Kristi, the sister of Paranormal Activity’s Katie, and husband Dan have had their newborn son Hunter safe at home with them for a whole year until Dan fires their Magic Latina housekeeper Martine. In that sense, unlike its predecessor, Paranormal Activity 2 doesn’t even look like a video report on unexplained events anymore: It’s footage of a fake haunting transformed into a film-within-a-film.Īs an imposing intertitle warns us by the film’s second reel, the events of Paranormal Activity 2 coincide with the events of Paranormal Activity, as the protagonists of the latter film are relatives of the ones in the former. That scene is cut in such a way that we can only see through that camera after the fact, confirming that we only get to see what the implied documentary filmmakers, as omniscient storytellers, want us to see in order to make their narrative spookier. For instance, loud late night banging coming from outside a front door isn’t explicitly shown, though there’s a security camera present to document the event. a narrative that only looks like raw documentary footage), as with the massive Kubrickian intertitles that tell us the date at the start of every night of recorded footage.Īnyone watching Paranormal Activity 2 closely enough will see that the transitions between different cameras in the film isn’t motivated by any internal logic but rather a narrative one. We’re frequently reminded that we’re watching edited footage (i.e. If nothing else, Paranormal Activity 2 directly grapples with the potential conceptual uses for the franchise’s defining narrative strategy of combining security camera footage and video shot on handheld digital cameras by the film’s protagonists in ways that Paranormal Activity didn’t even attempt. It is, after all, an overtly meta-textual narrative about the representation of violence on film. As ridiculous as the rumor may have seemed at the time, all the talk about how Brian De Palma was being sought out to direct Paranormal Activity 2 makes sense now.
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