PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 3

2006. The Ray family rediscover old home videos featuring Katie and Kristi as children. What follows is the material contained in those videotapes. 1988. Julie and her partner Dennis are filming an amateur hard video when an earthquake shakes them up and sends them to the room of young Katie and Kristi. The next day, while Dennis reviews the footage, he notices a strange presence that was with them in the room, and from that moment on, he decides to set up some cameras around the house to document the presence of something unusual, also driven by strange noises that have been increasingly persistent in the various rooms. Meanwhile, Kristi, the younger child, seems to have befriended Toby, who at first glance would seem like the classic imaginary childhood friend. A hypothesis soon questioned by Dennis' recordings! In 2007, the then-unknown video game programmer Oren Peli probably could never have imagined that his semi-amateur horror film 'Paranormal Activity' would one day become a cult film capable of giving life to a million-dollar saga... and yet that's what happened. What rumors say cost around fifteen thousand dollars was able to gross over one hundred million dollars in the United States alone and gave rise to two official sequels plus one apocryphal made in Japan. The formula devised by Paramount, which bought the film rights, is one of those that aim to strike while the iron is hot, and horror fans left orphaned by 'Saw' now have a new franchise to follow every year during the pre-Halloween period, at least as long as the box office makes it feasible. Right on time comes the third episode of the successful mockumentary saga that qualitatively raises the stakes after a mediocre second installment. In fact, one could venture to say that with 'Paranormal Activity 3' we are on the same level of effectiveness as the first chapter, if not even a step higher. The already mockumentary filmmakers Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, authors of the acclaimed 'Catfish,' adapt the screenplay by Christopher B. Landon ('Disturbia'; 'Paranormal Activity 2') starting from the beginning of the previous film. We therefore find the familiar faces of Katie Featherston and Sprague Gayden, aka the sisters Katie and Kristi, at the moment immediately following the vandal's intrusion into Kristi's house in 'Paranormal Activity 2,' from which follows the discovery of old VHS tapes dating back to 1988 and from which the nature of prequel of the prequel that this 'Paranormal Activity 3' actually is takes off. Once the different points of view of the two sisters on the matter have been told, the only thing missing was a leap back in time to know the origin of all evil. Catapulted into the 1980s, we realize that things don't change much and that the mania for home recordings is more than genetic. In 'Paranormal Activity 3,' however, we start right away by breaking the intimacy of the protagonists to the extreme, and the mechanical eye pointed at the bedroom is meant to film what had always been denied to us in the previous chapters: sex. Mom Julie and young partner Dennis, after a few tokes, are indeed intent on filming their exploits under the sheets, laying the primary foundations to outline their image as sinful victims from a horror film. The eye of the video camera/viewer is therefore placed as a voyeur in the most morbid sense of the term, and together with it, the malevolent presence is also a witness to the act. A presence that in this third chapter begins to take on specific connotations, almost provided with an identity, a mythology that effectively transforms into the childhood boogeyman. The demon of 'Paranormal Activity' marries wonderfully with the world of childhood, it is the imaginary friend and at the same time the bogeyman, but also the cruel spirit from urban legend that appears if you recite its name in the dark in front of the mirror. It is so effectively natural to see the girls dealing with the malevolent presence that one almost wonders that this was not the idea behind the prototype film, since it provides continuous opportunity to create chilling effect scenes guaranteed. And indeed, 'Paranormal Activity 3' plays precisely on the fear effect more than the previous chapters. Abandoning the repetitiveness of the first film and the flatness of the second, here the decision is made to multiply the moments of tension and start right away in fourth gear. The point of view is quadruple: bedroom, children's room, effective mobile panoramic view of the living room-kitchen, and handheld camera for Dennis' first-person documentations. Four gazes always ready to catch a disturbing detail, sometimes only hidden at the edges of the frame, capable of bringing to life at least two anthology moments: the brilliant sequence with the babysitter and the long final all in subjective, which is a triumph of situations to jump on the couch. A certain directorial care for effect framing can also be noted, which makes this third episode more cinematic than the previous ones. The single mobile framing on the fan gives occasion to many directorial expedients that play on the presence/absence of elements in the scene, but Joost and Schulman like to organize the scene in such a way as to also have mirror reflections and original perspectives always ready to catch disturbing revealing details. 'Paranormal Activity 3' works wonderfully, gives rise to some of the most genuinely disturbing moments seen recently on the big screen, and saves in the end a saga that with the second chapter was already considered dead. Nothing original, to be clear, after all we are dealing with a sort of mockumentary version of 'Poltergeist,' but the game is worth the candle.