#Paranormal movie series series#

Presented in the form of an improbably eclectic reportage assembled after the fact by a neophyte journalist (Kristen Connolly) who has witnessed, and now narrates, the day’s events, The Bay is hobbled by a feckless characterization straining to serve double duty as controlling point of view and audience surrogate. A lo-fi eco-thriller directed by Barry Levinson, The Bay chronicles the exceptionally nasty outbreak of a mutant flesh-eating parasite during a July 4th celebration in a Chesapeake Bay resort town. Directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, the same team behind the excellent third film in the cycle, Paranormal Activity 4 opened to relatively disappointing box office (at least in the multimillion-dollar terms of the franchise) two weeks before the arrival of a superior exercise in faux-archival trauma. Slated for release this coming October, Paranormal Activity 5 will determine either that the franchise has run out of ideas-fair warning: I’m about to make some serious claims for their existence-or that the fourth entry was a minor stumble. Paranormal Activity 4 proved the weakest entry in a cycle that has, film to film, worked variations on a marvelously simple, surprisingly expansive format whose structural elegance marks it as the most lively ongoing experiment in the found-footage aesthetic.

Peli-let us here pass over Chernobyl Diaries in silence-or his signature series.

#Paranormal movie series series#

(Let us here pass over 3 in silence.) Nearly a dozen features predicated on found footage were released last year alone, not to mention The River, ABC’s sloppy, ill-fated TV series co-created by Paranormal Activity mastermind Oren Peli. The most gimmicky of contemporary genres doggedly persists despite much jumpage of the shark. Whither found-footage horror in 2012? Everywhere, all over the place, alive and kicking and eating people’s tongues.