Paranormal Acitivty: from indie to fame2

Correction: Previously, the arti­cle states that this film is rated M18. The rat­ing is now rec­ti­fied to reflect the rat­ing as NC-16.

Paranormal Activity is a mock­u­men­tary hor­ror flick directed and writ­ten by Oren Peli. It was first pre­miered at the Screamfest Film Festival in the United States on 14^th October, 2007. “You watch it in your bed­room, it can look like your kid made it,” Blum told The LA Times. “You watch it with an audi­ence, it’s an entirely dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ence.” After a young, mid­dle class cou­ple moves into a sub­ur­ban “starter” tract house, they become increas­ingly dis­turbed by a pres­ence that may or may not be some­how demonic but is cer­tainly most active in the mid­dle of the night. Especially when they sleep. Or try to. Katie (por­trayed by Katie Featherson) and Micah (Micah Sloat) sets up a cam­corder and leaves it on record mode before head­ing to bed. The recorded footage has been edited into a 99-minutes film that doc­u­ments their expe­ri­ence with the extrasen­sory. The movie was made with a micro-budget of US$11,000 and it has grossed US$61,580,588 (week 5 since the­atri­cal release) up to date. At the Screamfest Film Festival, Peli dis­trib­uted copies of the DVD to any­one who was will­ing to become a dis­trib­u­tor for the film–but it was not well received. Later in the year, Miramax picked up the film and gave it a look. They tight­ened and spruced the film up via edit­ing for two other film fes­ti­vals: Sundance Film Festival and the Slamdance Film Festival. The for­mer fes­ti­val did not accept Paranormal Activity as an entry and the lat­ter saw no inter­ested dis­trib­u­tors who were will­ing to pick it up and release it glob­ally. In 2008, DreamWorks got hold of the DVD and not long after the movie landed on the hands of Steven Spielberg. He found Paranormal Activity to be orig­i­nal and scary and hence decided to pro­duce the film despite rumors of the DVD to be haunted. (He had his hotel room locked from the inside!) Paramount Pictures first test-drove this movie by releas­ing it in 13 small col­lege towns in the States. The catch? The show only has midnight-only screen­ings. The response was over­whelm­ing and for the first time ever, a major motion-picture stu­dio has decided to use viral mar­ket­ing to pro­mote the movie. Through the hype on status-update web­site Twitter, the viral infec­tion has spread through­out the US, Peli invited inter­net users to demand (on Eventful) where the film should be pre­miered next. With all the buzz on the inter­net, Paranormal Activity saw a reported sold-out of a total of 33 screen­ings in all 20 mar­kets in the States. Paramount Pictures then screened the film in 40 mar­kets play­ing at all hours. On October 6^th, 2009, Paramount and Eventful announced that if the film receives 1 mil­lion demands, Paranormal Activity would see a world­wide the­atri­cal release. On Saturday, October 10 at around 1:35 a.m. Eastern Time, the counter hit over 1,000,000 requests. With critically-acclaimed rat­ings from the crit­ics and the average-Joe, Paranormal Activity is a story of how an indie-film rises to fame through patience, luck and viral mar­ket­ing. The Internet has evolved. Digression aside, will you catch this film when it hits our shore with your friends? “I watched Paranormal Activity for the sec­ond time and it STILL man­aged to scare the crap out of me.” — aun­cun­sauto­bus “Paranormal Activity is lit­er­ally the most creepy movie i’ve seen in a minute 4 girls ran out the movie the­ater” — nicole­domonique This NC-16 movie will hit Singapore on 12^th November, 2009.