It’s early November 2008, and in a Santa Monica movie theatre a teenage girl is huddled in the corner, alone, rocking herself back and forth, like a baby. All around her, 250 of her frenzied traumatised peers are in emotional disarray. Some are yelling out loud, some are yelling at each other. While some are simply pacing the aisles, unable to sit down, or to watch. This, it transpires, is the first public screening of a low-budget yet highly potent horror movie called Paranormal Activity. The film, which was made by a 39-year-old former video games designer called Oren Peli for only $10,000, will soon be described as “the new Blair Witch”, will be supported and championed by Steven Spielberg, and will eventually — a full year later — storm to the No 1 position at the American box office for a $90 million (£54 million) payday.
For now, though, it’s all about first impressions. “That one screening has entered industry folklore,” explains Stuart Ford, the movie’s Liverpool-born sales agent (he links films with distributors) who organised the event. “We didn’t plant that girl in the corner, I swear, she was just freaked out. As was everyone. It was pandemonium. Clearly, anyone who was in the room that night was left in no doubt that this movie works — it just has that effect.” He adds that within 48 hours of the screening, which was also sprinkled with industry players, the distribution rights for the film had sold, in an unprecedented rush, to 52 countries around the world.
The movie itself has a deceptively simple premise, like all great horror films. A young professional San Diego couple called Katie and Micah (Katie Featherston and Micah Sloat) are increasingly disturbed in their own house by things going bump in the night. Micah, being a self-made day trader, a jock and a technology nerd, buys an expensive video camera and sets it up on a tripod in their bedroom to capture any nocturnal disturbances. Katie, being softer, less rational, and a part-time believer in the occult, is not so sure, but she capitulates anyway. Soon, naturally, the night-time footage, shot from a single continuous vantage point at the foot of the couple’s big black bed, proves hideously revealing — a door moves inches on its own, a sheet billows inexplicably and, worse still, footprints appear across the polished floorboards.
The drama escalates. A Ouija board spontaneously combusts, Katie sleepwalks, a psychic arrives (but flees from the house’s “negative energy”), and the demonic force eventually shows its teeth and its considerable physical strength. And yet through all this barely a drop of blood is spilt. Instead, in Paranormal Activity there is nothing so scary as an open door leading out to an empty, night-blackened corridor. The threat of something emerging from the darkness behind it is so great that it’s almost vertiginous. The fear that it engenders comes directly from within the viewer him or herself — a visceral, deeply felt sensation that has enticed some to repeat screenings and caused others to rock mournfully alone in the corner of darkened cinemas.
The similarities to The Blair Witch Project are self-evident. That movie, ten years old this year, was made for $35,000 and subsequently became a global phenomenon, raking in more than $240 million at the international box office. It is cited frequently by Peli as a source of inspiration for Paranormal Activity. He began his movie three years ago with Blair Witch in mind, conceiving of the film, like its predecessor, as a pile of footage made by the mysteriously disappeared Katie and Micah, and ultimately discovered by the police. “Blair Witch had proved that if a movie that purports to be ‘found footage’ is done well, it can be very popular,” he says. He adds that, personally, he is a fence-sitter when it comes to all things paranormal (“I have never seen anything I would call concrete proof that it exists”), but he based the film instead on the difficulties he had sleeping when he moved into his first, extremely creaky, home.
So, with only $10,000, a crew of three, a Sony video camera and two actors (Featherston and Sloat were paid $500 for their services), Peli filmed his movie in his own San Diego house over seven days and nights. “We shot round the clock,” he says, “With very little time for sleep.”
The two elements that are pivotal to Paranormal Activity’s artistic success as a movie — that eerie open-door shot and the lack of gore — were also paramount during shooting. Of the bedroom shot, Peli has explained, “I had been working on that for months, playing with all different types of lighting. You need to be able to barely see what’s happening in that bedroom, while still maintaining a degree of clarity for the audience.” Similarly, on the movie’s lack of gore-spattered set pieces, he has observed: “As in the case of Blair Witch and [the no-budget shark-attack movie] Open Water, I wanted there to be only a bit of blood. That’s just the way I like scary movies: you don’t have to go over the top.”
