Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension

A while back I reviewed all of the then-released Paranormal Activity movies. If you don’t feel like reading my stellar blogs posts on the topic, the short version is that the first movie is Good Actually, Fight Me while all of the sequels were disappointing to varying degrees, with Paranormal Activity 4 being especially bad. Due to the diminishing returns offered by successive paranormal activities, I didn’t see the sixth and “final” movie when it came out in 2015 even though it has possibly the greatest film title in cinematic history. 

It’s time to rectify that. Step through the spooky portal in your daughter’s bedroom and join me in...THE GHOST DIMENSION.

Although it takes place after Paranormal Activity 4, this is much more of a sequel to the third movie, both filling in the holes left behind by Paranormal Activity 3 and trying to bring the sprawling, extremely convoluted ongoing storyline of the franchise to something resembling a satisfying conclusion. The movie follows the Fleege family--Ryan, Emma and their daughter Leila--who have just moved into a big ugly McMansion in 2013 (this feels like an attempt at mirroring the first movie’s light financial crisis commentary, with some incidental dialogue raising into question whether the Fleeges can really afford such a huge home). Ryan’s brother has come to stay for Christmas following a bad breakup and it seems like he’s not in any hurry to leave, much to Emma’s consternation. 

Things take a turn for the supernatural when Ryan uncovers a box of tapes in the basement, along with a home-made video camera that can see the terrible CGI effects used to portray the demon in this movie. The tapes contain footage of Katie and Kristi being raised by cultists after the events of the third movie--because it turns out that the Fleege’s home was built on the burned-down remains of their childhood house. Shortly after this, Leila starts interacting with an imaginary friend, which in a Paranormal Activity movie can only mean one thing. In order to save his family, Ryan will have to venture into...THE GHOST DIMENSION.

The frustrating thing about this movie is that it introduces a lot of promising elements in its first twenty minutes. The discovery of the tapes from Katie and Kristi’s childhood means that the characters in this found footage movie are themselves watching found footage, which would be a nice meta twist even without the movie finding creative ways to have the two time periods influence each other.

Ryan’s brother piqued my interest early on due to the movie implying that he’s far more affected by the breakup than he’s letting on. My biggest problems with these movies, going all the way back to the second one, is that most of the non-demon drama is pointless filler. So introducing a slightly more interesting interpersonal dynamic seemed promising...but Mike ends up largely just being a stock “horror stoner” comic relief character.

Similarly, a camera that can see ghostly beings seems like a fairly natural direction for the franchise to go in, even if the camera itself is a goofy Ghostbuster-esque contraption with glowing blue bits that seems tonally out of place. But the CGI effects used to portray the demon are both incredibly over the top and cheap-looking, and they’re accompanied by silly whooshing sounds. The whole thing moves way too far outside the found footage conceit that you’re meant to be watching real recorded events, and it really demonstrates why movies like this have had a policy of not showing audiences the monster since as far back as The Blair Witch Project. “This time you can see the demon” was a fundamentally misguided direction to go in, and it really indicates that the creative leads of the franchise no longer understood what made the first one work.

Although The Ghost Dimension strays away from the established series convention in this one ill-advised way, elsewhere it sticks rigidly to the Paranormal Activity template. We once again get successive nights of demonic trolling as the entity makes thumping noises and breaks things, except now thanks to the special camera we can see that it’s a mass of Venom-esque black tendrils swooshing around the house.

The movie sticks with series convention even when it makes no sense: the other family members start out not taking Ryan seriously when he suggests that a ghost is causing Leila’s sudden behavioural issues, even though he has recorded footage of a big shadowy liquid mass bubbling away in her room all night. This specific contradiction is so egregious that I assume the demon effect was originally going to be a lot more subtle when the scenes in question were shot, as there’s no way anyone would try to dismiss what’s in the movie as a camera glitch (notably you see the demon during the night time footage, and then you see Ryan talking about seeing something on the recording, but you don’t see him or anyone else actually looking at the footage like you do elsewhere).

Another series staple is the bit where the characters Google the plot, represented here by a bit where Ryan runs into the room and is like “I’ve seen those symbols Leila was drawing before, they’re used by a coven of witches called the Midwives, and they worship satan and…!”. Where the fuck has he seen the symbols before? Where was all that shit about the witches? Did he go off and watch the previous five movies?

The Ghost Dimension does at least wrap up the ongoing franchise story, in that the demon finally accomplishes its goal of incarnating in a human form, but at this point the story is so convoluted and confusing that I’m having trouble remembering how many layers of time travel some scenes involve. I’m going to say that having time travel at all in your found footage series about ghosts is maybe a sign that the story got too complex at a certain point.