Paranormal Activity 3

A version of this review appeared in The Age, October 27, 2011.

A horror film presented as a series of “found” home videos, the original Paranormal Activity (2007) was equally effective as a study of a troubled young couple. By comparison, Paranormal Activity 3 feels as impersonal as the average instalment in any other modern horror series, from Final Destination to Saw. In a sense, the lack of human interest is the point: even more than its predecessors, the film treats the mechanical aspect of cinema as threatening in itself.

The directors are the newly recruited team of Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, who made the documentary or mockumentary Catfish (2010) about the perils of Internet relationships. Like Paranormal Activity 2, it proves to be not a sequel but a prequel, flashing back to the 1980s via a newly discovered box of VHS tapes. Once again, the peaceful existence of a suburban family is disturbed by a mischievous, elusive supernatural entity – and once again, the hapless man of the house (Christopher Nicholas Smith) sets up video cameras to capture any strange events that unfold overnight.

One camera is mounted on an oscillating fan so it pans back and forth between two rooms, putting the viewer in a state of constant uncertainty about what might be happening just off-screen; the film is almost worth seeing for the sake of this inspired formal device, which recalls the work of an avant-gardist like Michael Snow, and which proves alarming from the moment it's introduced. Whatever strange or violent incidents occur before the camera's gaze, we know that its slow, steady movement will continue as before.