Editorials
The 10 Scariest Scenes in the ‘Paranormal Activity’ Franchise!
This Friday brings the resurgence of the Paranormal Activity franchise with a new entry, Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin, arriving exclusively on Paramount+ on October 29, 2021. Next of Kin appears to give the series a fresh start after six films and a non-canon sidequel, all connected to the demon Toby and his coven of followers in some way.
The popular found footage series began with 2007’s Paranormal Activity, which introduced subtle supernatural chills that slowly gave way to a full-blown, jump-scare heavy demonic assault. Each franchise entry built upon the mythology while adhering to a formula that included a potent blend of understated scares and explosive moments of terror.
Ahead of Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin, let’s look back at ten of the franchise’s scariest scenes and moments.
Ouija on Fire – Paranormal Activity
Micah (Micah Sloat) ignores pleas and brings home an Ouija board anyway once paranormal activity around the home escalates. Katie (Katie Featherston) is furious, and the pair leave the house in an argument. While gone, the camera captures the planchette moving on its own. Then the board spontaneously bursts into flames. It’s the most overt sign of a supernatural presence at this point of the movie, making for a chilling escalation of sinister intention; there is nothing friendly about whatever is haunting Katie and Micah.
Freaky Footprints – Paranormal Activity
Another subtler but disconcerting moment comes when Micah sprinkles baby powder all over the floor upstairs, leading to their bedroom. They awake in the middle of the night by sounds and are horrified to find footprints in the powder. The footprints lead to the attic, where Katie finds a childhood picture long thought lost in a fire. The picture’s existence and implications take the focus in this scene, but the very inhuman footprints in the baby powder prove far more unsettling. It’s visual confirmation that this haunting is far more complex and dangerous.
Kinect Kid – Paranormal Activity 4
The Xbox Kinect becomes a surprising tool for detecting paranormal activity in the franchise’s fourth entry, but it dates the film in a clunky way, and its intended scare moments don’t always land. Creepy neighbor kid Robbie (Brady Allen) can often be seen interacting with shapes picked up on the Kinect in reviewed footage, but it’s never as effective as intended. Until that is, a fully-realized figure of a child walks behind Wyatt (Aiden Lovekamp) in the middle of the night. It’s eerie for how sharp and focused the image is and the questions it raises. Just who or what is after Wyatt? And why?
Kristi Dragged to Basement – Paranormal Activity 2
Like Katie in the first film, her sister Kristi (Sprague Grayden) gets dragged away by the demon. Only this time, there’s no one home to pull her back to safety. Despite multiple attempts to break free, Kristi gets dragged all the way downstairs and into the creepy basement. When she’s freed, it’s clear that she’s firmly in the demon’s grip. This scene gives a clearer idea of how Katie got possessed in the first film. It’s made even more unsettling with the reveal of scratch marks on the basement door, of Kristi’s attempts to flee, as well as the word “mine” in Latin.
Witch Siege – Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones
The Marked Ones offers the most action-heavy and intense finale of the franchise, emphasizing intense. Hector (Jorge Diaz) and Marisol (Gabrielle Walsh) enlist friends to help them retrieve their possessed pal Jesse (Andrew Jacobs) from his kidnappers, only to be met with a violent coven of witches that not even guns can stop. It’s a frantic and deadly siege that culminates in a surprising time loop tie-in to the first film.
Trapped in the Basement – Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones
Jesse gets lured to the basement through the trapdoor in his neighbor’s apartment one night by his dog’s cries. The trapdoor slams shut while he’s down there, leaving him alone in the dark with the ghostly appearances of young Katie and Kristi, followed by a malevolent entity that wants to claim him. It’s a shocking jolt that firmly connects this spinoff into the main canon, but seeing a black-eyed, ghoulish-looking Katie and Kristi is alarming in and of itself.
Chandelier – Paranormal Activity 4
Alex (Kathryn Newton) arrives home after school and expects an empty house, but a ball bounces down the stairs to greet her. When finding no one, she shrugs it off and plops down on her bed. Then loud bangs draw her out into the hallway, where she finds a trail of toys leading to her brother’s bedroom. As Alex peers into his closet, the toy train starts up and startles her. That eerie slow build to a jump scare would be enough, but it’s only the precursor to the more significant scare. As Alex runs downstairs to chase Robbie, she very nearly gets crushed by the entryway chandelier that crashes from above.
Bloody Mary – Paranormal Activity 3
When young Katie convinces her babysitter to play Bloody Mary, savvy horror fans automatically tense up; we know this will end badly for the characters. The lights go out, save for the single red dot of the camera in record mode as the pair chant “Bloody Mary.” But they quickly get turned back on when Katie’s babysitter winces from pain and lifts his shirt to find a deep scratch on his skin. It’s a minor but effective scare that could’ve ended there, but then the demon decides to terrorize them with the lights on, sending Katie into hysterics. No one could blame her, either.
Kitchen Tantrum – Paranormal Activity 2
Until this point, all paranormal activity happened in darkness at night. The daylight provided a reprieve from Toby’s shenanigans. That’s what made this sudden jump scare even more frightening. Kristi was sitting alone in her kitchen, deep in her thoughts, when the kitchen cabinets all flew open at once with a loud bang. It catches both Kristi and the viewer off guard in a breathless way.
Oscillating Fan – Paranormal Activity 3
The ’80s setting for the storyline of this prequel meant getting creative with the found footage format. Enter the camera rigged to an oscillating fan to pan and scan the downstairs living space. That comes in handy for the film and the franchise’s most innovative and effective scare. During a quiet night, young Katie and Kristi are tucked away upstairs in bed while their babysitter sits at the kitchen table for some homework. The camera pans back and forth from the empty living room to the kitchen. Eventually, a child-sized bedsheet ghost appears at the far end, staring at the babysitter’s back and making its way closer with every turn of the camera. As it reaches her back, the sheet deflates to the ground, the figure inside it vanishing into thin air. It’s only then that the babysitter realizes she wasn’t alone and how close she came to a terrifying encounter. But the audience knows, and we’re left with serious goosebumps.
