Coming from someone who loves horror films but is not easily scared, the first three Paranormal Activity movies were great. A movie is considered terrifying to me if I leave the theater feeling paranoid, unable to go to sleep and thinking about it days later. Unfortunately, “Paranormal Activity 4” did not leave me with any of these feelings.

Where its predecessors succeeded in scaring the pants off of the toughest men in the audience, this movie failed miserably. “Paranormal Activity 4,” directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, attempts to tell the story of a family whose neighbors happen to be Katie Rey and her “son” Robbie.  Robbie ends up spending several nights in the family’s house after Katie is supposedly taken away to the emergency room one night.

Alex, a 15-year-old girl with an adopted younger brother named Wyatt, video chats with her boyfriend Ben during Robbie’s stay. He soon discovers that his computer automatically records their webcam chats even as Alex is sleeping, conveniently. Ben shows her footage of Robbie coming into her room in the middle of the night and sleeping next to her.

They get the brilliant idea to set up webcams around the house to record what is going on at night. Let me just warn you now that this is the point I wanted to leave and ask for my money back. Not only is the whole idea unconvincing (who wouldn’t be suspicious of random open laptops displayed strategically around the house?) but the constant use of shaky camera footage gave me and half of the audience the worst motion sickness.

After an hour and a half of sleep-inducing scenes that only a 10-year-old would consider horrifying, the movie finally seems to get to the point. Spoiler alert: Wyatt is actually Hunter, which poses the unanswered question of who Robbie is and why he’s even there.

The last 30 minutes consist of Alex coming home to Ben and her mom murdered by the entity, which leads to her and her dad staggering over to Katie’s house next door. This can only be described as the classic scene of “victim follows willingly into trap” while the audience screams “Nooo.”

What follows are several minutes of darkness, screaming and faces turning into Scary Movie masks. A group of women appear similar to that in “Paranormal Activity 3,” who all start to hone in on Alex, whose father dies somewhere along the way. It finally ends with the image of Katie coming towards Alex with her face contorted. And that’s it.

Although a plotline was not entirely clear until the third Paranormal Activity, that is by no means a reason to avoid a plot in the fourth. Viewers were eager to find out what happens to Katie and Hunter and a conclusion to the story, but they will just have to wait until Paranormal Activity 5 comes out to do so.