Paranormal Activity 3 Review (2011)

Directors: Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman

Writers: Christopher Landon and Oren Peli

Genre: Horror

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Paranormal Activity 3 is scary. There’s no denying that. The jump-a-minute rating during PA3’s short 84 minute running time is off the charts. I watched this movie with my knees curled up to my chest, and my hands either over my eyes or in my mouth, since I was biting my nails basically the whole movie. For a Halloween horror movie, this is exactly what I was looking for; it’s almost like the candy you get during trick-r-treating – tastes sweet, makes you jumpy, and it’s mostly junk.

I went to see PA3 with two friends on the Saturday of the disastrous Halloweekend snowstorm and about 45 minutes into the movie, the theater’s power cut out and I was left to wonder how the movie would end. So the next day, since my home’s power was out and I was in the dark and freezing cold, I went with my brother to see the movie in its entirety. I was pretty bored seeing the first half again because I knew when all the popouts were coming, but once it got past the point of what I had already seen, I got back to being scared as hell right away. And the last 20 minutes are freaking scary, though they don’t really make sense.

You don’t really need to see the first two Paranormal’s to understand what’s going on in number 3, though I don’t know why you would want to see PA3 if you haven’t seen the first, second, or both. The story is a prequel to the previous two installments and takes place when the sisters, Katie and Kristie, who were the subjects of PA and PA2, were young girls, and their house becomes haunted. The gimmick of the Paranormal franchise is that the movies play out as if it was actually filmed in real life and the footage was found, in the tradition of The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield.

The man responsible for setting up the cameras around the house is Katie and Kristi’s stepdad, who wants to catch the strange occurrences happening in the house on tape. The movie gets repetitive, as the formula of the Paranormal scare method gets trite, but despite its unoriginality I was still scared. The best new idea from PA3 was setting up a camera on a moving fan that pans back and forth between two rooms so that tension builds as the camera moves and the audience is left waiting to see what the camera is missing. There will no doubt be a fourth installment of the series due to PA3’s box office success, but I’ve just about had it with this series as the repetition of the found footage gimmick is getting old really fast.

            There is little redeeming value to this movie besides being scared, so if all you want is be scared, you can’t go wrong with PA3. If you want anything else out of a movie, don’t see PA3, because it’s not really a good movie. And if you really want to be scared, rent the original Paranormal Activity and watch it alone, in a dark room.