Pair of Twos

We have had Paranormal Activity 2 (2010) on our queue for awhile, so it's nice they decided to send it the day before Halloween.

In this outing, Daniel Boland, Sprague Grey, and their daughter Molly Ephraim start by videoing the arrival of their new baby. We get quite a bit of random video of their life and pool parties - where we find that Grey is sister to Katie Featherstone from PA1. We also meet the nanny, Vivis Cortez, who speaks only Spanish while they all speak English to her. Like Katie and Micah from PA1, a family of rich assholes.

One video clip is for police and insurance purposes - their house has been trashed while they were out (except the baby's room). So they get a full set of security cameras, covering the whole house. Now we get a long series of daily life and security footage from the nights - with nothing happening. I came up with a term for this: "Negative scares". Like negative space, these can build tension, letting the real scares really stand out. But there are a LOT of them before much happens. When Leigh Whannel used this technique in Invisible Man, it was effective because he didn't overuse it - and because we suspected an evil presence. So far, we've just seen a normal family with a single break-in.

When things start to get a little dicey (doors closing mysteriously, for ex), nanny Cortez starts burning sage all around the house. Boland isn't having this kind of pagan superstition and fires her. Bad move. Because when things really go tits up, there's no one to help.

This is sort of a prequel to PA1, as well as a side-quel - stuff taking place at the same time but from the point of view of other characters. We find out where the demon came from and why it was going after Katie and Micah in the first movie. Of course, we found that out in the first movie and it was different - at least according to Ms. Spenser. I had already forgotten the main plot points. 

Anyway, before we saw this, we watched Paranormal Activity 3, but I didn't blog it because it was streaming (this blog is about Netflix DVDs and cocktails, and not so much about cocktails). I guess that was a prequel to both 1 and 2. I think I liked it best because it isn't about all rich assholes.