The next installment of horror series Paranormal Activity is coming in 2015!
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The fifth, currently known as The Ghost Dimension, has had a casting call looking for new characters to torment. This will be first of the series to be shown in 3D. The film will be post-converted (shot will be shot in 2D then altered to appear in 3D).
Gregoy Plotkin will handle directing duties for the low-budget horror film, which has been fast tracked for a quick release next year. Conflicting reports suggest the film begins shooting in February and will reach cinemas in October 2015, while others say it will be released in March 2015. Jason Pagan and Andrew Stark are writing the script.
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This brings us to famous people who have believed in the paranormal. Maybe we should have a Paranormal film about one of Canada's most interesting Prime Ministers?
William Lyon Mackenzie King, outwardly a colorless man, was elected prime minister on Dec. 29, 1921. He served a record 22 years. Defying his bland exterior, King had a secret that leaked out after his death in 1950: he was a spiritualist. He communicated through a medium with what he believed were the spirits of his dead mother and others.
If King's spiritualism had leaked out earlier, his career would have been over. The idea of the paranormal activities and ghosts disturbed a lot of educated people in those times. The academic and scientific community dismiss claims of the paranormal, or parapsychology. Ironically, mainstream religion, including the Presbyterian church, King's church, also dismisses paranormal as rubbish.
But the Canadian prime minister, whose governments balanced marketplace competition with important social programs for the unemployed, is one of many noteworthy people who believed in the paranormal.
Other non-crazies convinced of its reality include philosophers William James and Henri Bergson, psychiatrists Carl Jung and (later) Sigmund Freud, physicists David Bohm, Nobel Prize-winner Brian Josephson and Thomas Edison and literary figures William Blake, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, William Butler Yeats and even Mark Twain.
As well as King, other Canadians interested in the paranormal include McGill University researcher Bernard Grad, turn-of-the- century psychoanalyst Maurice Bucke (a friend of poet Walt Whitman), Vancouver psychologist-author Leonard George and the Gitksan Indians of northern B.C.
The experiences of these proponents went under the microscope in a ground-breaking book by noted American philosopher of religion, David Griffin, Parapsychology, Philosophy and Spirituality.
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Combining skepticism and open-mindedness, Griffin strongly argues that evidence for paranormal phenomena is overwhelming. Griffin also explains why the scientific and religious establishments attack paranormal research without attending to the evidence. Dismissing the paranormal means they are avoid the need to make any changes in their worldviews.
Griffin examines repeatable cases of extrasensory perception (including sensing that a loved one in another city has died) and psychokinesis (moving a matchstick, say, without using one's body). He also pores over evidence for life after death, including messages from mediums, visual apparitions of dead people, reincarnation and out-of-body experiences.
Griffin's conclusion? Chicanery is involved in many paranormal claims. But even after fakery is weeded out, he says, evidence remains so heavy in favour of the paranormal that at least some of it must be true.
But the paranormal is not soon going to be seen as normal. Even CBC Quirks and Quarks host Bob MacDonald, an otherwise broad-minded popularizer of science, argues against the paranormal by saying virtually no one in science takes it seriously.
It would be risky business to do so. Independent-minded scientists who challenge scientific orthodoxy by showing openness to the paranormal would be penalized and ostracized; their peer-judged research grants would dry up.
Meanwhile, many people in the religious community also view the paranormal as unacceptable, even a threat.
The paranormal, as Griffin say, throws into question claims of religious exclusivity. It would be a shock to many faithful Christians, Jews and Muslims to think that miracles -- such as Jesus' healings and appearance after his death -- were not necessarily one-time supernatural events. Instead, if evidence is to be believed, miracles can happen now.
Although Parapychology, Philosophy and Spirituality is by no means a breezy read, because it is painstakingly methodical, it is potentially revolutionary. It is for those seeking a religion that is not only intellectually defensible, but astonishing.