So, in spite of proclamations about being shy around cameras, she and old buddy Chris decide to make a feature length documentary about her driving up to the boonies and reconnecting with her mysterious past. And now that a cousin named Samuel (Henry Ayres-Brown) has found her on an ancestry website, she’s discovered she has a large Amish living family several states over. Despite seeming happy and well-adjusted, Margot is allegedly haunted by the fact she grew up adopted after her mother abandoned her as a baby on a hospital’s steps 23 years ago. The self-described documentarians of Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin are Margot and Chris (Emily Bader and Roland Buck III). And yet, it doesn’t feel any smarter or scarier than the nonsense we were watching by the time the franchise got to the “Ghost Dimension.” Night Shyamalan’s The Visit and perhaps Ari Aster’s Hereditary, and decided to do that with a GoPro. Instead this feels like a rather generic “found footage” horror movie made by folks who clearly enjoyed M.

But more than just the smoothness of the camera work, which is now shot by aspiring documentarians on GoPros, drones that appear and disappear at the film’s convenience, and even what looks like a phantom Steadicam, this movie feels only tangentially related to the mythology about demons and cursed family members from the original saga. For starters, amateur filmmaking equipment has really made leaps and bounds in the last decade, particularly since the original and still spooky haunted house film, which was shot way back in 2007. That might explain why the franchise’s soft reboot in this weekend’s Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin seemed like a no-brainer for Paramount Pictures as it was developing original content for the new streaming service Paramount+.īe that as it may, Next of Kin-or Paranormal Activity 7 for those who are still keeping count-is really a different animal from the previous six movies in the saga. Which by the measurement of Hollywood franchises is probably four or five years too many. It’s been six long years since we last saw the shaky, handheld footage of a Paranormal Activitymovie.

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