Lauren Flum Reviews “Paranormal Activity 4”
Paranormal Activity 4 hit theaters on October 19th, and left me, along with everyone else in the theater, flying out of our seats in fear.
I went to see the movie with a few friends on opening night, and the Princess Theater in Oxford was almost as crowded as the premiere day for The Hunger Games. As we filed into our seats, the movie previews began, and the fear inside me began to build up. I heard from a few people that the movie was pretty scary, so I had quite high expectations.
The movie started very suddenly. So suddenly, in fact, I actually thought it was just another preview until I began to recognize the characters. The film begins by recapping what happened at the end of Paranormal Activity 2, when Katie kills her family and walks off with the first born male, Hunter. It then skips to 5 years later, 2011, and shows a completely different family.
Alice and her family, the main characters in the movie, live a pretty normal life in the suburbs until some woman and her very odd son move in across the street. The woman apparently has to go to the hospital, so her son, Robbie, comes to stay with them. He acts very odd even before he goes to stay with them; sneaking over to their playhouse at night and always walking around alone.
Odd things keep happening in the house, such as odd noises and objects moving around. Alice and her friend Ben start to get suspicious of strange activity. They set up webcams throughout the house and monitor them. Alice begins to think that the cause of everything is Robbie.
It turns out that Robbie is the cause of all of the weird things going on in the house, and he is trying to convince Wyatt, Alice’s brother, to join in with him. Wyatt introduces Robbie to Toby, and at this point I’m thinking Ohhh man. Toby is back. Toby was from Paranormal Activity 3 and was absolutely horrifying.
Weird things continue to happen even after Wyatt leaves the house, and Alice begins to investigate what can be the cause of everything. I was glued to my chair with not only fear, also pure confusion. I really had to pay attention to figure out what exactly was happening and why.
The end of the movie caused me to have multiple heart attacks, and I am still slightly confused by it. I was left wanting yet another Paranormal Activity movie, which I never thought I would say.
Overall, the movie caused me to jump out of my seat a good 500 times (probably a good thing I didn’t end up getting popcorn), however it was also really funny, which is different from the past movies they have done. It was pretty much exactly like the last three movies, in a sense that odd things are happening and so the family decides to film it, and it goes along with “Night 1” “Night 5” and so on.
I would definitely recommend getting caught up by watching the first three movies if you haven’t already, but odds are I will probably go see it again before it leaves the theaters. It was definitely the best out of all four Paranormal Activity movies.
