When Paranormal Activity was released a year ago, it presented audiences with a unique spin on the haunted-house genre. With its Blair Witch Project approach to the handheld camera style of filming, the movie took its ghost story to the suburbs of California. In most of our minds, that would be the last place for the dead to haunt the living. After the first installment delivered the scares, we weren't expecting a sequel. How could the story continue after the terrifying ending in the first installment? Many of us, myself included, had the fear of the sequel going down the path of the Blair Witch sequel, which tanked after the first became a horror phenomenon. Well, the skeptics have been proven wrong. Paranormal Activity 2 isn't just a worthy continuation of the story. It dishes out the suspense and jolts and takes it to the next level; and does justice to its predecessor.
The story takes place two months before the events of Paranormal Activity, and centers around a family in Carlsbad, Ca., where parents Kristi (Sprague Grayden) and Dan (Brian Boland) arrive home with their newborn son, Hunter. After they return home one night and find that their house has been burglarized, they install six video cameras around the house to catch anything else that might happen. Soon, the family begins to hear loud noises and experiences strange goings-on in their house. Dan and Micah (Micah Sloat, from the first film), think nothing of it. But Kristi and her sister Katie (Katie Featherston, also from the first film), think that something otherworldly is causing the family's trouble. It's not until Kristi's older step-daughter Ali (Molly Ephraim), begins to conduct some research, that the horrors occuring in the house begin to happen more frequently, and starts to assume it has something to do with the family's past.
One of the factors that makes Paranormal Activity 2 that rare, better sequel is that it takes the handheld camera concept and expands upon it. In the first installment, the camera was mostly limited to the bedroom, and captured the activity that only happened there. In this one, the scares are captured through multiple angles of the house: the nursery, the front hallway, the kitchen, the living room, the front of the house, and the pool area. This wider perspective of the house allows the audience to see almost anything that goes on. Any one of these cameras can spot something sinister, and we wait with baited breath to see where it will happen, and what will happen. The surprises never become stale. And of course, there's also a handheld camera, mostly used by Ali. When she wakes up in terror and investigates to see what went bump in the night, she needs some way to document it, doesn't she?
The film doesn't take the typical horror convention of having the ghouls come out only when the sun goes down. In the sequel, the frights threaten the family in both night and day. Some of the movie's best scares happen during the day, and this shows that the family is as vulnerable while awake as they are when they're asleep. The baby and the family dog are also put to clever use. It's common knowledge that in many other horror stories, infants and pets can see what many cannot. What's unsettling is that when they see a ghost or a demon, only they can see it, not the audience or the other characters; and this provides another dimension to the idea that what we can't see can scare us just as well as anything else. Sudden noises and total silence are enough to give you a feeling of anxiety as you wait for the next big shock.
A small problem with Paranormal Activity 2 is that it follows most of the same format as the original; but with the few tweaks given to the sequel, it's almost never an issue. And although it takes a while for the frights to pick-up, the second half will leave you shaking. I won't give anything away, but the ending does leave the door ajar for another installment. The writers silenced our doubts about the sequel by giving it a clever approach; but it's difficult to imagine the story being stretched any further into a third film. There isn't any need to spoil what's already scary.
Final grade: B+
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