The build-up that is utilised in each film, all of which are filmed in the found-footage format, is phenomenal; the way in which the villainous entity/demon/ghost/whatever haunts and taunts the petrified protagonists guarantees a suspenseful build-up. The scares are always minimal at first - maybe a few bumps in the night and a gust of wind blowing a door closed - and then slowly but surely build and build into a batshit-insane bundle of horrifying horror and bloodcurdling screams; it’s at this point you begin to question why the character holding the camera is still, well, holding the camera.
“Paranormal Activity 3” uses this formula once again, but please don’t be put off, dear reader, because I assure you there are plenty of surprises stuffed up the filmmakers’ sleeves; also, the two-year-old formula, well-known as it is by now, still proves itself to be very effective in creating a boatload of tension and suspense (with pay-offs too!). Sure, fans of the first two films will be more than aware of the formula’s methods of progression, but the film is not as seen-it-all-before as one may initially suspect.
Like “Paranormal Activity 2,” “PA3” is a prequel, this time predating the first two films’ story by just under twenty years. The film is set in 1988, a fact which is sometimes convincing and sometimes not. Remember sisters Katie and Kristi from the first two films? Well, here they’re little youngsters living with mummy (Lauren Bittner, “Bride Wars”) and daddy (Brian Boland, “The Unborn”) in a lovely suburban home in California.
Kristi is here characterised as a rather shy girl, as opposed to her teasing sister Katie. Kristi is shown to have an imaginary friend named Toby; no, you do not get any reward for predicting that this Toby person is in fact the entity/demon/ghost/whatever haunting the home. This is so obvious (yet cool) that even daddy manages to figure this out in the film’s first half.
So, the family suspect there is an entity/demon/ghost/whatever stalking the hallways of their spacious abode. Well, daddy at least does, and thus he decides to set up cameras all around the house, recording footage with VHS tapes that need to be changed every six hours. There’s one in the kids’ bedroom, one in mummy and daddy’s bedroom, one that’s used for handheld filming about the house, and one that sits on a rotating fan, surveilling the kitchen and living room; the film is, of course, presented entirely through what these cameras manage to capture.
I love that last camera. I love the way it very slowly rotates from the kitchen to the living room, and then very slowly back to the kitchen again, repeat all throughout the day. This allows for nigh-unbearable suspense as we await the camera to rotate and reveal something standing, something moving, something going missing or something popping up out of nowhere; as the camera turns, you are entirely aware that anything could suddenly appear at the side of the frame at any moment. It’s simple, but gosh darn it’s effective.
The film is directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman. You may recognise these names from last year’s controversial documentary “Catfish,” a cautionary tale about the dangers of social networking. The choice of Joost and Schulman as directors of the next instalment in the biggest found-footage franchise in the history of ever is interesting, seeing as to how the two spent months fiercely defending their claims that “Catfish” was a genuine documentary and not a found-footage film.
Anyway, it turns out they were a fabulous choice for the film. Along with Christopher B. Landon, writer of “Paranormal Activity 2,” they muster up a cavalcade of creativity and originality in the scares department. Yes, some scares are easily foreseen (such as the babysitter lunging at the camera for a LOL-tastic gag), but there is an ample heap of shocks and frights to startle, traumatise and create a sort of yellowy-brown stain in the bottom of your underwear; I apologise for the image.
“Paranormal Activity 3,” against all odds, is an unexpectedly glorious success of a horror threequel. As somebody who thoroughly enjoyed “PA1” and “PA2,” I can safely say that “PA3” is at the very least on a par with both of its wonderful predecessors. Different enough to be fresh yet still true to the franchise’s well-established formula, it’s a titillatingly terrifying and furiously creative found-footage chiller that should more than please die-hard fans of the successful series. I would, however, advise the producers to end the series here; the story has been told, leave it at that. We don’t want another over-convoluted “Saw”-esque franchise on our hands here.
9/10
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