The once-a-year announcement continues to be entirely unsurprising, but here it is anyway... Following the success of this year's Paranormal Activity 4, Hallowe'en 2013 will see Paranormal Activity 5 making sudden loud noises in your local multiplex.

There are no details yet, other than the release date of October 25, so it's unclear if the directors of the last two instalments, Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman (who also made the excellent Catfish) will be returning for a third time. Their two Paranormals introduced some new story threads that are still dangling, however, so it may be that they want to stay for at least one more stint to tie those up.

Paranormals 2 and 3 were both prequels, but 4 finally got into the what-happened-next territory of Katie and Hunter's lives after their disappearance. The first film seemed to suggest that the paranormal entity was some sort of stalker poltergeist that was in love with Katie, but that's been lost and tweaked along the way. The last two cliffhangers have involved some sort of witch coven, and 4's big (unresolved) question revolved around the new identity of Hunter. 

Is there a grand plan here, or are the production team just winging it? It'll probably be a while before the series is finished and all becomes clear. While Paranormal Activity 4 was less successful than its predecessors, it still managed to gross well north of $130m in box office from a budget of $5m. So it's fair to predict that Paramount will detect ghostly life in the franchise for a while yet.