The Best & Worst Paranormal Activity Movies According To Rotten Tomatoes

If you've been online in the last several years, you know that film fans love to make their little ranked lists of franchise movies, particularly horror fans. In addition to the fun of making a ranking, people love to use these exercises to express their individuality, often highlighting undervalued or overpraised entries in a given series as a way of going against the grain of consensus. Not that people are always looking to be contrarian; a lot of these rankings tend to strongly resemble one another. Still, you rarely find a few that are exactly alike.

Yet sometimes, a consensus is inarguably reached. As an aggregator, Rotten Tomatoes provides a decent bird's eye view of a film's reception. While it's hardly the first or last word on a movie, it certainly helps one understand the conversation at large surrounding it. There are numerous examples of movies that are generally beloved or reviled sporting Tomatometer scores which don't reflect that opinion. In the case of the "Paranormal Activity" franchise, however, there seems to be an alignment with most fan rankings and the Tomatometer scores: the best movie in the series is allegedly the 2009 original, while the worst in the series is allegedly the last one (theatrically) released, 2015's "Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension. Although your individual mileage may vary, of course, there are some very discernible reasons why these two films happened to end up in their respective spots both on the Tomatometer as well as within the general perception of the series by fans and audiences — and it's not wholly a matter of quality.

It's generally understood that breaking into Hollywood is an incredibly difficult thing to do, which is why the few legitimate successes that make it through the system — starting from nothing but a dream and a hope — are usually that much more respected. Even if director/writer Oren Peli didn't have such a Cinderella story surrounding "Paranormal Activity," the movie would still have made a splash given its ingenious, lo-fi approach to scares and its impeccable sense of timing. The film came along just as the wave of found footage horror was beginning to crest, proving that prior luminaries in the emerging subgenre like "The Blair Witch Project" and "Cloverfield" were no flukes. Unlike the latter film, a big-budget monster movie from a major studio, "Paranormal Activity" relies primarily on the power of suggestion and implication, chronicling the struggle of a young couple dealing with mysterious phenomena that gradually reveals itself to have malevolent intentions.

Thus, the movie utilizes every element that makes found footage horror special. It has a sense of verisimilitude, presenting its footage and the people in it (who were unknown actors at the time) without any glamour, and never goes too far with physical or visual effects that might take a viewer out of the experience. It allows the audience to insert themselves and their own beliefs into the film, inviting everyone to wonder how they might deal with such phenomena, all while telling a story about these two fictional characters and their own specific mythology. In other words, it's both distant and experiential, making you the viewer feel like you're studying the events at the same time that they feel like they're happening to you. For all intents and purposes, "Paranormal Activity" became the benchmark for found footage horror for the next several years, and that pedigree easily explains why it's considered the best of its franchise.

It's fairly typical for the last entry in a long-running series to be regarded as the worst. Sometimes this is unfair, as people tend to have a real issue with endings, preferring instead their idealized version of the characters and their world that either ends their way or never ends at all. Other times, it's simply because of the law of diminishing returns; a final entry. If it's not treated as some culmination or grand finale like "Avengers: Endgame," it's usually around the time the people behind the series have either run out of ideas or have milked what was once original about the series completely dry. "The Ghost Dimension" suffers partially from this, as it was marketed and conceived as a concluding chapter to the mythology built within the "Paranormal Activity" series. Yet, either due to executives hedging their bets to see if another sequel might still be viable or some form of creative differences (there exists at least one wildly different alternate ending to the movie), the film raises more questions than it provides answers, and one of the strengths of the series — its ambiguity — starts to feel like a hindrance under the weight of too much vagueness.

Aside from not wrapping things up in a fully satisfactory way, "The Ghost Dimension" is a perfectly enjoyable entry in the series. Or, at least, it is when watched in 2D. The film was released in 3D, on the tail end of the post-"Avatar" boom of 3D films, and the effect of a found footage movie in 3D was either off-putting to some (including this writer, who became nauseous while watching the film in theaters) or resembled a too-little, too-late distraction for others. With all of these factors in play, it's not too surprising that "The Ghost Dimension" doesn't have a lot of shooters in the "Paranormal Activity" fandom.

Yet the film isn't the final movie in the series. "Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin" was released direct to Paramount+ in 2021 and although its Tomatometer score isn't significantly higher than "The Ghost Dimension," that could be because its streamer-exclusive status meant that not as many people saw it. It's unclear if the series might beget new installments in the future, but if it does, who knows: maybe "The Ghost Dimension" could rise or fall in the rankings. Like any consensus, only time will tell.