Created by Oren Peli, the original film premiered in 2007 and was widely released in 2009. Paranormal Activity is an American supernatural horror franchise consisting of seven films and additional media. Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin (2021).Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension (2015).Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones (2014).The minutes race by and turn into hours, but her body barely moves, suggesting an inhuman fixation on the man she, or the demon who possesses her, will shortly murder. On the last night, Katie rises from bed and stands at Micah’s side, silently watching him, and then suddenly, the footage shifts into fast-forward. In order to capture the goings-on in the couple’s room as they sleep, Micah sets a camera on a tripod and leaves it running, with the time stamp in the lower right-hand corner keeping track of the passing hours. The first movie was, for the most part, a standard-issue faux documentary in the post- Blair Witch mode, but its signature shot tapped a wellspring from which the following films have drunk copiously. It’s the way they’re put together that makes them work, combining overt artlessness with an underlying formal rigor. In substance, the Paranormal Activity films are unabashedly old-hat, full of creaking floorboards, shattered picture frames, and things that go bump in the night. Through a makeshift occult ritual, the family attempts to shift the demon’s attentions to Kristi’s sister, thus laying the groundwork for the first film, but by the end, Hunter’s parents are dead, and he’s spirited away by the possessed Katie. After some research, and with help from a spiritually connected Mexican maid, it’s intimated that Katie and Kristi’s great-great-grandmother may have made a deal with the devil, and that Hunter, as the family’s first male child in four generations, represents its long-overdue payment. The haunting begins in the same way, with the rumble of offscreen noises and the precipitous slamming of doors, but this time the locus is Kristi’s son, Hunter. In 2, which takes place at the same time as the first movie, the scene shifts to the home of Katie’s sister, Kristi, her husband, and their two children-a teenage daughter and a toddler son-the former from a previous relationship. The second and third films extend and overlap with the first, creating an expanding mythology that still has plenty of room to grow. At the film’s climax, an apparently possessed Katie lures Micah out of their bedroom and murders him offscreen, then hurls him at the camera in their bedroom before vanishing forever. An invisible force knocks her down and drags her toward an attic crawlspace, which seems to be where the spirit it makes its home. As the episodes grow more aggressive, Katie recalls a feeling of being watched that stretches back to childhood, and it becomes clear that the spirit means to abduct her. (The actors and their characters share names as if they were playing themselves.) Micah’s aim is to quell Katie’s suspicions, but once his cameras begin to record inexplicable phenomena, he becomes obsessed with getting the ghost on tape, essentially taunting it into greater and more dangerous displays. The first Paranormal Activity established a template that its successors have closely followed: It’s comprised of footage shot by day trader Micah Sloat after his girlfriend, Katie Featherstone, begins to suspect their house is haunted. In the theater, the audience gives up control, which is key to a series that’s ostensibly captured on the infinitely manipulable medium of home video.
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