As a rule, it's a little cheap to quote other film critics, but when something has been said perfectly, it bears repetition. Roger Ebert once wrote, "We're instinctively afraid of natural things (snakes, barking dogs, the dark) but have to be taught to fear walking into traffic or touching an electrical wire. Horror films that tap into our hard-wired instinctive fears probe a deeper place than movies with more sophisticated threats." True when spoken about The Blair Witch Project, but no less apt a summation of Paranormal Activity's appeal. Three films in, the franchise is still grounded in this principle, but is still struggling (as it initially did) to integrate headier, more fantastic explanations for its phenomena.
The saga of two sisters and the demon who follows them takes a step backward in this third entry, out of the digital era and into the domain of analog VHS tapes. Echoes of Poltergeist are felt as Katie and Kristi, not yet in their teenage years, interact with "Toby", an invisible figure occasionally suggested but spoken to only by Kristi. The found footage conceit plays out much as it has before (with their stepfather Dennis acting as the videographer), as do the ensuing family troubles between Dennis and Julie, which haven't even been inverted since the last time around.
The Paranormal Activity series might be imagined as the best possible horror films that could be made by high schoolers; though sex is mentioned, the films seem unaware of any sexual aspect of the menace (especially here, where little girls are involved), and their scares could best be compared to those you might torment a younger sibling with. They play off anticipated punishment, concealed in darkness, rather than really characterizing the demon in any satisfying detail. While he certainly isn't benevolent, most attempts to produce any real motive on its part have felt either unsatisfactory or like tropes from another series.
In its way, the 'demon' card was one of the cleverer devices of the series, because it manages to seem even more implausible than the more obvious ghost route, thus frustrating its literal-minded protagonists even more, who can barely bring themselves to accept that any of this is happening in the first place, let alone fight it. That mythology was extrapolated further in the first sequel, but it comes to what might be its breaking point here. Paranormal researchers are par for the course in any ghost film, but this third one now incorporates witches into its rogue gallery, and features its demon doing things that waver over the line from mysterious to kind of silly (with the obvious benefit of CGI). It's not that all of this couldn't fit organically into this franchise; it's that, for the first time, the people behind it seem to have ignored where their real assets are.
The relationship between Katie and Kristi, while not especially intricate, was at least strong enough to connect a series as stylistic as this. The potential inherent to seeing them interact as children seems obvious(at least as opposed to belaboring another bickering couple), but for the most part, Paranormal Activity 3 avoids providing any further insight into their relationship with this demon, or at least puts it off until another installment. Perhaps some of that comes with the territory of 'found footage', but if the series isn't building up to some larger pay-off, it will have wasted a lot of time with exposition when it could have been devising better scares. This amounts less to an unsatisfactory installment for the series than a sense of foreboding for Paranormal Activity 4 (and 5, and 6), which will determine whether 3 was an extra stepping stone or where it all went wrong.
SPECIAL FEATURES
The Blu-ray contains a commercial for Dennis's business and a scare montage. Pretty slim pickin's.
"Paranormal Activity 3" is on sale January 24, 2012 and is not rated. Horror. Directed by Ariel Schulman, Henry Joost. Written by Christopher B. Landon. Starring Chloe Csengery, Jessica Tyler Brown, Lauren Bittner, Christopher Nicholas Smith.
