After some research, and with help from a spiritually connected Mexican maid, it’s intimated that Katie and Kristi’s great-great-grandmother may have made a deal with the devil, and that Hunter, as the family’s first male child in four generations, represents its long-overdue payment. The haunting begins in the same way, with the rumble of offscreen noises and the precipitous slamming of doors, but this time the locus is Kristi’s son, Hunter. In 2, which takes place at the same time as the first movie, the scene shifts to the home of Katie’s sister, Kristi, her husband, and their two children-a teenage daughter and a toddler son-the former from a previous relationship. The second and third films extend and overlap with the first, creating an expanding mythology that still has plenty of room to grow. At the film’s climax, an apparently possessed Katie lures Micah out of their bedroom and murders him offscreen, then hurls him at the camera in their bedroom before vanishing forever. An invisible force knocks her down and drags her toward an attic crawlspace, which seems to be where the spirit it makes its home. As the episodes grow more aggressive, Katie recalls a feeling of being watched that stretches back to childhood, and it becomes clear that the spirit means to abduct her.

(The actors and their characters share names as if they were playing themselves.) Micah’s aim is to quell Katie’s suspicions, but once his cameras begin to record inexplicable phenomena, he becomes obsessed with getting the ghost on tape, essentially taunting it into greater and more dangerous displays.

The first Paranormal Activity established a template that its successors have closely followed: It’s comprised of footage shot by day trader Micah Sloat after his girlfriend, Katie Featherstone, begins to suspect their house is haunted. In the theater, the audience gives up control, which is key to a series that’s ostensibly captured on the infinitely manipulable medium of home video.

Paranormal activity movies in order