The first five installments in the Paranormal Activity franchise have arrived on Max. The franchise, which launched in 2007, centers on haunted spaces, and began with a found footage-style movie that used security cameras and other low-resolution cameras positioned in the practical locations in the world of the movie. Produced by Jason Blum, Paranormal Activity was one of the early horror franchises that helped elevate Blumhouse to its current perch as one of the most beloved horror and genre studios in the film industry. The series in general managed to stay successful even as its popularity waned, because it’s so cheap to make.
The movies currently appearing on Max are Paranormal Activity 1 through 4, as well as the fifth movie, which is titled Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones. The movie’s oddball Japanese installment, Paranormal Activity II: Tokyo Night, which ran parallel to the second movie but was ultimately disregarded as canon, isn’t included either.
The more recent two movies — 2015’s Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension and 2021’s Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin — remain on Paramount+. Paramount is the studio responsible for distributing the franchise.
These five films all star Katie Featherston, whose character Katie was one half of the young couple haunted in the first movie. Katie continued to play a role in the first five installments — her character having varying degrees of importance, but always tying the lore together. The two most recent movies do not feature Katie.
“I really love the fact that I’m both the damsel in distress and the bad guy,” franchise star Katie Featherston told me at Scare-A-Con in 2018. “I get to do both in one character, which is really fun. I like messy characters, I like flawed characters, I like telling those kinds of stories. So even in the world of horror, I like playing this girl who’s trying to keep her relationship together while everything’s happening around her, and also to be able to be the bad guy that scares everybody.”
There’s no clear direction for the franchise right now. While the movies never took more than a couple of years off between 2007 and 2015, it was a six-year gap before Next of Kin, which went straight to streaming and seemingly failed to generate a ton of buzz.