Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin is set to begin streaming on Paramount+ in the U.S. today. The film is the seventh in the franchise (assuming you don’t count 2010’s Japanese installment, Paranormal Activity II: Tokyo Night, which ran parallel to the second movie but was ultimately disregarded as canon), and the first new Paranormal Activity movie to be released since 2015’s Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension. The film was originally set for a theatrical release on March 19, 2021, but was delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. When the delay was first announced, it looked like a 2022 theatrical run was in the cards, but earlier this year, Paramount announced the movie would head straight to streaming so that it could come out in time for Halloween.
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William Eubank directed Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin from a screenplay by Christopher Landon. Very few details have yet been revealed about the movie’s plot.
In Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin, a documentary filmmaker follows Margot (Emily Bader) as she heads to a secluded Amish community in the hopes of meeting and learning about her long-lost mother and extended family. Following a string of strange occurrences and discoveries, she soon realizes this community that welcomed them into their home might be hiding something sinister.
With that description, it would be easy to assume that the woman’s mother has ties to Katie (Katie Featherston), who appeared in all but one of the first six movies in the series. It seems unlikely, though, given that the movie’s trailer takes the characters into an Amish community — something that Katie and Micah (Micah Sloat) never seemed to have any connections to.
“I really love the fact that I’m both the damsel in distress and the bad guy,” franchise star Katie Featherston told me at Scare-A-Con in 2018. “I get to do both in one character, which is really fun. I like messy characters, I like flawed characters, I like telling those kinds of stories. So even in the world of horror, I like playing this girl who’s trying to keep her relationship together while everything’s happening around her, and also to be able to be the bad guy that scares everybody.”
The Paranormal Activity franchise is a found-footage horror franchise and, aside from The Blair Witch Project, probably represents the most commercially and critically successful example of that genre.
Paramount+ will also release the feature-length documentary Unknown Dimension: The Story of Paranormal Activity on Friday, October 29th. The documentary will offer fans a deep dive into making the Paranormal Activity series of films via interviews, never-before-seen footage, and more.
