Look, I’m not going to say that Paranormal Activity 2 is a bad movie. It’s fine, 5 out of 10. I just think it’s the start of a slippery slope for the franchise. The first Paranormal Activity–which I covered last week as part of Paranormal Octoberty, hi, gotta throw a plug for the event into every intro paragraph, yes–was a decent stand-alone horror film with hints at something larger. But 2 really starts to dive deep into the lore of Katie and her family, and it’s not always great. I mean, we’re not at time traveling witches yet, but I feel like this movie answered questions no one was asking. What questions? Sounds like a transition into the summary!
Did you know Katie from the first movie had a sister? It may have been mentioned, I refuse to go back and verify. But this movie focuses on her sister, Kristi (Ms. Sprague Grayden), and her family two months before the first movie. She’s a new mom to a baby named Hunter, and also along are her husband Daniel (Brian Boland) and her step-daughter Ali (Molly Ephraim). After a break-in that wrecks the place–but the only thing taken is a necklace Katie gave Kristi–the family decides at first to film the damages but invests in a home security system involving cameras all over the property. So we’ve got our main source of footage, but they also carry the handcam around for reasons. Anyway, the titular paranormal activity centers around Hunter with the demon–we know it’s a demon, Ali has to figure that out on her own later on–really going after the infant. It’s not until the familt catches footage of a floating pool filter moving by itself that the family truly suspects something is wrong. Ali is the one who really believes the most, although she ignores when the Ouija board (trademark Hasbro) starts to spell H-U-N-T because her boyfriend was fucking with her, so she assumes he’s spelling “pussy hunt,” because… teenage boys, I guess. But some investigation leads her to discover that Hunter is the first male born in Kristi’s family going as far back as the 1930’s, and that sometimes people offer up their firstborn sons to demons in exchange for wealth and/or power. Things take a turn for the worse when Kristi is violently dragged into the basement and comes back in a possessed stupor. The dad finally acknowledge there’s a demon at play and call upon their housekeeper Martine (Vivis Colombetti) to banish the evil spirit. And by “banish” I mean “pass it on to Kristi’s sister,” which just seems kind of… evil? Anyway, after the timeline catches up to the end of the first movie, a possessed Katie kills Daniel and Kristi, then steals Hunter. Ali and the dog survive, at least!
The ending is the main problem I have with this movie. It’s both a sequel and a prequel, so it deals with a demonic attack but also has to tie into Paranormal Activity‘s demonic attack. Why does it go and torture Katie after haunting her sister? It can’t be because Kristi and her family died, because Katie would’ve been sad at the beginning of the other movie. The movie’s decision was to pass the demon on through a ritual that would wipe Kristi’s mind of the ordeal, but that just seems a cruel option. Sure, your family is safe, Daniel, but it really shows you don’t view your sister-in-law as “family.” Also, Martine the housekeeper was trying to ward off evil spirits at the beginning of the movie, so why does she know a ritual to pass the demon on to someone else? And while I’m complaining, creepy moments where a possessed character disappears between scenes don’t really work when you remember that the cut is just in the movie’s editing and that the cameras were running constantly and would’ve shown Katie scamper away. The more you think about it, the more the whole thing starts to look duct taped together. And we haven’t even gotten to the time traveling witches yet!
No, I will never stop complaining about that. This franchise makes some… bold moves.
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