Last week saw the title reveal for Paramount’s upcoming reboot of the Paranormal Activity franchise. Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin will see the franchise taken in a different direction that resets the playing board, which has so far always been an expansion of the original movie. Now we have a teaser trailer for the movie, which gives us a look at the new collection of characters to be traumatized by specters and immediately this is clearly not what we have seen in previous installments, with at least some of the action taking place in an Amish style community. The new trailer can be seen below, with the movie arriving on Paramount + exclusively on October 29th, just in time for Halloween.
Like the Saw franchise, the Paranormal Activity movies have built a mythology that runs through all of the movies, taking the threads of the original and tugging them slightly to unravel a little more of the same tale throughout the series to create a tangled web of mostly cohesive storytelling. While 2014’s Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones seemed to be giving the series a reboot, by the end of the movie everything tied back to the overarching story, so there is no way of completely ruling out that happening again with their latest offering.
In July, producer Jason Blum revealed that the movie wrapped filming. He spoke to Collider about how he originally had no intention of making more Paranormal Activity movies, but it seems that like most horror franchises when the studios come calling they always rise again. It seems that only the idea of a fresh take on the movie helped encourage Blum to start over again.
“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,” he said. “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.”
Christopher Landon returns to the franchise as writer, having penned movies 2-4 and directed The Marked Ones, and he seemed to be quite happy to be returning for the latest outing. “I think the creative forces behind that franchise, I think everyone’s only interested in really doing it if it can be done well,” he told ComicBook.com last year. “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…”
As well as Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin, a documentary about the making of the movie also arrives on Paramount+ on Oct. 29. It’s not the only horror follow-up on the way at Paramount+, as the streamer also has a Pet Sematary prequel movie in development.