Paranormal Activity 7 now has an official title, and it is Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin. This seventh installment of the popular 2010s found-footage horror series will be streaming exclusively on Paramount+ instead of hitting theaters, with a supposed release window of sometime this Halloween season. Happy Death Day and Freaky director Christopher Landon will be returning to the Paranormal Activity franchise for the first time in years, having written Paranormal Activity 2-4, the chapters that first started expanding the mythos of the indie horror series into an interconnected saga. Landon also directed the series’ first spinoff chapter Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones in 2014.
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We just recently found out that Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin was already complete, after massive delays caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Next of Kin stars Emily Bader (Broken Visions, Charmed), Roland Buck III (Chicago Med, Better Call Saul), Dan Lippert (The Grand Slams, Brooklyn Nine-Nine), and Henry Ayers-Brown (Blacklist, The Deuce). It will be written by Christopher Landon and directed by William Eubank (Underwater).
When Christopher Landon spoke to ComicBook.com last year, he discussed his excitement about jumping back into the Paranormal Activity franchise:
“I think the creative forces behind that franchise, I think everyone’s only interested in really doing it if it can be done well… I really loved that franchise and I enjoyed working and being a part of that team. It was an enormous amount of fun, but it was one of those things, too, that as the franchise went on, it was diminishing returns. It was a very difficult thing to sustain and that’s the nature of franchise-building. So we’ll see what happens there…”
“Paramount wanted to continue Paranormal Activity, I probably would have left it alone. So they wanted to continue it, but I thought if they were gonna continue it, you gotta — it was tired, there was no way to continue the road that we’d been down,” producer Jason Blum said to Collider . “So I really encouraged all the creative people involved to think of something new. A lot of people who are going to go see the new Paranormal Activity were 3 years old when the first Paranormal Activity came out, so they don’t even know from those older movies. I thought if you were going to re-do it, you better really re-do it, not try and expand what we did all those years ago.”
That’s a big challenge, given just how badly the Paranormal Activity series spiraled out in later installments. We’ll see if Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin fares better.
