Remember the salad days, when commercials tried to tell us that Paranormal Activity was the scariest movie ever made? And remember when you finally saw the film, and it had one jump-scare, and that was it? Just me? Well, we can talk about that later.
It was a bit of a no-brainer that Paranormal Activity would spawn a franchise ‐ after famously being made on the cheap, and gathering serious word-0f-mouth buzz by way of the Internet (a sort of modern day The Blair Witch Project approach to viral techniques of marketing, paired with a sense of the secretive), Paramount would have been stupid to let the “found footage” smash hit go without pushing out a few more sequels. There was Paranormal Activity 2, which served as the chocolate wafers to the cookie cream that is the Oreo that is the Paranormal Activity franchise. That’s a yummy way of saying that the events of the first film fit into the middle of the second film, making it both a prequel and sequel. Clever! Now we get a real prequel, one that goes way back to the childhood of Katie and Kristi, the sisters at the center of the mystery.
Check out the second trailer for Paranormal Activity 3 after the break, which expands on the first glimpses we got of the film from its earlier teaser, glimpses that show us that young Katie and Kristi were, well, pretty damn hard to handle.
As someone who would not identify herself as a Paranormal Activity fan by any stretch, this trailer actually quite intrigues me. Even if all of the scares we see here are the only scares in the actual film, I think I’d be okay with that. The staring-in-a-doorway bit has been done before, but that jumping-off-a-ledge bit? That’s the first time a PA film has given me a real chill, even a little one.
Also, the film is directed by Catfish helmers Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost, and they definitely know how to make the ahem, questionably fake feel real.
Paranormal Activity 3 opens on October 21. [Apple]