So, Holly takes in Robbie saying, "He has nowhere to go." Later that night there are cop cars outside Robbie's house and Robbie's mom has to go to the hospital. Alex is unfazed by this and merely brings Robbie back to the house. As Ben goes in he is startled to see Robbie standing there in the corner. Afterward she shows Ben the playhouse and they both go into it. While Holly and Doug have a fight Alex tries to teach Wyatt how to do a cartwheel so as to distract him.Īt home we meet her friend Ben and they hang out while her parents are gone. Then her, Wyatt and their mom, Holly, all sit down for lunch but have to wait for their father, Doug. While filming, she catches Manta on the camera standing still and silent at the other side of the field. We meet Alex as she is filming her little brother, Wyatt as he is playing soccer. She is reserved, smart, well-behaved, and resourceful in precarious situations. Like other protagonists, Alex is the only one who suspects anything is going on throughout most of the film. She is the main protagonist of Paranormal Activity 4. But in this franchise, the existential tedium of empty rooms is feeling more and more like plain old boredom.Wyatt Nelson (Adopted Brother) (Missing, Assumed Alive),Īlex Nelson is a fifteen year old high school student (9th/10th grade). That would be fine, if only he could still scare us. The plot twists merely serve to cement Toby’s reputation as the world’s least efficient villain - more of a demonic performance artist than an evil poised for world domination. The dread that should be smothering is merely an intermittent itch, especially when Alex and her parents begin acting as stupid as people in slasher films do. Joost and Schulman coast along, recycling suburban-haunting motifs from Poltergeist, with a touch of The Omen thrown in. Series originator Oren Peli was no great storyteller, but he knew how to sneak things into the margins of mundane images like that one. Meanwhile, the filmmakers waste a golden opportunity to do something disturbing with recurrent, annoying close-ups of an open fridge door. Among this installment’s innovations are the frequent use of webchat footage and a clever lighting effect involving an Xbox Kinect console, but neither yields more than a few scares. Alex enlists her boyfriend (Matt Shively) to set up laptops in each room for surveillance, and the usual shenanigans commence.ĭirectors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, who took over the series with PA 3, seem to be nearly out of ideas for their low-tech scarehouse. The newcomer introduces Alex’s little brother (Aiden Lovekamp) to his imaginary friend Toby (the demon’s alias throughout the series), and soon things are going bump in the night. Those threads are drawn out further in PA 4, but not in terribly logical directions.Īfter the recap, we launch into footage shot five years later by a suburban teenager in Nevada, Alex (Kathryn Newton), who notices untoward things happening after a strange, sullen neighbor kid (Brady Allen) comes to stay with her family. In Paranormal Activity, it was clear that the demon wanted Katie, but not why the sequel gave her the job of snatching a firstborn son, per a deal her forebears had made with the supernatural entity. The fourth film in the saga of the Demonic Presence That Stalked Some People Incredibly Slowly opens with footage from the end of Paranormal Activity 2, in which possessed Katie (Katie Featherston) abducted her sister’s baby and vanished into the night. Existential dread, it seems, is a cash cow. Yet here we are, five years later, witnessing the release of Paranormal Activity 4, and nothing much happens in this installment that didn’t already happen in Nos. Not all horror fans are as patient as art-house goers: When I saw the first Paranormal Activity, the theater was full of grumbles of “That’s it?” when the credits rolled. That’s essentially the same principle that drives Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse toward its dark conclusion - albeit much, much, much more slowly. We know the director wouldn’t extend this shot of a teenage girl’s empty room for a full minute unless something bad was going to happen there. When they work, these movies create a mood of existential dread through sheer monotony. What does the blockbuster Paranormal Activity series have in common with European art cinema? The willingness to bore the audience.įound-footage films in the Blair Witch Project tradition distinguish themselves from regular ol’ scare flicks by establishing a baseline of normality so numbingly mundane that the smallest deviation is terrifying.
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