6. Ghosts - Paranormal Activity And Its Various Sequels And Rip-offs
Paranormal Activity, the ultra-low budget found footage bore, has sparked a new trend of ghost films. Not only are there several blatant rip-offs circling around (the most well-known being The Asylums shadowing Paranormal Entity series) but also an influx of generic, lacklustre found footage films in general. This blunt method of cashing in on a cheap filmmaking effect is both repetitively annoying and detracting from the instances where it was used well, such as in 2012s Sinister, where it was employed in flashback-style home videos of gruesome murders, and REC, which gave the new sub-genre a twist with its cameraman vs. zombies storyline. However, there has yet to be a decent ghost movie for a fair few years now thanks to every up and coming horror director jumping onto the camcorder and a door and string technique. Except The Woman in Black, which kind of speaks for itself in terms of its trivial scare factor. Who Can Save Them? In times where Hollywood horror is dwindling in quality, we as a collective audience have often turned to them arguably superior Japanese filmmakers to deliver the shocks and scares. Who better to revive the scariness of ghosts than Takashi Shimizu, director of the Ju-On series and The Grudge, its American remake? With a supernatural entity overtaking an overnight trans-Pacific flight and over two hundred passengers for the ghoul to play around with at high altitude, 7500 looks set to terrify audiences worldwide very soon. There are no flickering lights in this one