"Paranormal Activity 2" is bone-chillingly fantastic

In 2007, up and coming director Oren Peli spent 10 days and $11,000 creating the "faux-reality" horror film, "Paranormal Activity" (PA1) – a film which grossed more than $100 million world-wide.

After a success like that, it came as no surprise that we would see a "Paranormal Activity 2" (PA2) break into theaters this year.

PA2 is actually part prequel and part sequel to the original film, beginning roughly two months before the events of the first movie and ending a few days after the ending of PA1.

The plot of this film is that Kristi has recently brought home newborn son Hunter to her widowed husband Dan and stepdaughter Ali. The tie-in to the first film is that Kristi is the sister of Katie from PA1. After what seems like an innocuous break-in, Dan decides that he will buy a surveillance system to monitor the inside and out of the family's home. However, a few days after the installation of the cameras, strange, unexplainable things start to happen in the home.

Much like in PA1, the most unsettling thing about this movie is the fact that it's not some visible threat like a crazed, psycho killer that is messing with this family. The fact that most of the early disturbances of the family resemble things that could happen in your own home is what makes this movie so entertaining and bone-chilling to watch. Things like a door slowly drifting shut or something else that you would ordinarily write off as being caused by wind or as the result of absent-mindedness, are the sort of things that make this movie all the more scarier because it's relatable to the audience.

An interesting nuance to this prequel/sequel is that fact that, instead of viewing the supernatural mischief through one handheld camera with a limited scope, the events of PA2 are seen through a handful of security cameras, as well as a handheld one. This adds another aspect to the story in that the family doesn't realize what is going on from the jump so they are not reviewing the footage every day like Micah did in the first movie. So you have the family only checking on cameras when something strange happens to one of them, but since 1-year-old Hunter can't speak, nobody is checking the camera in his nursery to see a mobile spinning by itself in his crib, or the fact that he is at one point lifted out of his crib and then mysteriously put back before the parents get home.

One thing I really enjoyed was that this prequel served to explain the events of the first movie and clarify that the events of PA1 were not just some sort of random act of demonic violence. We find out during the unfolding of PA2 that a possible explanation is that, somewhere along the way, somebody in Kristi and Katie's family history made a deal with a demon for wealth or power and the cost was the soul of the first-born son. However, as there have been no males in the bloodline until Hunter, the demon has not come calling until now. And we also find out that through some form of "voodoo hoodoo," how the demon was able to latch onto Katie.

Even though PA2 was given a considerably larger budget of almost $3 million, you would not be able to tell by watching, as some of the effects are basically the same as the first movie.

There is something very interesting for fans of the first "Paranormal Activity" in the last five minutes of the this movie. At the end of PA1, it says that Katie had not been seen since the murder of Micah. However, in the last scenes of PA2, we find out that Katie made one last pit stop before she disappeared from the face of the earth.

Scary movies ordinarily don't rattle me, but my heart was beating a mile a minute for the last half hour of this film. I wouldn't recommend this film for anybody who is superstitious or faint of heart, but I personally loved it.