Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones, or, Simon Dice

Since I was thoroughly creeped out by The Blair Witch Project, I got swept up into the later hype around the first Paranormal Activity movie, and went in fully prepared to be terrified. Instead, I spent the whole time being bored and irritated, impatiently waiting for someone or something to come in and murder these painfully annoying people already.

It wasn’t offensive, and I don’t begrudge its success or anything. But I might be the easiest person in the world to scare, and it barely ever registered a blip in my heart rate. I was perfectly happy to write off the entire series as not for me.

But digging through older episodes of the Dead Meat podcast, I found a series where they talked about each installment of the Paranormal Activity movies. I’ve been just curious enough to wonder what they did with the premise, without having to actually watch any more of them, so I listened to the recaps and had my “not for me” suspicions confirmed.

Until I got to the episode about the fifth installment in the series, Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones. I was surprised that not only did they like it, but that it sounded like something I’d probably enjoy a lot as well.

There are three big changes with The Marked Ones, which all work together to make it more my thing than anything else in the series:

First, it was written and directed by Christopher Landon, who had written some of the other installments, and who would go on to make the Happy Death Day movies, Freaky, and Drop. Because this was a spin-off instead of a direct sequel, I think this one was freer to break from the existing formula, while Landon’s involvement with the others meant he knew how to tie it into the series in a way that would make fans happy.

Second, it breaks from the usual setup of spooky stuff happening to a white, upper-middle class, annoying, suburban family. This one has spooky stuff happening to a Hispanic community living in an apartment building in Oxnard, California. The main characters are Jesse, a recent high school graduate who’s just bought himself a new camera, and Hector, his best friend. And you’re immediately introduced to their friends, family, and neighbors, making it feel like it’s happening in a real place, instead of all confined to a suburban house somewhere in southern California.

Third, it breaks from the format established by the first one, of a bunch of static cameras placed around a house, inviting you to look for weird stuff happening in the periphery. This one is still a found footage movie, technically, but it’s a bit more like Cloverfield: it’s structured like a traditional mid-budget horror movie, but you’re seeing everything from the perspective of one of the characters holding a camera.

That does lose the sense of verisimilitude that was (at least initially) the core idea of the franchise, and it means fewer opportunities for the kind of eerie moments that the first movie actually did pretty well: like seeing via timestamp that a woman stood next to a bed and just stared at her partner for hours.

The “found footage” aspect of The Marked Ones is more of a stylistic thing than anything else. It’s given an initial justification, but it’s never allowed to become a burden. The movie’s happy to keep using it even in situations where it just doesn’t make sense that someone would keep filming, and complaining that it doesn’t seem realistic misses the point in a movie that isn’t that concerned with rigorous realism.

Instead, we see a couple of teenagers goofing off with a camera, recording themselves doing Jackass-style stunts around their apartment building, as a sinister story about their creepy neighbor Ana (who’s rumored to be a bruja) plays out in the background. It’s an ingenious way to introduce the characters as real, likeable, reckless kids who don’t take any of this stuff seriously. It means that they’re just fun to watch, and that it’s completely in character for them to make all the obviously terrible decisions you need characters in a horror movie to make.

I watched it on Pluto, which is streaming a version that for some reason cuts out several scenes, the most significant of which is one of those terrible decisions: the kids sneak into a local church one night to perform a ritual to summon a demon. You can find the scene on YouTube. It’s not really essential — I didn’t even detect anything was missing until the podcast hosts were describing a scene I couldn’t remember seeing — but it does establish the tone. Teenagers who don’t know that they’re in a horror movie, doing the kinds of things that drive a horror movie into the next act.

A really clever gimmick is when the kids are playing with an old Simon game, and they discover that they can use it to communicate with whatever strange entity is making weird noises in the building. I like it because it does a ton of things at once. First, there’s the simple novelty of using an electronic game instead of the way-overused Ouija board. Second, it drives home the idea that the teenagers think this stuff is weird, but they’re not scared of it: they’re more in sync with a horror movie audience, because they’re not completely oblivious to the fact that things are getting spooky, but they’re also more interested in having fun with it instead of being freaked out. Third, it gives Jesse’s abuela Irma — one of the best characters — the opportunity to be suitably spooked and pulled into the story.

Finally, it just sells the idea that these are bored teens hanging out together without a lot to do. The movie moves really quickly through its initial scenes, rapidly cutting through short clips, and its total run time is pretty short. It’s a difficult pace to establish the feel of bored people with a ton of time on their hands. I like it because it hints at the same feel of It Follows, a bunch of young people in a holding pattern on the cusp of whatever comes next. And it further explains why they’re diving recklessly into this story — they just want something to do.

And I realized one of the biggest differences between The Marked Ones and the first Paranormal Activity: I’d really gotten to like these characters, and I was dreading something terrible happening to them, instead of eagerly looking forward to it.

I don’t want to oversell it. It doesn’t just abandon verisimilitude, but requires hyper-active suspension of disbelief more and more as it goes on. It’s weakest when it tries to be part of the franchise instead of just a teenage slice-of-life story set in a Hispanic community — although I did appreciate the scene where a character (who I’m told is from the second movie) shows up to deliver all of the exposition they need in a couple of minutes, then disappears, with as little as possible attempt made to make any of it seem elegant or even natural. And ultimately, I didn’t think it was ever that scary.

But it’s pretty fun! And that’s something I never thought I’d be saying about a Paranormal Activity movie.

Content warnings: body horror related to eyes, and a dog in distress (but not injured as far as I could tell).