I think I see your problem. You have this list. It’s a list of people you need/want to buy a Christmas gift for. The trouble is that they’re into home theatre, and you don’t know Star Trek from Star Wars. You couldn’t tell a Wolf Man from a Wolverine. And you always thought that Paranormal Activity was something too kinky to talk about. Fortunately, Upcomingdiscs has come to the rescue every Christmas with our Gift Guide Spotlights. Keep checking back to see more recommendations for your holiday shopping. These gift guides ARE NOT paid advertisements. We take no money to publish them. And for your Black Friday shopping frightmare, we present Paranormal Activity: The Ultimate Chills Collection. Your horror fan friends will just eat this up. Just don’t make any sudden loud noises around them for a while.
Here’s the thing. Fans of the franchise should be pleased with Paranormal Activity: The Ultimate Chills Collection. The series has been a solid October tradition for some time now. When you consider the low cost of creating one of these films with the proven box office numbers, this was all really a no-brainer, to say the least. You’re going to get more of what you are expecting, and with all of the films together there are enough new angles and tricks to keep the idea as fresh as possible. The history is of vital importance if you’re going to appreciate where all of this is going. That isn’t to say newcomers won’t be entertained. There are enough jumps and shocks to have a relatively good time. Still, if you haven’t gotten yourself caught up in the franchise’s mythology yet, you’ll find it all here, which allows you to go back to the beginning and see it all together for the first time.
The first film introduced us to Katie (Featherston) and her boyfriend Micah (Sloat). Strange things are happening in their home. It starts out small: keys on the floor, strange sounds. That sort of thing. Micah decides to set up a video camera 24/7 in their bedroom and wherever else they happen to be in the hopes of capturing the mystery. What we get is a lot of mundane footage punctuated by an escalating haunting and eventual possession of Katie. It’s goodbye poor Micah, and Katie is left smiling into the camera.
The film was made for just a little over 10 grand and made $108 million in the USA alone. That was just the initial box office. The film has brought in hundreds of millions on that original $10-15,000. The idea was clever, actually, and it took the found-footage concept to a level that did away with constant shaky cameras, although not entirely. The scares were in the sounds more than anything else. More importantly, the film proved you can make money without showing any blood and guts.
The second film takes place just before the first and dovetails neatly into that story. It follows Katie’s sister Kristi (Grayden) and her husband Daniel (Boland). They are bringing home their new son, Hunter. This time the footage comes courtesy of the security cameras placed both inside and outside the house. The haunting appears to center around poor little Hunter. The film introduced a possible explanation for Katie and Kristi’s familial curse. There’s hypothesizing about someone in the family having made a deal with the devil to gain wealth. I guess this also explains how everyone in this franchise lives in such nice houses, has great state-of-the-art tech toys, and doesn’t appear to actually work. The film ends with Katie killing the couple and absconding with baby Hunter. The postscript tells us they were never seen again, but we know better, don’t we?
This film pulled in a little less money but still managed $85 million on another several-grand budget. Like Dire Straits once said, it’s money for nothing. I’m not sure if the chicks were free.
Along comes the third film, and a box of found video tapes by the sisters brings us back to 1988 when the girls were very young. This time Dad’s a wedding videographer (finally a working stiff) who uses VHS camcorders to capture the strange events going on in his home. The young girls have an imaginary/invisible friend named Toby who appears to be at the center of the strange goings-on. The film added a far more aggressive haunting. There was little subtlety in this one, which involved entire rooms crashing down.
The film broke the bank again, getting back up above the $100 million mark once again. When you pull in the total sales of the three films worldwide, you get nearly a billion bucks in box office receipts. Was there any doubt we were going to see number four?
The fourth film brings us back to the “present”. Couple Doug and Holly are played by real-life husband and wife Stephen Dunham and Alexandra Lee. They have a young daughter, Alex (Newton) and adopted son Wyatt (Lovekamp). This is your everyday kind of family with no apparent connection to the cursed family. Our suspicions get aroused when they take in the neighbor boy Robbie (Allen) when his mother has to go to the hospital. With the arrival of Robbie, strange, and by now familiar to fans, things arrive also. This time it’s the use of laptops, cell phone cameras, and video game motion cameras that provide the found footage. Comic relief can be found both in Alex’s older boyfriend, Ben (Shively), who “accidentally” taps into Alex’s laptop camera and records her sleeping. It wasn’t him, you see. His computer “just does it”. While he doesn’t capture the hoped-for suggestive material, he captures Robbie doing some strange stuff. Thus the mission to set up the other camera coverage is begun. More comic relief can be found in a father who has apparently checked out. When the footage is shown to him, he appears completely cool that this guy was recording his teenage daughter while she was sleeping. You pretty much know the rest. Strange things are captured on the footage, and the mystery continues.
I have to say that I appear to be alone in finding the film to be worthwhile. Most of the people in my original screening were pretty down on the film. Their arguments simply can’t be denied. There’s little new ground here, and there’s certainly a ton of lull in the action. I agree 100% with those assessments. Here’s where I differ. So what? What kind of new ground were you expecting? This is strictly formula here, and I don’t go to these films expecting to encounter elite philosophy or intricate story. I go there for the jumps and the fun. If that’s why you go, you won’t be quite so disappointed.
