Random Movie: Paranormal Activity 3 (2011)

At this point, the Paranormal Activity series is almost critic-proof since it is dirt-cheap to produce, brings in fists full of dollars and is generally well-received by audiences. With the departure of the Saw franchise last year, October needed another big, R-rated series to take its place to win over the hard earned cash of horror-loving moviegoers. I said in the review of PA2: “It is pretty safe to say that if you liked the first PA, you will probably like this one too.” Amend that to say the first two PA films and you have my excerpt for Parnormal Activity 3. That isn’t a bad thing … unless you really hated the preceding films.

The formula for these stories are pretty simple: a family experiences some traumatic experience leading to the dominant male of the household placing a camera, or cameras, around the house to document something or another. This film sets up the loving family of Julie, mother of Katie and Kristi, and her boyfriend Dennis who conveniently is a wedding photographer, thus having access to multiple cameras and a seemingly endless supply of VHS tapes. Katie and Kristi’s father is out of the picture but the four have a pretty good relationship especially between Dennis and the kids. An earthquake interrupts Julie and Dennis’ very tame sex tape and Dennis maybe sees something weird when reviewing the tape.



Thus Dennis does what any sensible man does and convinces his girlfriend to set up three cameras in the house, one in their bedroom, one in the kids’ and one affixed to an oscillating fan base in the living room/kitchen. The first few nights aren’t too eventful (at least those that we see) mostly consisting of Kristi running around the house and talking to Toby, her imaginary friend at 4 AM. It isn’t long though before more odd things start occurring especially surrounding the babysitter and Dennis’ friend Randy who only show up for weird shit to happen to them.

Once you get past the inevitable “Why is this dude lugging around an 8 pound camera everywhere he goes?” puzzlement, PA3 offers a lot more freaky and some downright scary occurrences. There aren’t too many jump scares this time around but many scenes that are almost unbearably tense especially around the girls. While the movie reminds us that Katie and Kristi are alive almost twenty years later, previous films have explained that they have little recollection of their childhood … and I can probably see why. That takes some of the potential bite out of the scares around the two but with the other adults around, directors Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost (from Catfish fame) have plenty of tension to work with and they do so remarkably well.

I appreciated that this go-around did not take as long to get to the meat-and-potatoes of the story as the last, or at least it didn’t feel as long due to the underlying creepiness or the decent characters. And even though there was a lot (and I mean A LOT) of stuff shown in trailers that didn’t make the final cut, you never really get the sense that this is a film cobbled together at the last minute even though it kind of is. The prequel nature of it with the same elements we’ve seen before makes the story a tad more unbelievable (ghosts/demons attacking the same two girls, yet another budding videographer in the house, etc.) but not to any real detriment of your enjoyment.

Like I said in the review of the last one, I have no idea where the story can go from here, especially since it seems to hinge on strange events of these two girls. But if this one is any indication, with the right combination of talented directors and writers, we could be seeing Paranormal Activity 13 come 2021. As long as they keep churning out films that give me chills after the fact, I’ll keep watching them.