"Paranormal Acitivity 4" - Film Review

Why do we like the found footage genre?

I’ve always found it to be due to our desire for being immersed into something that appears, at least on the surface, real. In the first Paranormal Activity film (the best of the series), there isn’t a big budget and there aren’t any large scares (besides a conclusive moment). Nothing really happens. In the first film this works because there’s a sense of verisimilitude: this could happen in real life.

By the fourth film, what’s the appeal of watching people be occasionally, abruptly be freaked out by demonic beings (beings which they can’t even see in the first place)? If the story were to immerse us into this world, and have us buy into the notion that there’s a legitimate threat to the people we’re watching than perhaps we might care. Or perhaps if these were fully realized, well-developed characters worth liking and worrying about. 

Instead we’re made to watch unrealistic, one-dimensional people … and mostly they’re not even being haunted. They’re going about their daily lives and every now and again we’re reminded that oh, right there’s demonic foul play afoot!

 

Paranormal Activity 4 features long stretches of voyeuristically witnessing the day to day lives of a family. There’s dialogue that’s repetitive, uninteresting, and doesn’t advance the plot. And every once in a while the film remembers that it’s supposed to be a horror movie and has some moment that has us jump.

The would-be protagonist teenager Alex (Kathryn Newton) suspects something is up when the neighbor’s son Robbie (Brady Allen) creepily keeps appearing at their house. He’s forced to stay with them when his mother takes ill (the mother being the demonically possessed woman from the first film, but that’s almost beside the point). He’s helping the demon try to take possession of the family’s son Ben (Matt Shively) and in the meantime the demon dicks around and messes with this family in some supposedly, but not really, scary moments.      

Not only is Paranormal Activity 4 not very scary, it’s also very illogical. It’s necessary to accept the found footage concept to buy into the premise, but the film doesn’t even do a nice job establishing the basis of this found footage. Why is the daughter filming all the damn time? Does she have an interest in filming? Does she like documenting stuff? Why is she recording stuff with computers all the time? Why do they have so many damn computers?

A boring film that fails to achieve the one thing it’s supposed to (ya’ know: be scary), and that’s frustratingly, distractingly fallacious.  

D