It’s not completely true that there is no new ground here. The best part of the film, for me, was the revelation of the tracking dot lights projected by the Microsoft Kinect. When viewed through infrared they flood the room with literally thousands of white dot lights that track a person’s movement to control the game. I never knew about this and have since verified this stuff is real. Not only is it a new visual turn, but it adds some of the creepiest footage of the franchise. It’s pretty eerie watching the “phantom” move, revealed only by the shifting pattern in the lights. I have to give the filmmakers some credit for creating those images.
While acting in these films has never been anything to write home, or the readers at Upcomingdiscs, about, I have to say I was quite impressed with young Brady Allen’s performance as Robbie. The kid sells the creepy stuff quite well indeed. Some of his expressions are priceless. He’s a joy to watch in action.
The film has also been touched by real-life tragedy. Stephen Dunham died suddenly of a heart attack at the young age of 48 in September. The film includes an appropriate dedication to him. It’s always sad when an actor dies before getting to see a project they worked on released. It’s doubly sad here, as his real wife co-starred in the film with him.
Finally, you need to stay through the credits. Don’t worry. They’re quite short on these films. There is an extra scene that might be a return of an earlier character. It is also a tease for a Spanish language spinoff film that came next. Apparently the films have a huge Latino following, and Paramount was looking to capitalize. Whatever the real intention of the scene might be, you won’t want to miss it. You can be sure it’s going to pay off down the road in some way or another. Paranormal Activity has reigned as the Halloween champ for four years now after dethroning the Saw franchise.
The fifth film finally added an additional title, which would be the pattern going forward. It’s called The Marked Ones. A couple of teens are out doing pranks. When they try to set off some fireworks in an alley, a guy comes running out of one of the neighborhood houses where a girl turned up dead. The guys decide to play junior detectives and sneak into the house to look for “clues”. They find a journal that suggests there has been some occult activity surrounding the girl and the murder. Most of it is full of symbols, but it apparently describes the process to open a portal to another time and place. It looks dangerous, and at least one person has been killed, so what do they do? Of course, they perform the ceremony, which involves painting a mirror black.
Shortly after the ceremony one of the group appears to have superpowers. He tosses some street thugs like they were rag dolls. He also appears to be communicating with some kind of entity. Now Grand Ma is an old-time religion woman, and she’s the only one here smart enough to know this is bad. But her interdiction doesn’t go well for them or the house. This film breaks the mold of the first four films. The cameras are Go-Pro kinds of things and no longer static. The story moves around the neighborhood. The film ends with a strange coven of witches that do some pretty big damage and provide a kind of thread and possible explanation of the previous films.
Ghost Dimension is the first and only film in the franchise to be filmed and released in 3D. The 3D version is included in the set. This film deviates even more from the franchise pattern. Not everything here is from a camera POV. There’s also an attempt to evolve the franchise into the standard mainstream horror films. There are several ways that is achieved. You actually get to see the spirits and monsters this time. That also meant some bigger-budget items like CG creatures.
Ryan (Murray) and Emily (Shaw) are having houseguests for Christmas. Digging for Christmas stuff, they find a box left by a previous owner of the house. There’s a strange homemade video camera and some videotapes. It turns out that the camera has been built so you can see spirits or creatures. They watch the tapes, and we learn that Katie and her sister went through some tough training as children. This is almost like Soviet Black Widow stuff here. When things get tough, they call in Father Todd (Krawic), but he’s pretty much next to useless.
That bigger budget means huge black tunnels opening up and a climactic battle that looks far more mainstream than the franchise has ever been taken. There was a gamble here to widen the audience, but I’m not sure that’s what happened.
The last film was called Next Of Kin, and it was plagued by more than the franchise’s characters. It was intended to be a theatrical release, but then came COVID, and a lot of films’ paths were changed.
Margot (Bader) was abandoned by her mother when she was a child. She decides to make a documentary of her search for her real mother, and that’s how we get the cameras involved for this final film in the franchise. She meets an Amish teen who is having Rumspringa, an opportunity for a teen to experience the outside world before they make a lifelong commitment to the community and the Amish life. Samuel (Ayers-Brown) agrees to take the documentary crew to his Amish community, where Margot hopes to find clues about her mother.
Once there, they face alternating welcome and hostility and find themselves in a kind of tug of war between good and evil. Turns out it was no accident they were here. Margot was drawn here, and it wasn’t just to say hello.
The film ended up going straight to streaming because of the pandemic, and there do not appear to be any plans to add to the franchise at the moment. I suspect there will be some kind of a return, but not for a while. This was an innovative franchise that lost its way when it tried to be more like everyone else. Each film comes in a separate disc with the slight extras from each individual release. You also get an 8th disc with the feature-length documentary Unknown Dimensions: The Story Of Paranormal Activity. Horror can be a very individual thing. The first film scared Steven Spielberg, and he wanted in pretty quickly. Now the question falls to you … “What scares you?”
