Chris’ drone camera is occasionally and effectively employed to highlight how isolated the characters are on the farm, but it’s perhaps the one piece of tech Eubank restrains himself in using. The remote Beiler farm itself is perhaps the scariest aspect of the film, full of labyrinthine passages and farm buildings capable of evoking an eerie atmosphere day or night. The only way Next of Kin really improves on Paranormal Activity’s past is by moving the series’ action out of southern California (spookiest of all locations) to rural Pennsylvania. Next of Kin director William Eubank and writer/franchise vet Christopher Landon seem to look back on the original Paranormal Activity’s ethos of “less is more” with a laugh and a shake of the head. There are even scares that veer straight into derivative territory, calling to mind better-executed moments from more confident films ( fans may start to get deja vu at times during the third act). The film takes very few risks in constructing its scares, with a number of long pans around dark rooms ending with something popping out from the location second down your list of most likely places to be surprised from. Too often, Next of Kin is shot like any old found-footage horror movie, so how scary you find it will rely heavily on your experience with the franchise and with the subgenre in general… that is to say, if you’re familiar with either, it’s not very scary. While Next of Kin’s more professional cinematography is crisp and less static than previous Paranormal Activity movies, it loses the distinct visual language the locked-off surveillance-style angles gave earlier entries in a sea of samey handheld horror. What we said about the last Paranormal Activity movieĮric Goldman gave 2015's Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension a 6/10, writing that it "lacks impact as far as wrapping up such a long-running series and our investment with the people and situations we’ve seen since it began."Ĭonsumer camera tech is a crucial component of making a found-footage horror film feel authentic and immediate. Samuel agrees to introduce Margot to her long-lost family, so she travels deep into the woods to the Beiler farm with hired sound guy Dale (Dan Lippert) and partner Chris (Roland Buck III), a cinematographer whose pricey gear gives the Paranormal Activity franchise a major visual facelift, for better or worse. She makes contact with Samuel Beiler (Henry Ayres-Brown), a relative taking a year off from his Amish community. The first question of found-footage, and the hardest to continue to answer throughout the film: who are these people and why won’t they put their damn cameras down!? Next of Kin goes with the old standby of “documentary filmmakers, one of which is the subject of the documentary.” That’s Margot (Emily Bader), a young woman looking for her birth family. That’s putting the cart before the horse in a big way, though: Next of Kin brings nothing new to either the Paranormal Activity franchise or found-footage horror, making it a disappointment on multiple fronts. Rather than furthering the established continuity, Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin reboots the found-footage stalwart for Paramount+, setting up new villains and demons should audiences connect with this film in the same way they did with the original. Cheap to make, Paramount and later Blumhouse quickly started churning out sequels that introduced new camera gimmicks and a surprisingly deep mythology, but also increasingly strained credulity around why any of these people are still filming instead of running for the hills. There’s no better avatar for that transition than the Paranormal Activity franchise, which like Blair Witch, has its roots in a viral internet campaign that catapulted the austere first film to massive box office success. Unfortunately, years and years of focus on the latter aspect of the subgenre has taken focus away from the former. When it’s done right, found-footage horror can be terribly imaginative and immersive while remaining budget friendly. As someone whose roots in horror are very tied up in the release of 1999’s The Blair Witch Project, I’ve been an ardent champion of found footage for a long time.
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