Once the filming and editing was completed (it was edited on Peli’s home PC), the movie began a tortuous three-year journey to screen, banging from Hollywood pillar to studio post. One of the first people to see it was the producer Jason Blum (The Reader), who was sent it on DVD. He watched it in his living room and, he says, started laughing at himself for being so scared. He knew, nonetheless, that he was on to a winner. “I had run the acquisitions department for Miramax in 1999,” he says. “And I didn’t buy Blair Witch. I wasn’t going to let it happen again.”
Blum jumped on board Paranormal Activity, becoming the movie’s official producer. He touted it around Hollywood, eventually getting a copy to Steven Spielberg. The latter, famously, was deeply upset by the movie, and even more so by the fact that things started to go bump in his Pacific Palisades home directly after seeing it — an empty bedroom suddenly became locked from the inside. He returned the disc in a black plastic sack, believing it to have, well, a malign influence (“That story is 100 per cent true!” Blum says, excitedly). Spielberg nonetheless began championing the movie, and even suggested to Peli a new tighter ending, which he adopted.
At this time, in 2008, the film was causing quite a buzz in industry circles. Executives spoke of remaking it with bigger, glossier production values. Others spoke of putting straight on to DVD for some quick cultish payback. It was then, in November, that Blum and Ford, organised the legendary Santa Monica screening. After which, Ford says, the entire industry was left with only one resounding message — “This is a movie that will play for any audience, anywhere in the world!”
In the interim, of course, a sizeable population of internet fans had been baying for the movie — industry buzz had been leaking for months, while some had seen a sneak preview at the LA horror festival, Screamfest. In response, Paramount, the studio that was about to release the movie, did something audacious. Instead of marketing it traditionally, with posters and trailers and TV spots, it directed fans to a “demand it” website (www.eventful.com/demand). Film fans from all over America could demand, with a single click, that the movie come to their local cinema. If the area received enough clicks, the movie would play there. “It was a genius idea,” Ford says. “In one fell swoop Paramount turned to the internet fanboys who were complaining that they couldn’t see the movie yet and said: ‘You like it so much? You want it? Then demand it! Tell us where you want it to play and we’ll play it there!’ ”
It was a revolutionary piece of marketing and resulted in the film being released in Boston, Chicago, San Francisco and 15 other so-called college towns on September 25 of this year, nearly a month before the movie’s national debut — by which point the chatter around the film had become so immense that the movie rocketed straight to No 1 at the box office. For Ford this is evidence of the possible future face of movie distribution. In a rapidly changing recession-era industry, one that is continually fearful of the internet as a place of piracy and poisonous bloggers, here at last is an example of the web working for Hollywood. “It spreads the word, it generates loyalty, and it pinpoints the fanbase,” he says. “It showed us that, for marketing, it can be so much more potent than traditional media.”
And yet, Ford is also wary of turning Paranormal Activity into a story of marketing hype. Instead, he says, “the reason why it’s been embraced by horror audiences is because of the integrity in the way it was made. This guy, Oren Peli, didn’t have millions of dollars and large crews full of experienced industry professionals. He was an outsider, and he made a movie that is scarier than anything Hollywood’s come up with in many, many years.”
As for Peli himself? The director, who is currently working on another eerie chiller called Area 51, has said that his highest ambitions for Paranormal Activity are that it will ultimately maintain a noble horror lineage that began with Psycho and continued through Jaws, Open Water and The Blair Witch Project. “After Blair Witch people said they would never go camping in the woods. I figured that sleeping at home is something you can’t really avoid. So if I can make people scared of being at home, Paranormal Activity might do something.”
Paranormal Activity is released nationwide on Nov 25
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