Movies: "Paranormal Activity 3" Taut With Tension

Let it be noted that the trailers you might have seen for "Paranormal Activity 3" have not much to do with the film. The scenes shown were cut out, so the movie you are watching in the theater is not at all ruined by the trailers you see.

It would also be no exaggeration to say that we spend the 89 minutes of the film—taut with tension—waiting to see a face.

Not just any face, mind you. A face of nightmarish terror and shivery awe, one that will shoot a scary volt of revelation right through us.

We're never entirely sure if that face is going to arrive, but the anticipation is everything. The movie sets us up for it early on, with an amazing shock as a closet door is opened.

Of course, we're also waiting because, with two other "Paranormal Activity" films behind it, "Paranormal Activity 3" implicitly understands that we've been through enough tricks in these movies—the doors that open and slam shut, thuds and booms and scratchy skitters on the soundtrack, kitchen utensils that fall with a crash, spectral shapes that you can almost make out—to now want to see something more.

"Paranormal Activity 3" features variations on every one of the tricks I just mentioned, and a few additional ones (they all work), but more than the first two films, it tweaks our desire to put a face on evil.

The movie is a pre-prequel, since the second film was already a prequel, set in September 1988, though it doesn't exactly look like an ‘80s period piece. While the film takes place in 1988, the home video tapes are presented in wide screen and HD quality. However, this is a necessary and deliberate change on the part of the crew, and not an error. Producing a movie that is authentic to the equipment used in the time frame would make a horrible quality film to be seen in theaters, and the movie would not even be usable in most theaters these days.

This time, the family consists of Dennis (Christopher Nicholas Smith), a wedding videographer who has banks of monitors and editing equipment in his home studio; his big-haired sexy wife, Julie (Lauren Bittner); and her two preteen daughters from a previous marriage.

They are Katie (Chloe Csengery), who will grow up to be the Katie Featherstone character in the first film, and angel-faced Kristi (Jessica Tyler Brown), from "Paranormal Activity 2," here an enigmatic child who can communicate with the spirit world. It's one of this haunted-house movie's best jokes that the ghost on hand is Kristi's invisible friend, ‘'Toby,'' whom she talks to with a mixture of intimacy and intimidated formality.

As soon as the family begins to hear mysterious sounds in their new home, Dennis insists on rigging up a handful of video cameras as makeshift surveillance devices. We get time-coded views of the parents' and kids' bedrooms—and, most cleverly, there's a camera mounted on the base of a rotating fan that pans back and forth, with fearful deliberation, from the kitchen, with its pristine white cabinets, to the living room, with its creepy looped lamp in the foreground.

The bottom line, for me, is this: I don't scare easily at horror films (that's one of the reasons I tend to pan them), but I watched "Paranormal Activity 3" in a state of high anxiety. Schulman and Joost have fun with the archetypal image of a white-sheeted costume ghost, but mostly what they're aces at is timing. They know just how to thread a handheld camera up the stairs, down a hallway, and into the scattered bric-a-brac of a middle-class children's bedroom, settling at just the right moment upon a talking teddy bear that plays as a joke, even as a part of you momentarily thinks: Is that bear possessed?

They also make terrific use of characters like Dennis's assistant, a Napoleon Dynamite type, played with an infectious spark by Dustin Ingram, who ends up huddling in a darkened bathroom with young Katie for a scary game of ‘'Bloody Mary'' (say it three times and wait to see what happens).

There's no denying that the "Paranormal Activity" films adhere, by now, to a formula; this one, almost by definition, lacks the originality that made the first one so startling. But when you consider how the grimy, mangle-fest "Saw" sequels have ruled the Halloween season in recent years, it's refreshing to think that the spook-show franchise that has now caught the popular imagination has replaced depravity and sadism with a 21st-century, video-reality version of old-school campfire shivers.

In her review of "The Shining," Pauline Kael asked—derisively—‘'Who wants to see evil in daylight, through a wide-angle lens?'' The answer, it turns out, is everybody. If you want to get really nitpicky about this film, notice that the stuffed killer whale Kristi carries around throughout the film is actually a stuffed version of Willy from 1993's "Free Willy" series. You can tell by the three black dots on its back. But who would think to pick that out unless you're actively looking for it.

This movie is hard to rate since it was not as shocking as the first, but also better cinematically, but definitely better than the second. The story is very compelling and suspenseful, but also you have an idea of what to expect. Case in point, Katie being picked up by her hair after chasing Kristi.

After hard consideration I'll give "Paranormal Activity 3" a solid "B."