Paranormal Activity 2 a Sequel that Scares
One of the last movies I ever would have expected to be decent let alone borderline awesome is Paranormal Activity 2. Rushed into production after the 2009 original became s surprise smash, stuck with a concept that seemed like it should have played itself out the first time around, this is a sequel that seems like it would have everything working against it. On paper, these sorts of projects just do not work (see just about any horror sequel to a surprise hit first film ever made for reference), and as hopeful as I was this one would prove me wrong I can’t say going in I anticipated it doing so.
The scares are back in town in Paranormal Activity 2 © Paramount Pictures
Thankfully, this wonderfully unsettling and scary thriller did just that and then some. Another tale of a haunting gone terribly wrong, this is a picture that gets it right. Like Oren Peli’s (who returns to produce, co-write the script but not direct) smash from last year, this one knows that it is what you don’t see that scares you, that strange and sinister sounds can be more unsettling than a masked killer wielding an axe. It understands that misdirection can be the cheapest trick of them all, and that playing against convention (a mirror will always draw attention while cracked door catches the eye) is the quickest way to unhinge an audience leading them to scream as if it were their own lives at stake and not the actors up on the screen.
So, it should be stated upfront that Katie and Micah are indeed back, but this isn’t their story (although they are a very integral part of it, the first film filling in many of the climactic moment’s blanks) but instead her wealthy sister’s. She’s just had a baby, Hunter, and her husband and daughter-in-law couldn’t be more ecstatic.
But something inside the house isn’t nearly as exuberant. It topples chairs, messes with the machine cleaning their pool, has fun torturing the dog and otherwise does some very strange things that slowly but surely make everyone uncomfortable. Most of all it has its eye on Hunter, looking at him as if he were some sort of prize to slowly be one and potentially picked apart right to the bone.
So instead of a single camera this time we get surveillance footage from inside the house alone with an HD video recorder that everyone in the family is apparently obsessed with playing with. Additionally, there is a bit of a been there-done that quality to everything that can eat away at the tension at times, the sequel not quite getting to the stratospherically terrifying heights of the original no matter how hard new director Tod Williams and his much larger cast of nondescript character actors try.
Yet that doesn’t mean Paranormal Activity 2 doesn’t score. Quite the opposite, in fact. This movie had me and the rest of the late night preview audience right at the edge of our seats, screams filling the theatre time and time again especially during the suitably frenetic and breathlessly unsettling lead-up to the climax. The level of restraint on display here is phenomenal, the tension ratcheting up in spades as we got nearer and nearer the end.
Like the first one, this is a movie that simply must be seen with a large audience. The level of participation involved is palpable, watching it a communal event where the frights and shocks build as the audience feeds of one another’s fear. Even though I always sort of knew where it was going that didn’t make me any less under the sequel’s spell, and by the time it was over all I could do was sit in the theatre until the credits ended trying to catch my breath.
Let’s leave things there. For those who adored the original Paranormal Activity 2 is as wonderful a second chapter in this growing demonic mythology as anyone could have hoped for. It’s a haunted house thriller that gets it right, relying upon the unseen to titillate, the aural to unsettle and the unexpected to outright scare. It had me wrapped around its finger almost from the start, and the only thing I want to do now is grab a handful of friends and head right back to the multiplex so I can see it again.
Film Rating: êêê1/2 (out of 4)
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