By: Jonathan Crocker

Things go bump in the night again in scariest instalment yet in the surveillance-cam horror saga...

What's the story? Rewind: we're back in 1988, before the events of the first film, to reveal how raven-haired little sisters Katie (Chloe Csengery) and Kristi (Jessica Tyler Brown) had their first close encounter with things that go bump in the night. This time, it's the girls' wedding-videographer dad Dennis (Christopher Nicholas-Smith) who rigs his family home with cameras when he discovers one of his daughters has an invisible friend called Toby who lives in a cupboard in her room.

What did we think? Sharper and scarier than Paranormal Activity 2, this threequel isn't groundbreaking by any stretch, but it works the shock-doc template in expert style to set up scene after scene of nerve-destroying tension and heart-pulping jumps.

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Tap, tap, tap. Creeeeeak. THUMP! Here we go again... You know what you're in for. And there's nothing you can do about it. Reason to care about this one more than the last two? It's directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, the filmmakers behind last year's wonderful docu-mystery Catfish. Their smarts are fully in play (watch them have fun with a ghost in a white sheet), as they execute the franchise's old tricks with ace timing: slamming doors, rumbling soundtrack, crashing furniture, creaks and thuds...

But they also bring a brilliant new gimmick to the party: a camera rigged to a swivelling fan, which forces us to wait agonisingly while the image pans slowly back and forth, revealing and withholding the next terrible surprise. The fear factor is on a near-constant spin cycle: slow-burn suspense mutates into unbearable dread which detonates with seat-ejector scares.

You can poke holes in it all you want. Yes, it's repetitive. Yes, it makes no sense that the girls wouldn't remember any of this stuff. But you can't intellectualise the fact you're cacking your pants.

Predictable? You bet. And totally, unavoidably terrifying.

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