Katie Featherston

An easygoing actress who has created a career out of playing a fictional version of herself, Katie Featherston is the onscreen constant in the highly successful and reliably unsettling "Paranormal Activity" horror-film series. After college, the native Texan headed to Los Angeles and found her big break when she was cast as a main character in the inventive low-budget supernatural thriller "Paranormal Activity," which met with huge buzz upon its 2009 release. The significant box-office returns on the movie led to a steady stream of sequels, all featuring Featherston in some capacity. The franchise's mastermind, Oren Peli, also brought her aboard on episodes of his mysterious television series, "The River" (ABC, 2012), but the show was quickly cancelled. Although Featherston has appeared elsewhere, she has primarily thrived in the relative comfort zone of Peli's eerie productions.

Born and raised in Texas, Featherston showed an interest in drama during high school and gained more acting experience in college. Like many aspiring actresses, she relocated to Los Angeles and waited tables while going out on auditions. One of these meetings happened to be with first-time filmmaker Oren Peli, who was looking for a pair of unflashy and relatable actors to play the lead couple in his debut horror film, which would use found video footage as its main conceit. Featherston was cast along with fellow untested actor Micah Sloat, and they shot "Paranormal Activity" on a tiny budget in only one week. In the partially improvised film, Featherston portrays "Katie," a woman living with her boyfriend (Sloat) who slowly realizes that she is being tormented by a demon that increasingly makes its presence known. The movie made the festival rounds in 2007 and was eventually acquired by Paramount Pictures, which released it in the fall of 2009, with its viral marketing campaign helping it garner major attention and surprising box-office numbers. In 2010 Featherston returned for "Paranormal Activity 2," which provided further insight into her character's demonic background. The same year, she turned up in the unfortunately titled "Psychic Experiment," a sci-fi/horror film that remained little seen despite her presence. Meanwhile, "Paranormal Activity 3" (2011) injected some new life into the series with some intriguing set pieces and further evidence of her family's macabre history. After appearing on Peli's short-lived Amazonian-set TV series "The River," Featherston returned for "Paranormal Activity 4" (2012), albeit in a less prominent way, and the continued success of the franchise led to a green light for a fifth installment, keeping her once again busy playing the demon-possessed Katie.