A Film Canon

By the third installment, the Paranormal Activity films are starting to feel like a franchise as much as a cycle - and, like all good filmic franchises, the pleasure lies in repetition with a difference. To that end, Paranormal Activity 3 repeats the same basic narrative set-up as the first two films: a homeowner filming himself and his family sleeping, in order to isolate or identify an elusive demonic-domestic presence. The difference is that this film is set in the 80s, rather than the 00s, functioning as a prequel to the events of the previous two films. As a result, all the night sequences are shot on VHS, rather than digital, with the result that 00s digital uncanniness, and its preoccupation with the grain and glitch of the image, is replaced with 80s VHS uncanniness, and its preoccupation with the astonishing portability and mobility of the recording device itself. On the one hand, this deflects glitch into a sonic register - it's easily the most nuanced soundscape in the series, with the house rumbling, shuddering and breathing fairly consistently all the way through, as if internalizing the aftershocks of the earthquake that sets the narrative in motion. At the same time, the soundscape takes on the burden of disembodiment, meaning that the demonic presence tends to be embodied more than ever before in the visual plane. Almost from the very beginning, the demon manifests itself through one of the couple's children - and most of the night sequences involve her movement around the house, drawing heavily on the corpus of suburban horror, especially Poltergeist and Halloween. As a result, it's the most classically cinematic of the three films - unlike the first two, it's best seen in a cavernous, haunted multiplex, rather than illegally streamed - and this feeds back into the second consequence of the movement from digital to VHS: the increased attention to the camera as a mobile protagonist. Not only is this the first Paranormal Activity film in which we see the eye of the camera, but it quickly moves from static to mobile claustrophobia, as the main nocturnal camera is finally positioned on a slowly and spectacularly panning fan base. Moreover, the day footage, which, in the previous two films, played a fairly straightforward documentary role, is now understood more as a series of elaborate tracking shots. As a midpoint between the opening scene of Halloween and The Blair Witch Project - the film actually begins, in the 00s, with the original Paranormal household discovering the VHS cassettes in their basement - it tantalisingly opens up the Paranormal prospect as a haunted archive of cinema, a narrative that progresses technologically (single, multiple, mobile camera; shallow, deep focus) but regresses historically (00s, 80s).