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Ho boy, I'm not sure I'm prepared for this. The prolific horror movie series Paranormal Activity is finally getting its own video game, and it's in development by Brian Clarke, the creator of The Mortuary Assistant, itself one of the most frightening games I've played in my long career of playing scary games.
17 years on from the original movie, the series has yet to produce another entry that comes close to rivaling the original, but the newly announced game Paranormal Activity: Found Footage - the product of a partnership between DreadXP and Paramount Game Studios - has the potential to conjure up some serious scares.
The teaser doesn't show much, and by that I mean it doesn't show anything besides a black screen with key information displayed in the style of the found footage movies' on-screen text. An unintelligible conversation, seemingly between police officers, can be heard behind the fuzz of an old video tape, but otherwise we're left in the dark.
In a press release, DreadXP says the game will feature an advanced "Haunt System" that dynamically alters the intensity and style of the scares you'll encounter based on your actions.
"The success of the Paranormal Activity franchise epitomizes the power and reach of the horror genre," said Clarke, who's serving as creative director. "If you thought The Mortuary Assistant was scary, we're taking what we learned during the development of that title and cranking it up with a more reactive and horrifying haunting system. It’s going to be intense!"
The fact that Clarke is only directing the game, but also saying he's taking what he learned from The Mortuary Assistant and using those lessons to make an even scarier game is sending chills down my spine in the best possible way. If he can even slightly recreate the suffocating buildup of dread to the first movie's horrific finale - which I trust him to do after The Mortuary Assistant's shocking ending - we're in for a wild flippin' ride.
I'll never forget the night I saw the original Paranormal Activity - still the best entry in the series by far - in theaters back in 2009. Because it had such a limited run in theaters at the time, I hadn't seen any promotional material and thus had no clue it existed until I stumbled across a showtime at my local theater with some friends.
Turns out, having absolutely zero knowledge or expectations about this movie, and seeing it in a crowded theater with other poor souls who didn't know what was coming, is the precise recipe for undoubtedly the scariest film experience I've ever had. The amateurish handling of the camera, the understated brilliance of the acting, and the fact that found footage was still a relatively novel concept at the time, was often enough to genuinely suspend my disbelief and send my heart racing. When I left the theater, the first thing I did was pull out my phone and Google to confirm that, it's OK, Jordan, it really was a movie you watched and not insensitively distributed proof of a horrific murder.
The Paranormal Activity game is due to launch in 2026 on "multiple platforms."
Until then, here are the best horror games to play.
