This happens around the point where other horror films would start to get busy explaining the plot - letting their characters discover what kind of demon is following them and/or ways to defeat it. And yes, this family does own a cat.īut after a while, we start to get bored at seeing the same locations (the same bedrooms, the same living room, the same kitchen) used in the same ways (a creeping shadow here, a thud on the ceiling there). As usual, there are lots of open doors and barely visible corridors in the background. They gleefully get plenty of horror mileage out of the sound of random objects and/or wind hitting the microphone, and they also display a fondness for the unmotivated jump cut as a source of cheap scares. The film was directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Shulman, who also made PA3 and who came to prominence with the offbeat indie documentary hit Catfish (which had enough of a thriller/mystery vibe that some felt it was staged). These early scenes work reasonably well, in part because the characters have an easygoing, unscripted feel to them they feel like real suburban kids. Soon enough, Alice and her boyfriend, Ben, who were already into Skyping, are rigging up computers and their cameras around the house to monitor the strange things little Robbie does at night.
Could this boy be Hunter? Well, he certainly seems weird. Their life starts to take a creepy turn when Robbie, a shy, odd boy from across the street, comes to stay with them after his (unseen) mother mysteriously has to go to the hospital. Now we’re in the happy suburban Nevada home of Alice (Kathryn Newton) and her 6-year-old brother Wyatt. The film follows up on the occurrences in PA2, in which a girl named Katie abducted her baby nephew Hunter from his father and mother (her sister) after killing them.
(Technically speaking, a feature film need only be more than 40 minutes long, but when was the last time you saw something that short in a theater?) The fourth film in the extremely profitable Paranormal Activity franchise works largely along the same lines as the earlier ones: An admirably tense buildup effectively utilizes the films’ found-footage gimmick, before a lot of dithering around waiting for predictable, repetitive scares reveals the concept’s limitations. Watching Paranormal Activity 4, I found myself wishing that there was a way to monetize the concept of a 45-minute-long feature. Some movies just aren’t made for typical running times.
Photo: Donald Schwartz/Paramount Pictures
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