In this day and age, the word “troll” is often used to describe various online nuisances. Yet as abundant and irksome as the modern troll can be, they aren’t usually as fearsome as their mythological counterparts. I’m not talking about the small and gentler versions that have become more common to see in media. No, there are much bigger and scarier trolls out there—and André Øvredal’s movie Troll Hunter is one of the best places to find them.
It doesn’t take long for Troll Hunter (or Trolljegeren) to dump the Blair Witch Project-esque setup and aim for something a lot fresher. The trajectory of the story is augmented by Otto Jespersen’s character Hans, the titular Troll Hunter. The second he comes barreling out of the deep, dark woods and shouts “troll” at the camera, this movie takes a turn into what feels like uncharted territory. Not only subject-wise, but also conceptually.
For fantastical and made-up subject matter in cinema, found footage is a fast way to add a guise of believability. After all, what we accept to be the most crucial aspect of documentaries—the truth—rubs off on pseudo-documentaries, despite our understanding of the pretense involved. That is what Øvredal delivered with Troll Hunter: a movie so convincing that some viewers wondered if trolls really do exist. So, had this been straightforwardly made, it likely wouldn’t have been as effective. Conventional narratives would be more inclined to treat something like trolls as flat out unreal, and never try to convince the audience to think otherwise.
Hans petrifies the three-headed Tusseladd troll.
The viewers, like the characters trailing Hans, are quickly thrown into the deeper end of that extraordinary story. They have to process all this new information while staying on the go. So, although there is no significant amount of meandering, narratively or physically, there is still a good amount of atmosphere, not to mention tension building. It’s never anything frightful, but then again, Troll Hunter isn’t your standard offering of horror; it’s more on the low end of the dark fantasy spectrum. We aren’t ever spirited away to a faraway world—we stay in rather familiar surroundings, as well as dip into those less so. The outcome is a movie where you’re constantly more in awe than in terror.
As fantasy fiction might do, Troll Hunter prefers not to deal with incredulity. There is no time to waste on doubt, as interviewer Thomas (Glenn Erland Tosterud), soundperson Johanna (Johanna Mørck), and cameraman Kalle (Tomas Alf Larsen) all follow Hans around, recording whatever this character is willing to reveal about his bizarre job. Of course, the Troll Hunter himself is not an open book; in that respect, the diegetic documentary fails to fully capture and unpack the more interesting of its two subjects. Yes, all those giant, monstrous trolls are indeed incredible, but understandably, your mind wanders to their pursuer. What kind of person signs up for this gig and then chooses to stick with it for so long?
Reviews have called out Troll Hunter for its lack of character development. In regard to Thomas and his fellow documentarians, that criticism is valid, but bear in mind, they aren’t the focus of the story, either. Meanwhile, Hans is a well-crafted character. At least better than first realized. Before he was introduced, Hans had already grown tired of the troll grind. Fed up with that low compensation for his services, resentful of the bureaucracy, and wanting to expose his employer on a large scale, Hans’ discontent is glaring.
Then there are those finer details about the Troll Hunter, such as that indifference to both the natural splendor of his everyday surroundings and the affections of an obviously smitten colleague, that also suggest some level of despondency. So it is fair to say this movie doesn’t feature any sizable growth for its characters; however, the namesake isn’t underwritten. No doubt, putting a real-life character like Otto Jespersen in that role is partly why Hans is so fascinating—maybe even relatable.
Otto Jespersen as Hans the Troll Hunter.
There is always a small risk whenever using the term “mockumentary” to describe a found-footage movie, as the word could imply humor where there is none. In the case of Troll Hunter, the term’s usage is appropriate. Some folks have claimed the English-dubbed version has the more comedic tone, however, the Norwegian cut isn’t exactly humorless. Apart from the trolls’ absurd appearances, this is a movie where the characters nearly choke on the monsters’ farts, and Christians are like walking targets. Hans’ complete apathy towards everything is another cause of laughter. Overall, the comedy is intentionally dry and inconsistent. Unfunny, though? Absolutely not.
In a movie where endemic creatures are maltreated, as well as disavowed from living freely and peacefully, it’s hard not to notice the ecological message buried beneath the story. In addition to that is the unmistakable political satire. There is this whole business about intrusive and unsightly power lines—like trolls, they’re big blemishes on the land—that leads to what is perhaps the movie’s funniest moment. The scene in question is that one where certain electric lines, the ones secretly being used to keep the trolls at bay, go in a loop and don’t actually send power to any residents. Yet the monitors of said lines don’t find this at all weird. So it stands to reason that Øvredal was having a go at those who accept the government’s doings without question.
Looking past the fact that trolls aren’t actually real, this movie is an enlightening source of information. And not just for international audiences; Norwegians, too, get schooled about their homeland’s own mythology. It’s also evident from everything on screen that Øvredal and his crew were enthusiastic about the topic. The creature designs are the most indicative of that zeal; those imaginative yet myth-accurate manifestations are equally amusing and grotesque. One second you’re laughing at their phallic noses, the next you’re white-knuckling during a hairy sequence. Most surprisingly is how well the trolls’ visual effects hold up after fifteen years. It’s not all spotless, but on the whole, they remain impressive.
Vouching for a mockumentary about trolls isn’t easy, but those who do come around and give it a shot will more than likely be grateful for the recommendation. For Troll Hunter is a real find in that vast and varied genre we call “found footage“.
A bridge troll reaches up for food and finds Hans decked out in armor.
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