Underwater director William Eubank to pump some life back into the Paranormal Activity franchise
It’s not hard to imagine that there are plenty of people—lured in by the twin siren calls of Kristen Stewart out-acting everyone around her with apparent effortlessness, and T.J. Miller getting fucked up by ocean monsters—for whom 2020's Underwater was the last film they saw in theaters. Fast-paced and claustrophobic, it got the job—i.e., being a classic January horror release—done with a minimum of fuss, and a maximum of exploding shit. Which might explain why director William Eubank has now been tapped to do it all over again, with Deadline reporting that Eubank has just been named for the latest effort to milk a new movie out of Blumhouse’s long-running Paranormal Activity franchise of found-footage horror films
There have been, you’ll be forgiven for immediately forgetting again after we tell you this, six previous installments in the PA franchise—four numbered versions, plus 2014 spinoff The Marked Ones and 2015's “Fine, we’ll show you the ghosts, are you happy now?” The Ghost Dimension. The latter film was also the franchise’s least successful to date (which is to say, it only made back its meager $10 million budget 8 times over, instead of the 20, 30, or nearly 100 times other installments have scored), which might explain why Blumhouse gave the series a rest for a bit. But now it’s back—after a brief COVID-related delay—with Eubank in line to try to revive found-footage horror as a going concern for a seventh time.
Eubank will work on the film with Christopher Landon, who wrote the second through fifth Paranormal Activity movies, as well as Happy Death Day 2U, and last year’s Vince Vaughn body-swap horror comedy Freaky. Deadline also notes that “Plot details are being kept secret” about the new Paranormal Activity flick; apologies to all you super-dedicated Paranormal Activity lore hunters out there, who can’t wait to untangle the latest knot of this endlessly rewarding narrative web.