Online Audiences Demand Paranormal Activity Into Theaters

Halloween is here, which means that it’s scary movie season — otherwise known as the only time a year I’ll willingly sit through a horror flick, because I get scared EASY. But when I do watch them, I definitely prefer the theatrical experience, because it’s gonna be a long long time before at-home technology can capture the magic of sitting in the dark with a hundred other terrified people.

It’s that experience which is the key to Paramount Pictures’s release of Paranormal Activity, a DV horror film with no stars, no budget, and some of the year’s biggest scares. Directed by Oren Peli and released by Paramount Pictures, the film has been gathering Blair Witch Project-esque buzz for a while now, thanks to two years of test screenings and a limited release schedule driven by intrigued fans like myself, who were able to literally demand the film be distributed widely.

The start-up Eventful used the pre-release buzz for the official website, where visitors could hit a Demand button on the front page — if the site received 1,000,000 million Demands, the film would receive a wide release. When I voted on Friday afternoon, the tally was approximately at 930,000 (I couldn’t actually tell for sure, because of how fast the numbers were flying upwards) and it was cool to see it tip over 1,000,000 shortly afterwards. The film will go national on October 16.

This weekend, Paranormal earned $7.1 million playing on 160 screens, setting a major record for a limited release. All that with only a $2 million advertising budget, according to the LA Times.

There’s some irony to the fact that people are turning online to request a theatrical experience, but it works in conjunction with the official trailer (embedded above). For the trailer doesn’t get into plot, doesn’t tell you about the actors — it just shows audiences reacting in terror to an unsettling and scary set of images, with plenty of people physically shaken by what’s happening.

Speaking from my own experience, yeah, it’s a slow build, but it really is that scary. And maybe it would have been just as terrifying in my own home on my own TV, but when I see a horror movie, I prefer to know that I’m not the only one scared to death.