They may not look pretty or come across as especially sophisticated, but watching the fourth installment (as I have the previous three) of the PARANORMAL ACTIVITY series with an audience, one thing becomes abundantly clear: the folks the make these movies know how to wind up and freak out an audience. Watching PARANORMAL ACTIVITY movies is unlike viewing any other films in a given year.
There's something of a formula (thanks to title cards that read Day 1, Day 3, Day 11, etc.). We learn to look at a series of static shots with a keener eye than we do most other horror films. We're scanning every corner of the frame for movement or a shadowy figure or a swinging light fixture--any sign of a ghostly presence. I love that moment when a new scene starts, and inevitably someone in the audience will whisper "Uh oh." The latest ads for PA4 have night-vision shots of a preview audience jumping, screaming, and otherwise getting antsy while watching the film. I was skeptical that the audience I saw it with would follow suit, but I'll be damned if they didn't. The fear was genuine, the screams well earned, even if the particular story in this new installment is a little threadbare.
In the timeline of the story of the demonized Katie (Katie Featherston), PA4 is the most recently set of the four films. She and the son she stole from her sister in PA2 have moved into a new home, across the street from a teenage girl Alice (Kathryn Newton, who I recognized from Bad Teacher), whose family--parents and younger brother--agree to take care of Katie's "son" for a few days when she supposedly goes into the hospital. Considering I'm pretty sure Alice's parents have never even met Katie, it seems odd that they would take in her kid, but OK...
The two young boys start hanging out even thought Katie's kid is a freak, and pretty soon weird things start happening in the house, either being caused by this little stranger or something that's watching over him--an invisible friends of sorts. Since this is yet another found footage film, the excuse for having camera in most rooms of the house is that Alice's boyfriend (the quite funny Matt Shively) secretly converts every computer in the house into a camera at her behest so she can review footage of these strange occurrences. When the boyfriend isn't actually in the house, he and Alice are video chatting, so we get to see her approximate narration as she's conveying stories to him about the titular activity.
Directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman (PA3 and CATISH) do their usual job of slowly ramping up the scares, and I've said before, in a movie like this, if it can consistently scare me, I'm hooked. I'd even go so far as to guess that PA4 has more frequent scares than its predecessors. The hits just keep on coming. The film's deepest flaw is Featherston. She's a good actress at playing regular Katie, but I never found her particularly menacing when she's prowling around the neighborhood or inside someone's house. She does some pretty horrific things to certain people in this movie, but I never got a sense of danger or dread off of her. When she switches on the demon face, that's a different story. But her dead-eyed creeping around did nothing for me.
Fortunately, Katie isn't the scary centerpiece of the film--that honor belongs to both of the little boys and a series of terrifying moments carried out by unseen forces. PA4 also brings back into the series this idea from the previous film that some sort of coven of women has a hand in all of this childnapping. The funny thing about this series is that if the good guys win, the series is done, so we always basically know who's going to die or live to see the next installment. But if we're not rooting for the ghosts to continue scaring us, then how will we continue having fun year after year?
Storywise, PA4 is probably the weakest of the bunch, but who's really watching these for story? Actually, I am. I want there to be an understandable thread that binds this franchise together, and certain things feel a bit fuzzy and random here. These aren't unforgivable offenses, and they certainly don't stop the scary from happening. Who knows where they'll take us for the next chapter, but I'm still on board with only slightly less enthusiasm than prior to seeing PA4. And while it may not match it in terms of frequency of big scream-worthy moments, SINISTER is still the better movie overall in this current crop of recent horror releases.
