy into the conceit. It will not distract you with story or character development like other, better movies will; you have to want to believe it is real and get off to whatever gimmick they throw at you next. You have to accept that this is not a movie, but a theme park ride. Otherwise, you’re just playing WHERE’S BEELZEBUB for 90 minutes.
This is not a better film than the original; it is a different film from the original using the exact same gimmicks. The first film had something of a (admittedly terrible) character arc, and arguably was less about a haunting and more about an emasculated alpha male douchebag trying to maintain control of his household and beat the devil at his own game. Micah Sloat is one of the worst protagonists in modern horror history, a two dimensional asshole whose reluctance to turn to someone for help dooms his household. But at least he had a second dimension; Katie didn’t. She was just terrified all the time and wanted the camera out of her face.
PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 2 trades that startling level of character depth for an actual mythology, which it aims to flesh out about as much as the characters in the first film. Here, no one has a discernable personality short of Suburban Dad, Suburban Teenager and Katie 2.0 (who happens to be Katie’s sister.) They are characters so thin and hollow that you will beg for the deep, rich stereotypes of z-grade 80’s slasher films. The baby has about as much personality as every other character in the film, and its most likable character is the family dog. And I get it; they’re supposed to work the same way Bella Swan works in the TWILIGHT novels, in which you are told nothing about them so you can put your family and friends into those roles and feel the terror by association. Again, it’s a theme park ride, not a movie.
What they do right this time around is tie the film in seamlessly with the first, answering any questions you might have about these connections along the way, while exploring the aspects of what this creature is and why it might be haunting them. But it doesn’t have any answers and the creature remains as nameless as ever. But my hat is off to them for trying.
The first film was forgivable for being a $10,000 experiment in a sub-category of film that had yet to reach its apex when it was made. But it was not a hit because it was good. It was a hit because the people that work at Paramount marketing are fucking geniuses that know their jobs better than almost anyone else in the industry and created one of the most successful campaigns of the modern era. They talked you into being scared; and odds are you were. If you can be talked into it again, you most likely will be. I know a number of other critics that are singing the praises of this film. But if you had problems with the last one, you’ll have problems with this one; it’s just more of the same. But in ten years I imagine people will look back and remember the experience, but not the film.
Until next time friends,
Massawyrm
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