Paranormal Activity 2 (2010)
Pavlovian Horror Redux

Zombos Says: Good (but stretches camera POV thin)

Watching Paranormal Activity 2 I felt like one of Ivan Pavlov’s dogs, but instead of salivating at the sound of a bell, I would watch the screen more intently each time a low rumbling noise alerted me to the onset of a supernatural event. I can’t readily recall any other horror movie franchise that purposefully conditions you to wait for something to happen by making you watch near endless home video recordings of the same scenes, again and again, in anticipation of something happening. Either this is an ingenious use of minimalist cinema verite and camera POV, or we’re being suckered big time. Maybe it’s a little of both.

A prequel and sequel rolled into one, the reason for the haunting is also hinted at, removing the unsettling feeling of this-could-happen-to-anyone you get in Paranormal Activity, but leaving room for another franchise entrant. Since the explanation involves family members back in the 1920s, you’d have to show it through box camera and scrapbook photographs, and hand-cranked newsreel footage instead of modern handycams and convenient home security cameras, like the ones watching Hunter’s bedroom, the swimming pool vacuum cleaner, the living room, and the front door during the night. Their use is a creative and necessary extension to the first movie’s handycam-only point of view, but this camera POV storytelling is wearing its compensating techniques thin through overuse, to a point of creating a self-conscious persistance that erodes believability. How many people, young or old, have a handycam glued to their hand to record everything, including lengthy poolside chit-chat and room-roaming discussions?

Recordings from the security cameras are shown again and again, each night, until the family takes notice (and us) of the escalating activity around Hunter, the German Shepard, and Kristi Rey (Sprague Grayden), Katie‘s sister. Katie was haunted and possessed by the demon in the first movie. The events in this one take place two months before that happens and explain why.

I suppose demons have all eternity to mess with mortals, so that’s why not much happens for a while:  the pool’s vacuum cleaner strangely winds up outside the pool each morning; the German Shepard barks and growl’s at empty air; Hunter keeps staring at empty air; kitchen pots rattle and drop off their hooks with a bang in the dead of night; the family’s nanny, Martine (Vivis Cortez), keeps cleansing the house of evil spirits. Like Maleva, the old gypsy woman in The Wolf Man, Martine knows something bad is happening. They didn’t listen to Maleva until it was too late, either.

After her continual religious-based cleaning smokes up the house and irks Dan Rey (Brian Boland), he sends her away. The haunting begins in earnest after she leaves, and Dan’s daughter Ali (Molly Ephraim) turns to Google to find out what’s going on. In the older horror movies characters turned to moldy books, dusty parchments, curled scrolls, and bloody scrawls, and spent much of their time seeking them out (except for bloody scrawls of course: you just stumble across those); now every teen in a horror movie goes to the Internet to learn everything about the supernatural and demonic: same motif, different notes.

And yet it still works its magic. I jumped at the kitchen jump-shock, and waited uneasily for those payout moments that built from little innocuous events to the terminal ferocity in the basement.

In a horror movie, the basement is always the place you don’t want to be.