Review #388: Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension (2015)

October 2026 Horror Reviews #16 - Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension (2015)

Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension follows a new family living in an absurdly massive house, who discover a box of junk in their garage that contains a bunch of VHS tapes as well as an old video camera. The tapes turn out to have belonged to Katie and Kristi's family from Paranormal Activity 3 (including the tape that ostensibly contained that entire movie on it), and the house they are living in turns out to have been built on the land where Katie & Kristi lived when they were kids (before their house burned down after the events of that movie). The old video camera seems to be able to pick up ghosts and paranormal phenomena on film, which is convenient because the ghost/demon/whatever Toby shows up to befriend and eventually kidnap the family's daughter, Leila. Yadda yadda yadda, more of the same.

Needless to say, I did not care for this movie. Like, at all. The quality of the writing seems to have fallen straight down the toilet, it goes back to the poor pacing and lazy editing of the rest of the series (after going hard in what I considered to be the "right direction" with The Marked Ones), and the movie has a severe overreliance on CGI. This time they decided to show the ghost/demon/whatever by use of the ghost camera, so since you probably haven't seen this movie, think of it like this: in all of the previous ones, when there was a long static shot of nothing happening and then it all comes to a head with the door slightly moving? This movie posits "What if the whole time, instead, there was a spooky ghost just hanging out, and they moved the door". Because that's what happens- you get the same long shots of nothing, except in some of the shots (because there's only one ghost camera, obviously most of the shots are just normal footage with no visible ghosts) there's just like a big cloud of darkness that nobody acknowledges because canonically, none of them can see it. Don't worry, whatever you're picturing, it looks worse.

The characters in this are simultaneously the most lucky and perceptive people in the world, while also being completely braindead. The dad in this movie finds the time to watch dozens of hours' worth of old home movies (no mention of what kind of job allows him to afford this mansion, it takes place two weeks before Christmas so whatever he does must give him tons of time off around the holidays) and he somehow manages to pick up on tons of subtext this movie is retconning into the series (more on that in a bit) to the point where he immediately knows everything that's going on and why he should be concerned, but also, nobody in the movie believes anything supernatural is happening even when they have clear video evidence on top of their own experiences of weird things happening. (One time the mom catches Leila in the middle of the night tearing pages out of the Bible and trying to burn the house down, and when she voices her concerns to the other people in the house, she's told "Oh, it was probably just a game or something". Keep in mind, this is AFTER they have captured numerous days' worth of videos of a big black cloud talking to their daughter! 

Some of the characters in this movie acted so weird, that I was like 90% certain it was going to turn out that the brother and friend living with the family were actually plants sent by the cult to manipulate them. That was the only justification I could find for how stupid and counter-intuitive they were acting, but none of it turned out to be true. (Also, there's a point where the dad in this movie acts confused when he hears his daughter was trying to play Bloody Mary in front of the mirror, because apparently, he's never heard of Bloody Mary before. Just bizarre.)

This movie also does some really weird things with the series lore, that range from continuity errors, to plot holes, to full-on retcons. The video containing the events of Paranormal Activity 3 is in this family's garage, despite the previous movie showing that it was in the witch's apartment around the time this movie takes place. (Maybe there's a few months' time in between the two, so maybe someone from the cult took it and put it in this family's garage? But then... why? Why give the family the tools that would let them interfere with Toby and the cult's own plans?) This movie also tries to say that Katie and Kristi spent their entire lives after the events of PA3 living with the cult and getting trained to use magic powers, but if that were the case, why did either of them act the way they did in the first two movies? Like, why did Katie have Micah set up cameras to investigate the supernatural happenings in their house when she would have instantly known they were caused by Toby, the ghost/demon she and her sister spent years learning to communicate with? Also, the events of Paranormal Activity 4 made it very clear that Toby was all about needing a first-born son (hence why Wyatt/Hunter needed to be stolen in that movie) but in this movie, he doesn't need a first-born son anymore, he needs Leila's special blood apparently. None of this makes sense.

Anyway, like I said, I really didn't care for this one. The characters are all annoying, the action is incredibly poorly-paced, and once again this movie didn't need to be found footage and desperately wants to be free of the constraints of that subgenre but they went ahead and made it that way. This is apparently the lowest-grossing of the series and I am not surprised in the least.

Overall Rating: 2/10 Dumb-Looking CGI Ghosts

Alternate Ending: Like the last movie, this one also had a severe dearth of interesting trivia and goofs to mention, but I did find out that this one has an alternate ending that makes even less sense and is even less interesting than the one that we got. So I guess we can all rest assured that, as bad as this movie was, it could have been slightly worse!

Next Up: Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin (2021)!