Paranormal Activity 2

Paramount Pictures

2.5 stars out of 5

It’s important to first establish that I was highly impressed by last year’s Paranormal Activity. By taking a simple premise and presenting it in a different way, producer and writer Oren Peli turned out arguably the best example of a found footage horror film since The Blair Witch Project in 1999.

That being said, I went into the sequel both excited and worried, not sure how successful an attempt to revisit the story would be.  Although Paranormal Activity 2 succeeds in expanding the series’ mythology to support further films, it does so at the cost of being a successful sequel to the original.

The minimalist cinematography of the sequel is as impressive as in the first film. Told predominantly from the view of security cameras placed throughout the house, Paranormal Activity 2 manages to let the scenes play out naturally without shots that play to the cameras.

The sequel’s ability to rely upon nothing but practical effects furthers the minimalism. When the demonic force haunting the house casts a shadow across something or slams a door shut, it leaves the audience wondering how the filmmakers created the effect.

The writers and actors in this film do a great job of creating realistic characters. It can be hard to write authentic dialogue and even harder to deliver it convincingly. Both are done excellently in this movie. Even more impressive is the realistic behavior of the family dog, Abby, who at no point seems to be receiving off-screen coaching.

While portrayed well, most of the characters seem like carbon copies of the original film’s protagonists, Katie and Micah.  Kristi, played by Sprague Grayden, is Katie’s sister who is similarly the demon’s main victim.

Much like Micah before him, Kristi’s husband Dan, played by Brian Boland, makes a joke out of his wife’s and daughter’s fears, refusing to believe that his home is haunted.

Of course, the big draw for a horror film is the number of scares it can provide for the audience. More specifically, Paranormal Activity 2 has the task of living up to the masterful tension found in the original. This is where the film runs into its biggest problems.

Instead of a sequel, Paranormal Activity 2 is almost entirely a prequel, taking place in the month before the haunting in the original film.

In this film, Katie’s family is visited by the demon, immediately removing all tension from the narrative. In the original, Katie never mentioned anything happening at her sister’s house. As a result, I never expected any real harm to befall the characters in this film, at least not until it moved past the timeframe of the original.

This might be forgivable if the scares on display were more elaborate than before. Instead, more than half of the scares are recycled from the first film. While the new moments are impressive from a technical angle, they rely on cheap jump scares, replacing the slow burn horror of the original.

Paranormal Activity 2 does a good job of expanding the storyline (which I won‘t spoil here), but is nowhere near as scary and well paced as before. Instead, this sequel does little more than lay the groundwork for future films. That being said, Paranormal Activity 2 is still a fun film, and worth seeing if the first film was of any interest to you.