Plot Description: ‘The film follows a young woman trying to discover what happened with her mother, who disappeared years ago, until she discovers a terrifying truth about her mother’s past.”
The Blair Witch started the found footage movement 22 years ago. She scared the love of camping out of audiences everywhere. Then, years later Paranormal Activity’s demon came back to scare the love of home ownership out of people. And now we have Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin, here to scare the love of 23andme.com out of you.
The newest addition to the Paranormal Activity family has hit the streaming service Paramount Plus right in time for Halloween. The franchise, which now spans 5 films, is branching out to that Conjuring universe style of storytelling. This film is no longer part of the same story, the demon interlinked between time and film in the previous 4 is nowhere to be found. Sadly. I wouldn’t categorize this as a Paranormal Activity film in any way. It’s a stand alone horror film. So let’s start there.
Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin centers around Margot, a girl who was abandoned by her mother as a baby. She sought out her real family on the DNA based site ‘23 And Me’ which led her to find a relative lurking close by. Her and her friend, Chris, decide this is the perfect subject matter to film a documentary around, Margot finally being reunited with the family she never knew. They’re led to an Amish farm where Margot’s mother once lived…or does she still live there? Sadly this does not take the Lifetime film vibes and Margot finds that knowing your real family can be hell.
There were a few good filming tactics that got a little rise out of my adrenaline. Snowfall blurring the background in great distracting patterns, the ambiance of a creepy farm, a bed sinking when no one was on it. The director, William Eubank (who directed Underwater), had a handful of great ideas and the rest were “been there, screamed that”. I’d seen it. I knew what was coming and yeah, it was still scary at times, but also it didn’t help that a found footage film also had a score at some points. I don’t know. Sort of took you out of what made Paranormal Activity well…Paranormal Activity.
Overall the plot line itself was spooky, but obvious. I understood why Margot and her friends stayed when things went south, the need to find your mother of course would have made anyone rationalize staying on a horrific farm through numerous scary nights. I connected the dots and then looked at the picture they created. It didn’t really look right. Seemed like a crossword that was shoved into a coloring book. It had no reason to even be in there to begin with.
I still turned the lights on about an hour into the film. They got me. They always do. But at one point no one was holding the camera and it turned into an actual film. I’m serious. It threw the whole point out the barn door and then suddenly went back to being handheld. I would have been more scared, staying up all night, if they just would have followed the Paranormal Activity formula. Stick to the realistic, the not perfect, the grainy, the cheese. I missed it. I wanted the sped up time lapse of someone sleeping and a door opening in the background. Sometimes simple is better.
This film is not part of a world famous franchise. It is a stand alone horror film that tried to fit its ghostly square into a high brow horror star hole. I was missing everything that a found footage film offers. I didn’t want a shiny, well done piece of cinema. I wanted to see something that felt like it could come through the screen and get me too. Instead I saw a film where at the end I was rooting for the bad guys to win and I even fell asleep that night without worrying that my feet were out from under the blanket.
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Writer. Geek. Final Girl.
