Paranormal Activity 2
Just as the first “Paranormal Activity” snuck up on everyone last October, “Paranormal Activity 2” snuck up on me, primarily for how effective a thriller it is. The story is fundamentally the same, and the tactics of director Tod Williams (the underrated “The Door on the Floor”) will be familiar to anyone who watched the first film, yet somehow, this film still grabbed me… probably because, deep down, I still worry about things “that go bump in the night.”
The film takes place a month or so before the events in the first “Paranormal Activity” as we follow the lives of Kristi (Sprague Grayden), her husband Daniel (Brian Boland), and his daughter from an earlier marriage Ali (Molly Ephraim) after the birth of Kristi and Daniel’s son Hunter. We eventually find out that Kristi is the sister of Katie (Katie Featherstone), the young woman haunted by spirits in the first movie, and we see visits by Katie and her boyfriend Micah (Micah Sloat). But when Katie first comes to visit, that’s when things get strange at Kristi’s house, and the family has security cameras installed.
There are a couple of things that allow “Paranormal Activity 2” to stand as more than just a quick-buck retread of the original. One is the way the writers (Michael R. Perry, Christopher B. Landon, Tom Pabst) emphasize the family dynamic more in how everyone reacts. Kristi, Daniel, and Ali all have different reactions to the strange happenings they experience or witness, all more or less keeping with their respective roles in the family. Daniel is the doubter, but will humor the women in his life; Ali reacts like any teenage girl would react to such things; while Kristi’s reactions are more in keeping with the experiences she and Katie had when they were kids. Another point of interest is the way the writers play on the ideas of how toddlers and dogs have a sort of extra-sensory perception to otherworldly events, which helps generate much of the tension in this film.
“Paranormal Activity 2” ends the same way its predecessor did: with a burst of scares and an ending card that made me groan. There was one ending to the original “Paranormal Activity” that appeared online, which left a far greater chill up my spine. The words, “Whereabouts currently unknown,” however, send a different kind of chill.
