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Chloe Csengery, Christopher Nicholas Brown, Dustin Ingram, franchise, Horror, Jessica Tyler Brown, Katie Featherston, Lauren Bittner, Oren Peli, Paranormal Activity 3, Supernatural, Thriller
Living in this world of franchises, as we do, it’s difficult to really convince when one of real quality arrives. The very act of creating a third film in a series screams of dramatic inertia, cash grab and the like. But ‘Paranormal Activity 3′ is a truly frightening film, with real, grounded, believable performances and some of the best scares I’ve seen all year.
The real key to the success of this film is that it finds a simple hook that makes it distinctive from the others in the series. Firstly, setting the film in the technologically Jurassic 1988, and bringing us into the backstory of the two sisters from the previous films. Then, the real hook is in having the youngest sister, Kristi, befriend an imaginary friend named Toby. It seems simple enough, but it’s a situation most of us can relate to, at least from the outside, and then the fun of the mystery is in trying to read the youngest sister’s relationship and to find out what Toby really is. Is he a thing or a person? How old is he? How tall is he? What rules does he live by, and most importantly, how controlling is he?
Toby turns out to be the most playfully frightening villain since the original Michael Myers. He loves toying with these people, but at the same time he may react like a petulant child if neglected, albeit a quite violent one. His playfulness and unpredictability leads to the most imaginative and effective set pieces of the series, particularly one involving a ghostly bed sheet and cute babysitter (sound familiar?). The directors, Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, have a lot of fun with the genre conventions. They know when they’re introducing a disposable character, and they know where our expectations are heading every step of the way. This is the kind of horror that is fun to frightened with.
The story develops into some really unexpected areas. The very basic outlines from the other entries in the series are present, those being the set-up of the cameras and the dynamics of the female lead wanting to dismiss the occurrences, and the male lead being fascinated by them. What this entry does is really quite devious. Firstly, most of the scares that are present in the promotional materials, are not in the film. That is a brilliant piece of misdirection because every time you think you know what they’re setting up, they go in a new, surprising direction. Secondly, for the first time, they change locations during the film. This resets the game board, as we had gotten used to where to look and where not to look, and now we’re right back at square one. This location change leads into a truly unsettling, lengthy sequence that concludes the film. We are so out of our element that we don’t know where to run, much like our characters. It’s a brilliant, edge-of-the-seat ending.
There are many more visual effects used in this variation, probably double from the previous entry. Joost and Schulman are here to entertain and they’ll use anything in their arsenal to do so. Some of these moments are truly startling because of the seamlessness of the fx integration. My guess is that many different methods were introduced in order to achieve the final effect, and that’s the root of the films success. I never once questioned the reality of the film.
An invaluable help to this reality is in the casting. This entry is impeccably cast, all around. The two child performers, Chloe Csengery and especially Jessica Tyler Brown, communicate terror and playfulness with wrenching effectiveness. The most brutal is a sequence where Toby tries to separate the sisters, violently, in order to get what he wants. There isn’t a false note present. The two adult leads, Lauren Bittner and Christopher Nicholas Smith, are grounded and loving. Smith in particular does a nice job of being humanly ineffective at times, which makes us root for him so much more than if he was purely arrogant. And lastly the two key supporting performances, Dustin Ingram as Smith’s assistant, and an actress who isn’t credited online as the babysitter, each help in racheting the tension with their unfortunate encounters with Toby. It’s a true ensemble cast.
The first ‘Paranormal Activity’ was an impressively calculated scare machine, much more tame nowadays compared to the slew of imitators it inspired. It’s still a remarkably effective film, primarily due to the confident staging and the superior performances. I wasn’t a particular fan of the 2nd in the series, although it was far from being an awful film. It just didn’t have the spark of inspiration that the first one did.
My hope is that the audience is reinvigorated by this entry. I don’t particularly care if the series continues, I’m only grateful when a superior horror film enters the marketplace once again. It doesn’t happen very often.
‘Paranormal Activity 3′ is a surprising and terrifying film.
