Paranormal 3 sets an ultimate scare

MANILA, Philippines - A couple is pursued by an evil spirit in its own home. In an attempt to unveil the mystery, they install cameras throughout the house to capture the strange paranormal activity occurring.

Typically, consecutive movies in a franchise have storylines that move forward in time, but the timeline in the Paranormal Activity franchise is a little more complicated than that. The first movie took us into the home of Micah (Micah Sloat) and Katie (Katie Featherston), a young California couple who became obsessed with discovering the source of the strange occurrences in their home, an obsession that ended in demonic possession and death. The “found footage” that comprised the second movie took place before (prequel), during (midquel) and after (sequel) the events in the first movie and revealed that the entity was transferred over to Katie by her sister, Kristi (Sprague Grayden), and her brother-in-law, Dan (Brian Boland), after it nearly tore their family apart.

The latest movie, Paranormal Activity 3, plays with the timeline even more, setting much (if not all) of the action 18 years before the events depicted in the first two movies — showing that Katie and Kristi may ultimately be responsible for inviting the demon into their lives by playing around with the occult as children.

Paranormal Activity 3 opens Oct. 21 in theaters.