Review #384: Paranormal Activity 2 (2010)

October 2026 Horror Reviews #12 - Paranormal Activity 2 (2010)

Paranormal Activity 2 (or, as I think it should have been called, Paranormal Ac2vity) is primarily a prequel to the first film, taking place about two months before that movie's events. It follows Katie's sister, Kristi, as well as Kristi's husband Daniel, stepdaughter Ali, and infant son Hunter. Following an apparent break-in, Kristi and Daniel kit out their house with a ton of stationary surveillance cameras in an attempt to keep themselves safe, but as time goes on, the cameras pick up activity of the... paranormal... variety, as we learn a bit more of the origins of the malevolent force introduced in the first film.

First, let me get the good out of the way: I appreciated how this movie looks and sounds way better than the previous one (three years and an extra few millions dollars' worth of budget will do that), and I really liked how the plot of this movie ends up tying directly into the plot of the previous one, explaining how and why Katie got targeted by the demon or whatever. Even though this was my second viewing of the film (my first being back in 2010), that part took me a bit by surprise and really helped make the ending of this entry a lot more engaging than it had been up until then.

That's it, that's where the praise ends.

This movie is still subject to the same pacing issues as the first film (and at this point it's establishing a trend that will surely continue not only across this series, but most likely bleed into the entire genre for decades to come). The first half of this movie is basically pointless, serving primarily to fill time until the movie has checked off the requisite number of minutes before the filmmakers feel justified in having anything noteworthy happen. Seriously- having already seen this movie once, I cannot stress how bored I was for the first ~50 minutes of this entry, because apart from a couple lines of dialogue here and there, nothing freaking happens for that entire chunk of the movie. And just like the previous film, they insist on having scenes that start (and end!) with characters mid-sentence, conveying the sentiment that the dialogue isn't even worth showing to the audience. I'm not saying that every single line of dialogue needs to further the plot, but... I dunno, is it so hard to make a movie where all of the dialogue is at least worth hearing? This is seriously so bizarre to me.

Additionally, there is a roughly two-minute scene in this movie that consists of Kristi, slightly on edge, walking around Hunter's nursery, looking behind every corner just in case there's a ghost or something. The scene has no dialogue, Kristi finds nothing of consequence, and the only thing of note that happens in the entire two-minute sequence is that (unnoticed by Kristi) the mobile hanging over Hunter's crib moves slightly. That's it, that's all that happens in the entire two minutes. I understand that this movie is meant to be slowly building suspense, but why did they need to spend two minutes showing nothing in order to do it? Surely there was a way that could have been done that wasn't such a waste of time. And to be clear, this isn't an outlier- the entire movie (and the previous movie, and probably the whole series) is lousy with scenes like this, where you watch multiple minutes of absolutely nothing, only for the "payoff" at the end to be something you might not even notice because it's so slight.

Now, I know that there have been plenty of movies where incredibly memorable jump scares come at the end of long periods of mundane silence (like the famous jump scare scene from The Exorcist 3, which is four minutes of almost entirely one static shot where not much happens). But the sequences I'm complaining about so far in this series can hardly even be called jump scares (again, no exaggeration, they build up to a door moving slightly or a mobile gently turning) and even then, The Exorcist 3 did not (to my knowledge) cram five or six of those sequences into one film. So far in the Paranormal Activity series, the movies seem to be primarily composed of these long mundane silent sequences, punctuated occasionally with a half-heard conversation with a plot detail or two in it. If there was anything being done to make the cinematography interesting or the dialogue cleverly written that would be one thing, but these are almost all single static shots of improvised banter.

In the previous review I pointed out how weird it was that Micah was so inconsistent about watching the recorded footage- this one is even worse in that regard. Not only does Daniel only ever review the footage of these clearly supernatural events when someone else forces him to (keep in mind, it was his idea to set up the cameras in the first place, after the apparent break-in), but his daughter Ali almost always insists on filming him watching the footage (except for the one time where his reaction to it would have been genuinely interesting, which conveniently goes unrecorded). 

Speaking of which, Ali is such a weird element in this movie- she is often filming herself doing stuff that makes no sense except to further the plot of the film (like the aforementioned parts where she films her dad watching another filmed video of an event we already saw), and also, she is constantly doing things her parents surely would not approve of directly in front of the cameras she knows her parents set up to record. (In one case, she and her boyfriend are having a peaceful nighttime dip in the hot tub directly in front of a camera, and don't stop canoodling even when the smoke alarms inside the house are going off, until her dad runs out the back door with a burning pan. In another case, her parents are out on a date, so she lets her boyfriend into the living room to play Ouija, once again directly in front of the camera, even though she's supposed to be watching her infant brother.) These would all make sense if this was a conventionally-shot film, but it isn't. It's a found-footage film. They desperately want to be able to show plot-crucial events without scrutiny, but they chose a format that invites additional scrutiny instead.

So, this is all to say that while I remember greatly enjoying this movie the first time around (back in 2010), it was hard to see past all of the glaring flaws and contrivances today. The plot is neat, but the plot takes up about five minutes of screentime and the rest of it is static shots of empty rooms or conversations where none of the filmmakers care if you heard it or not. I really hope they start changing the pacing VERY soon, but I'm pretty sure that's not going to happen.

Overall Rating: 4/10 Flying Pool Cleaners

Location, Location, Location: This came as a shock when I first learned it, but this movie was filmed in the exact same house as the first movie! (They were both shot in the home of the series creator, Oren Peli.) Due to the immense financial success of the first film, as well as the three years that passed between the filming of the two movies, the house was completely remodeled on the inside, resulting in a shooting location that looked completely different.

Next Up: Paranormal Activity 3 (2011)!