Paranormal Activity 7 can provide answers to some lingering mysteries left by the earlier films in the franchise. 2009's Paranormal Activity was the definition of a sleeper hit, a micro-budget home movie that dethroned the long-running Saw franchise (which itself is seeing a revival with the involvement of Chris Rock) to emerge as the new king of Halloween. While found footage has often been the most polarizing corner of the horror genre, there's no denying that Paranormal Activity was a runaway hit of the 2009 Halloween season.
Within a year, the haunting tale started in the first film would continue with Paranormal Activity 2, with the buzz only growing hotter with 2011's Paranormal Activity 3. While that would prove to be the franchise's peak, both critically and financially, the bare-bone's budgets that each movie could be made on saw the series continue with 2012's Paranormal Activity 4 and the 2014 spinoff Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones, before finally concluding in 2015 with Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension. That would be where the series would mark its end for a few years, until Paramount announced that a seventh film in the franchise is in development for a 2021 release.
With the Paranormal Activity movies being the kind of series that can be produced for pennies, the financial prospects of Paranormal Activity 7 are very likely to be bountiful by default. However, this also puts the next movie in the position of giving moviegoers a peak behind the curtain into the cryptic mythology it has established over six films, along with providing the answers to a number of unsolved mysteries left by its predecessors. Here are the most pertinent questions about the Paranormal Activity series that Paranormal Activity 7 can answer.
What Happened To Katie, Hunter, And Robbie?
The Paranormal Activity movies have always kept the audience on their toes with what to expect, particularly when it comes to their chronology, as seen with Paranormal Activity 2 keeping its status as a prequel to the original under wraps until opening night. However, the series would leave a major thread hanging with the ending of Paranormal Activity 4 with regards to Katie, Hunter, and Robbie. By the end of Paranormal Activity 4, the now-possessed Katie has been established as a major antagonist, with the child in her care, Robbie, an eerie presence himself, along with Hunter being set up to join the forces of hell alongside his aunt.
Though The Marked Ones and The Ghost Dimension both canonically take place after Paranormal Activity 4, neither includes any direct reference to Katie in the present tense, with the former revisiting the ending of the original film via time-travel, and the latter only featuring home video recordings of Katie and Kristi as children. With Katie being the fulcrum of the entire series from its inception, her return in Paranormal Activity 7 is a must, especially after her perplexing absence in The Ghost Dimension (made that much more odd by the makers of the series purportedly knowing the ending well in advance.) Additionally, with Hunter and Robbie's significance made clear in prior movies, an exploration of what they're demonic destiny entails is something that the next film would do well to address, along with how Robbie came into Katie's care, and the full scope of just what Katie has become since her possession at the end of the original Paranormal Activity.
What Deal Did Katie And Kristi's Grandmother Make?
Another of the unanswered questions of the Paranormal Activity series lies in the specifics of how the mysterious demon Toby came to haunt Katie and Kristi. The original Paranormal Activity established that the hauntings Katie had experienced throughout her life meant that she, rather than her home, was the target of a supernatural entity. Paranormal Activity 2 went even further by revealing demonic hauntings occur when an individual has made a bargain of some kind with a demon in exchange for their first-born son.
By the time of Paranormal Activity 3, it is clear that Katie and Kristi's grandmother, Lois, had aligned herself with demonic entities at some point. The film would end with Toby murdering Katie and Kristi's mother and her boyfriend, while Lois took to the two into her care in order to "get ready". With everything the series has laid out up to this point, Lois is as much of an antagonist as Toby himself. With that in mind, the when and how of her alignment with demonic forces is a question just begging to be answered in the next film, with the elements of time-travel and dimensional vortexes introduced in The Marked Ones and The Ghost Dimension possibly weaving into it.
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Who Are The Midwives And What Is Their Army All About?
Paranormal Activity 3 would prove to be arguably the most pivotal installment of the series, with its introduction of witchcraft into its ongoing story. This would later be touched upon further in The Marked Ones with the research conducted by Ali following her experience during the events of the second film. In The Marked Ones, we learn that the coven seen in Paranormal Activity 3 is known as "The Midwives", who ritualistically select unborn male children in order for them to be fully possessed as adults, in the coven's efforts "to build an army".
With that much already established, Paranormal Activity 7 has been perfectly set up to dive right into the history of The Midwives right out of the gate. Everything from their origins to the direct union they clearly have with demons is very fertile ground for the next movie to explore, as is the concept of The Midwives building an army of demonically possessed young men. Some kind of apocalyptic end is presumably the ultimate goal of The Midwives in that regard, but the series has never gone into specifics of what that fully entails. This lays the groundwork for the next Paranormal Activity to really get creative, with anything from The Midwives ushering in Satan's arrival on Earth to repopulating the entire world with demons one unsuspecting soul at a time, while keeping it within the raw, minimalistic framework that makes the series so endearingly creepy in the first place.
With six movies already under its belt, already placing it among the longest-running horror movie franchises, the Paranormal Activity series is clearly the undisputed king of the found footage hill and has left an enduring impact on the horror genre. With its humble but very lucrative beginnings in 2009, the series has proven that big scares can be made on even the tiniest of budgets, while simultaneously doing quite a bit of world building. However, there remain plenty of loose ends and unanswered questions dying for a resolution. With the franchise set to make its grand return to cinema screens next year, these would make for a great starting point in wrapping up the unexplained plot points from prior films, while also forming the basis for the story of Paranormal Activity 7.