![]() In this case, he’s the aforementioned soccer voyeur Robbie (Brady Allen), who has moved next door with his mother but seems to prefer lurking outside Alex’s window. Otherwise, the material is tried-and-true: doors and other objects moving by themselves, people (and ghosts) appearing from the corners and a creepy kid. Similarly, there’s a nifty visual gimmick in which we frequently see night-vision footage of a darkened room where an Xbox Kinect is running, and its thousands of motion-tracker dots become visible, making the space resemble an eerie starfield. This up-to-the-minute technology gives Paranormal Activity 4 a bit of distinction from the retro-hardware-oriented previous film. When weird stuff starts happening around Alex’s house, Ben is able to set up the computers in every room to send nonstop video feeds back to his machine, where the images can be recorded and perused later. To effect these movies’ signature found-footage style, Alex, like all Paranormal protagonists, has a penchant for running her camcorder at all hours of the day, and her Skype chats with boyfriend Ben (Matt Shively) are accidentally-he says-recorded on his own laptop. ![]() Five years later, an odd little boy is seen watching in the background as teenager Alex (Kathryn Newton) videotapes her little brother Wyatt (Aiden Lovekamp) at his soccer game. The methods employed by Joost and Schulman here are sometimes old, but they still work.Įschewing a continuation of the open ending of the previous 1988-set prequel, Paranormal Activity 4 recaps the conclusion of 2, in which the possessed Katie (Katie Featherston) was last seen spiriting away her infant nephew Hunter circa 2006. (It should be noted that this review is based on having seen Paranormal Activity 4 with a packed and enthusiastic audience, without which it likely wouldn’t be quite as effective.) Sometimes the jolts are the payoff of a careful buildup of suspense and the result of precise timing and framing, at others they’re elicited via the simple (one could say cheap) trick of having a character suddenly jump-cut into the middle of the screen. Rather than continue in the creeping-dread mode of the previous movies, directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman and screenwriter Christopher Landon (all returning from Paranormal 3, this time working from a story by Chad Feehan) aim for a funhouse feel that encourages the audience to jump and scream, and then laugh at themselves for having jumped and screamed. Paranormal Activity 4 is the first film in the series to be as funny as it is scary, and that’s not a bad thing, as it seems to have been intentional, and was probably the right direction at this point in the franchise. Editor's Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on October 19, 2012, and we're proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
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