Review #387: Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones (2014)

October 2026 Horror Reviews #15 - Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones (2014)

Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones is the fifth entry in the Paranormal Activity series, but at first glance appears to be a spin-off rather than a direct follow-up to the others (though as the movie goes on, the connections become quite frequent and direct). It follows a group of Mexican-American teenagers- Jesse, Hector, and Marisol- who start spying on a woman in their apartment complex after hearing she might be some kind of witch. After this woman gets murdered by another teen in the community, they sneak into her home and find a collection of occult materials- and Jesse starts exhibiting strange powers and violent tendencies. Will the three of them be able to find the cause of these strange happenings before Jesse is overtaken by this strange occultic force?

I remember watching the first half of this movie back when it came out, but lost interest and never finished it until just now. Having had such a disappointing revisit with the first few Paranormal Activity movies, this one actually kind of blew me away- the pacing was an immediate and obvious improvement compared to the rest, with virtually no chaff in this entire movie. Almost every scene began and ended in a natural and reasonable manner, almost every scene had a clear purpose in the grand scheme, and none of the scenes felt like they were a long silent lead-up to a big nothingburger. Now, this does come at a bit of a cost- for most of its runtime this didn't really "feel" like a Paranormal Activity movie, because it had none of the rhythm of the rest of the movies. There were no static cameras at all (everything was handheld), no nighttime scenes where you're waiting for something spooky to happen, not even a timestamp to be seen in the whole movie. While the others could be argued as having a unique style created for this franchise, this one just feels like a generic Found Footage horror movie (which is probably the reason it was marketed as a spin-off rather than a mainline entry). But for better or for worse, it felt like an actual watchable movie, not an exercise in trying the audience's patience.

Story-wise, though, this movie has very clear connections to the rest of the franchise throughout. It gives some clear backstory on the cult presented at the ends of the third and fourth movies (which I didn't really need but whatever), and through some timey-wimey shenanigans, the ending of this one directly shows what happened at the end of the first film, which I thought was cool (though also not really necessary). I don't really feel like any of the ideas in this movie quite got fully explored (the ritual the three main characters take part in, the superpowers Jesse gets, the classmate that killed the witch- all of these felt like they should have been a really big part of the movie but by the end, none of them felt complete) but for whatever this movie was trying to do, I guess it did enough to keep me interested and wanting more.

The movie isn't perfect- I felt like the last thirty minutes kind of dragged a little, and there were plenty of times where it just made no sense why the characters were still filming (which was an issue in the last couple Paranormal Activity movies as well) but all in all I was very, very pleased with this one, and I'm really hoping the next two manage to keep moving in a good direction as well!

Overall Rating: 9/10 Dogs on the Ceiling

Small World: Okay, this is weird. I might have a three-degrees-of-separation connection with this movie? There's not a ton of trivia or even goofs for this one on IMDB, so I was looking through the cast list for anyone who might have been in anything else that I've seen, to see if I could find something interesting to list for this section of the review. One of the actresses is named Raven Rockette (she played the aptly-named "Nude Woman" in this movie), and most of her other credits sound like straight-up porn. However, one of her credits was for a B-horror movie starring Michael Madsen, called Lumberjack Man (2015). One of the other members of the cast caught my eye- his name is Jarett King, and I'm about 90% sure that he's married to a girl I went to high school with! I didn't know her husband was an actor but looking at his photos on Facebook it sure looks like the same person!