Review #389: Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin (2021)

October 2026 Horror Reviews #17 - Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin (2021)

Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin is a direct-to-streaming entry in the series, that was made six years after The Ghost Dimension. It follows a girl named Margot who was abandoned by her mother as a baby, after she discovers her closest living relatives are members of an Amish community. With camera help from her friend Chris and an audio engineer they met online, they start making a documentary about the community her mother came from- but they quickly learn that this community has dark secrets, and connections to the occult.

The first thing I should mention about this movie: as far as I can tell, it has no in-universe connection to the rest of the series. (I was looking pretty hard for any sort of easter egg that mentions any of the lore from other Paranormal Activity movies, and found nothing.) Not only that, but this movie seems to be found footage pretty much in name only- a lot of the movie is filmed with a handheld camera and it's presented as if it was a found footage movie, but there are numerous shots in various scenes that couldn't be filmed with the cameras they had on hand (like, for example, they'll unexpectedly arrive at someone's house and we'll get a shot from inside the house opening the door, or we'll get a shot-reverse-shot of someone being interviewed, and only one camera would be visible during the scene, or just numerous cases of shots cutting seamlessly during a scene without any break in the action despite only having one person recording with one camera). This almost definitely was a creative choice, to alleviate some of the limitations of the subgenre by allowing for more interesting camerawork than would otherwise be possible- and I would say this is absolutely an improvement over the typical found footage experience- but it does kind of still draw attention to the question of why it needed to be found footage at all, rather than just a traditionally-shot movie about someone making a documentary.

Anyway, much like how I felt about the other entries in this series that deviated sharply from the Paranormal Activity format (like The Marked Ones), I think this movie was fairly solid and enjoyable, if a bit generic. The characters are fairly one-note but they pull off that one note really well, and each one is memorable. The action doesn't strain credulity to an unreasonable degree, with most of it being executed competently and without taking me out of the atmosphere and tone of the rest of the movie. There was a bit of CGI in here that I could have done without, and the plot felt a little shallow and sparse at times, but this movie never felt boring or unnecessary. I don't think it did very well commercially or critically (I didn't even know it existed until I started making the list for this month's movies) but on balance I felt it was better than half of the rest of the series, and it'll probably hold up better.

I don't really have much else to say about this one; nothing about it jumped out as being particularly memorable but it delivered a competent experience, which is more than I can say about the rest of this series. Its main sin is that it felt generic compared to the others, for better and for worse.

Overall Rating: 6/10 Incredibly Helpful Store Clerks

New Goofs: Likely due to the fact that this one flew under everyone's radar, there was almost no trivia listed on IMDB and not a single goof. Until now, that is! I noticed one on my own viewing, and added it for posterity's sake. In the scene where Margot hides after finding what appears to have been her mother's bedroom, she tries the door handle and realizes she's been locked in. But if you look closely, the type of door handle she's trying to open has the lock mechanism on her side of the door, meaning she could have unlocked it at any point. Whoopsie!

Next Up: Friday the 13th (1980)!