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Chosen One of the Day: The oscillating fan from Paranormal Activity 3
I love a good found footage movie. And the Paranormal Activity series gave us, like, two and a half good found footage movies but those good things are so good. Paranormal Activity 3 is the half-good movie of the franchise (the first two are great, and the rest we do not speak of) and honestly half of its half goodness comes courtesy of an oscillating fan with a camera strapped to it. Congratulations on your *does math* quarter goodness...? Whatever, it's a fan, it can't read this.
Paranormal Activity 3 is a prequel to the first two films (the second of which is actually a prequel to the first, look, the timelines are a lot) and takes place in 1988 when luckily sisters Katie and Kristi (the subjects of Paranormal Activity and Paranormal Activity 2, respectively) have a mom's-boyfriend who gosh dang loves cameras. But mom's boyfriend is an innovator in ways the previous camera-happy demon fodder could never be. Using that period-appropriate MacGyver know-how, Dennis hooks a camera up to a fan and lets that business oscillate. This means a good chunk of the film (a third of the quarter of what's good? this is too much math?) is spent oscillating.
In this, we are the fan. We're just turning left, turning right, stopping in the middle, doing our jobs. The fan bit is built up for a long time and is tense every single time making this moment all the more worth it (which I have sped up for gif purposes):
We the audience are like "HOLY S***" but not the fan. The fan remains stalwart, a calm hero, a semi-circle spinning icon. You might say we're *puts sunglasses on a ghost* its biggest fan. YEEEAHHHHHHHHHHH.
