New Paranormal Activity movie, Next of Kin relaunches the franchise with an all-new story. But this horrifying feature film could ultimately be linked to the rest of the saga by a surprising detail.
Warning, spoilers. The following paragraphs contain spoilers for the movie Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin.
Closing film of the Gérardmer fantasy film festival, Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin is now available in France on OCS. The seventh installment in a lucrative franchise, this horror film directed by William Eubank (Underwater) follows the journey of Margot (Emily Bader) as she follows in the footsteps of her mother who abandoned her at birth.
Accompanied by a film crew, she decides to make a documentary in the isolated Amish community where she was born in order to better understand her mother and meet her distant family. But past the festivities, Margot realizes that this community hides a heavy and dangerous secret that affects her…
A connection that leaves doors open
This new Paranormal Activity, still shot in a style found footagewas presented as a stand-alone, a separate film supposed to have no connection with the rest of the franchise. But a detail in Next of Kin could well link the horror feature film to the other parts of the saga. And it ties into the demon that terrorizes the characters in Next of Kin.
Paramount Pictures Germany
Named Asmodeus, this demonic figure would have, according to the myth, been at the origin of the massacre of a Norwegian village of Beskytter. Its inhabitants would then have trapped the demon in the body of a woman in order to protect the survivors. In order to perpetuate their line, the villagers performed rituals so that the demon remained imprisoned and passed from mother to daughter in the line.
Which brings us to Sarah, Margot’s mother, who has the demon in her and is a prisoner of the Amish community. By abandoning Margot, Sarah wanted to protect her daughter. If this Asmodeus demon has a priori nothing to do with the demon of the previous six films, a detail could well connect Next of Kin to the rest of the franchise and leave the door open to other sequels.
As noted by internet user NoraFromQueens on the Paranormal Activity Wiki Page, Asmodeus is a biblical demon hunted by the Archangel Raphael. And this demonic figure appears more precisely in The Book of Tobitsometimes called Tobit’s booka book ofOld Testament. The name Tobie/Tobit is no stranger to Paranormal Activity fans since the demon from the other films in the franchise is called Tobi!
Paramount Pictures Germany
And as Father Todd pointed out in Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension, demons often change their names to hide their identities. This could therefore be the case here and the demon in Next of Kin would then be the same as in the other films of the saga.
Even if in fact, the chronology of events could be problematic, since Asmodeus had been imprisoned in Sarah’s body for decades. However, anything is possible with the Paranormal Activity franchise as the spin-off Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones introduced time travel.
For the moment, the producers of the franchise have neither confirmed nor contradicted this hypothesis, but this detail could leave them the field open for new films in the saga, which was supposed to end with the Ghost Dimension, with the demon Tobi / Asmodeus.