Katie Featherston

There is a camera on a tripod at the foot of a bed, and a woman trying to sleep in front of it. That is most of what Katie Featherston is asked to do in Paranormal Activity (2007), and she does it without appearing to do anything. She plays Katie as someone who has lived with this since childhood and is more worn down than scared: a woman who would like a night's rest and cannot have one, because the thing in the house will not allow it and the man beside her keeps pointing a lens at it. When she asks Micah to stop filming, the line lands as a row between a couple, not a horror beat. Our review found the bedroom more interesting than the people in it, which is fair, but she is what makes the people worth sitting with.

The film was made by Oren Peli on very little, shot in 2007 and not given a wide American release until 2009. Featherston and Micah Sloat were cast through unscripted auditions and improvised much of what ended up on screen, which is why their bickering sounds like a household rather than a script. She then played Katie again in Paranormal Activity 2 (2010), in a brief adult cameo in Paranormal Activity 3 (2011), in Paranormal Activity 4 (2012) and in a cameo in the spin-off The Marked Ones (2014). She turned up in Peli's television series The River (2012) for three episodes and had a guest part in Big Little Lies (2019). Most critics found the later franchise entries thinner, and her appearances in them were often small. Outside horror, the roles have been few.

What she does well is the small stuff. Her fear is in the voice going flat and the shoulders coming up; she does not scream her way through it, and that restraint is what the found-footage form needs, since anything that looks like acting breaks the spell. We believed her more than we believed the noises. By the third night, when she tells Micah she is frightened and he answers with a plan, we were on her side and stayed there, and we were slightly startled by how angry a film this quiet had made us on her behalf. Some reviewers felt the couple had little to offer beyond the haunting, and there is something in that: take the thing in the house away and there is not much of a relationship left. But Sloat's Micah is written to be the problem, needling and disobedient, and the film's sympathies end up where hers are.

Featherston has since directed and produced short films of her own, among them Becoming (2016). As an actor she remains, for most viewers, one part in one house, and the franchise seems to have decided that was enough. If you want to see what she can do, there is one film to watch, and she spends most of it in bed, awake.