'Paranormal Activity' Star Katie Featherston On Why She Still Likes The Role That Made Her Famous

If you know writer, filmmaker and actress Katie Featherston, there is a good chance you first encountered her in the found footage franchise Paranormal Activity.

Featherston, who most recently appeared in a webseries titled Solace For the Unloved, appeared at Scare-A-Con this weekend in Upstate New York and spoke briefly with ComicBook.com about being one of a rare breed of young women who make it more than a movie or two into a horror franchise.

"I really love the fact that I am both the damsel in distress and the bad guy — I get to be both in one character which is really fun. I like messy characters, I like flawed females, I like those kind of stories," Featherston said. "Even in the world of horror, it was fun to play this girl who's trying to get her relationship together and everything's happening around her, and also to be able to be the bad guy that scares everybody in the movie."

It would be difficult to find a more messy character than Katie, who essentially cursed herself as a child -- a curse that came through in the first film when she and her boyfriend moved in together and the demon that has followed her for years becomes much more aggressive.

Featherston appeared in five Paranormal Activity movies between 2007 and 2014, and most of the series' most significant plot developments centered around her character of Katie and Katie's family. A sixth film, 2015's Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension, mentioned the character of Katie Higgins but did not star Featherston. As of now, there are no known plans for a seventh film in the franchise.

Paranormal Activity drew inspiration from The Blair Witch Project and other "found footage" films popular in the first decade of the 21st Century, but it has helped to shape the next decade of horror films, in part because it was one of the earliest major successes for Blumhouse, who specialize in turning tiny budgets into huge profits on movies like Sinister, The Purge, and Get Out.

Since its launch, the Paranormal Activity franchise has earned more than thirty times its collective budget back.