Paranormal Activity's' haunted history

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Paranormal Activity's' haunted history
September 30, 2009
By John Horn
The Chicago Tribune

t was early 2008, and the director's DreamWorks studio was trying to decide whether it wanted to be a part of the micro-budgeted supernatural thriller. As the story goes, Spielberg had taken a "Paranormal Activity" DVD to his Pacific Palisades estate, and not long after he watched it, the door to his empty bedroom inexplicably locked from the inside, forcing him to summon a locksmith.

While Spielberg didn't want the "Paranormal Activity" disc anywhere near his home -- he brought the movie back to DreamWorks in a garbage bag, colleagues say -- he very much shared his studio's enthusiasm for director Oren Peli's haunting story about the demonic invasion of a couple's suburban tract house.

"Paranormal Activity" was hardly a typical studio production. Peli, an Israeli-born video game designer who had no formal film training, shot the $15,000 movie in a week in 2006 with a no-name cast, a crew of several San Diego friends and a hand-held video camera.

But as Spielberg and the DreamWorks team believed, the movie held a special appeal -- it was original and scary. The challenge was to fit this square peg into a DreamWorks round hole -- a process that would ultimately take more than a year and a half, the delay exacerbated by the slow collapse of Paramount's acquisition of DreamWorks.

Supported by one of the more unusual marketing and distribution strategies for a studio release, Paramount opened the film in 13 college towns Sept. 25; it will play locally at midnight Thursday, Friday and Saturday at AMC River East 21. Scary movies are a dime a dozen these days -- at least 75 horror movies have been released theatrically in the last three years -- and "Paranormal Activity" doesn't have the franchise awareness or recognizable actors that help separate a handful of genre films from the teeming herd.

Yet as preview and film festival audiences can attest, "Paranormal Activity" exhibits something many fright flicks don't -- goose-bump inducing, gore-free scares. Now it's up to the film (and Paramount) to translate Internet buzz into a "Blair Witch Project"-style phenomenon.

"The movie could be stratospheric, or it could just become a cult favorite," says Stuart Ford, the chief executive of international sales agent IM Global, which sold "Paranormal Activity" to more than 50 foreign distributors. "It just depends on whether the studio can catch a wave."

"Once every five years, a guy makes a movie for a nickel that can cross over to a broad audience," says "Paranormal Activity" producer Jason Blum, who, as a senior executive at Miramax Films, had a producing credit on "The Reader" and acquired the supernatural thriller "The Others." "And there are about 3,000 of these movies made every year, so this film is about one in 15,000."

In late 2007, Blum's producing partner Steven Schneider came across "Paranormal Activity," which follows a young couple who videotape themselves (including their nocturnal activities) to figure out who -- or what -- is tormenting them at night. An assistant at the Creative Artists Agency had seen Peli's movie in 2007's Screamfest Horror Film Festival, and CAA, which signed Peli, sent out DVDs to anyone who would take one, looking for a theatrical distributor for the film and future jobs for Peli as a director.

No one stepped up to distribute the movie, but Schneider and Blum thought Peli's first feature was so compelling that it deserved better.

Ashley Brucks, a production executive at DreamWorks, was one of the only studio types who believed in "Paranormal Activity" and continually pestered her boss, production chief Adam Goodman, to watch the movie. Goodman finally did, and on his and studio chief Stacey Snider's recommendation, so did Spielberg.

Goodman had invited several screenwriters to the March 2008 test screening in Burbank in the hopes of seeing not only which scenes worked but also whether the writers were interested in working on the new version. Not long into the screening, some of the moviegoers started walking out. "I thought this was one of the worst previews I'd ever been a part of," Goodman says.

The exiting audience members said they weren't bored but scared. (Other early spectators have echoed that sentiment, while others have found the movie implausible and silly.)

In November, Ford's IM Global showed the film to international buyers. Just as Peli and Blum had done, Stuart invited dozens of older teens and young adults to sit alongside 150 buyers in a Santa Monica theater. "It was nothing short of riotous," Stuart says. "In the next 24 hours, we sold out all the international rights in 52 countries."

A few weeks ago, rain was coming down in a hard drizzle at the Telluride Film Festival, and as midnight approached, the several hundred festival guests wrapped themselves tighter in blankets, tarps and ponchos as they tried to stay warm. The free, outdoor "Paranormal Activity" screening at this year's Labor Day festival scarcely benefited from the cold, wet weather, but few in the audience left early. By the next day, positive Internet reviews and Tweets were flowing in.

Paramount's expectation is that as word-of-mouth builds for "Paranormal Activity," people who haven't seen the film will use eventful.com/demand to request the movie in their towns.

The Internet service has been used by music fans who want bands to play a local gig; Paramount says the "Paranormal Activity" application is Demand's first for a movie.

"It allows us to be really responsive to what is actually happening," says Megan Colligan, Paramount's marketing co-president.