2009’s Paranormal Activity and its new sequel, Paranormal Activity 2, are very similar. They tell different parts of the same overlapping story, and they have the same ingenious mock-documentary concept—The Blair Witch Project set in the posh, comfortable interiors of affluent suburbia. Both movies harbor a kind of subtle contempt for their highly-educated, hipster-ironic, technology-saturated characters, and they both participate in that venerable horror-movie tradition which chides and ultimately punishes modern cynicism, arrogance, and unbelief.

The most striking difference between the two movies is that P.A. 2 involves quite a few more cameras. The first movie is presented as “found footage” from a single camera, the camcorder with which Micah (Micah Sloat) tries to record the titular demonic goings-on which have been terrorizing his girlfriend, Katie (Katie Featherston). The sequel begins with camcorder footage of Katie’s sister, Kristi (Sprague Grayden), and her family, including her newborn baby. However, after Kristi, her husband (Brian Boland), and her daughter (Molly Ephraim) find the house mysteriously trashed with nothing stolen, they install fly-on-the-wall security cameras all over the house. In the first film, we would hear something banging or roaring demonically in another room, and Micah and Katie would haul the camera through the house in confusion.  In the sequel, we switch casually from wide-shot to wide-shot, or to camcorder-vision if it’s more convenient.

So, we see more—yet, in a weird and clever way, we actually see less. The first film worked mostly by suspense and atmospheric murk, but it had some startlingly supernatural scares (e.g. when the demon’s footprints start appearing on a floor covered with baby powder) and some psychologically striking ones (e.g. the shattering of the glass in a framed picture of Micah and Katie). By contrast, in P.A. 2, we get frozen wide-shots of glossy suburban spaces throughout; the lonely hum of ventilation bleeds into the noises of electronic, unspiritual feedback which signal the entrance of the demon. When the paranormal types of activities finally start to go down, we view them obscurely and inconclusively. People descend to a creepy basement (where there is no security camera), doors close by themselves, people are dragged around by invisible hands—yet the obsessively objective cameras, with their technological imitation of omniscience, can’t tell us anything about the spiritual forces at work; they only record, uselessly, a slow progression toward doom. One of the movie’s most striking images is the baby’s eyes as they wander around the room in an early scene, reacting in wonder to some invisible presence, and frustrating Kristi and her husband, who are so deeply wonderless themselves. The demon in the first movie had a wicked personality, and so did Micah, who taunted and teased it with a kind of weasel-like hubris. In P.A. 2, the demonic visitation is revealed to be the result of the past wicked behavior of one of the new characters, yet that character appears as banal as everyone else onscreen; his/her wickedness only paved the way for a life of comfort and spiritual numbness. In response, the demon, too, is bland and businesslike. This haunting is nothing personal. The movie is not nearly as scary or emotionally exciting as the first one, and its demonology is significantly less convincing. Still, it has a strong, atmospheric creepiness of its own. I felt a tingling heaviness in my heart afterward; I’m not sure if it was fear or sadness.

There’s something fascinating and valuable about a horror movie this intentionally cold and alienated, where the monster is less menacing than the complacent, polished, lifeless home it haunts. It’s frustrating, though, that the movie never ventures beyond that cocoon of spiritual deadness. In the first movie, the warm romance of Micah and Katie gave us some hope amid the horror; here, there is no such soft spot, no real humanity. In some of the old horror movies of the 1930s, actress Maria Ouspenskaya showed up as a Mystical Gypsy Woman to warn cocky, rational-minded heroes about otherworldly perils. P.A. 2 features today’s equivalent ethnic/spiritual type: the family’s maid, Martine (Vivis), who is Hispanic, devoutly Catholic, and immediately alert to the presence of spiritual evil. The same type was used in the recent horror film Devil, produced by M. Night Shyamalan. Devil is a much cruder, cheesier movie than P.A. 2, and its devout Latino security guard (Jacob Vargas) is a more egregious stereotype. Yet Devil takes Vargas’ character seriously; he narrates the film and embodies its pious message. The treatment of Martine in P.A. 2, by contrast, is disappointingly casual and uninterested; the possibility of her piety as a real weapon against the demon is suggested early on but cheaply discarded. All we have left, then, are the comfy and cynical; the baby and the family dog are the most charming characters. The daughter, Ali, has a certain innocence and sensitivity, but she’s emotionally under-developed and ineffectual.

At heart, Paranormal Activity 2 feels as cynical as its characters. By contrast, the charm (such as it is) of Devil is summed up well by Adam Markowitz’s description in Entertainment Weekly: “a bit like Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians retold by an unstable Sunday School teacher.” At the end of Devil, Vargas’ narration offers us comfort: “If the devil is real, that means God is real, too.” That’s a logically weak proposition but an intuitively strong one, and the horrors of Devil start, paradoxically, with a childlike intuition that goodness is real. Paranormal Activity2, on the other hand, seems to have plenty of faith in the devil but none in God. How very post-modern.