All Hail Paranormal Activity!!

Hey guys, Julian here to fill ya in about a little movie called Paranormal Activity. (Note: this post may seem outdated, but was written with the Dutch Movie audience in mind and they only get to see the film in November.)

Now I’ guessing that most of you have heard at least a little something about the ongoing internet-phenomenon that is Paranormal Activity. I mean, even if you don’t enjoy wetting your pants in a stuffy theater full of screaming girlfriends and their male companions acting all tough, there is way more to this movie than first meets the eye. But before I get ahead of myself I think I should quickly give the ignorant among you the lowdown of what this movie is all about. (Hey there’s nothing wrong with being ignorant, who gives a f*ck about movies anyway!)

Paranormal Activity, which was very well catch-phrased with the slogan ‘The scariest movie you have ever seen!!’, is actually a super low-budget independent horror production. The movie is shot all with handy-cam, which might have seemed original back in the nineties but by now has become general scare-fare used by way too many films. (Rec., Quarantine, Cloverfield, Diary of the Dead etc.) My personal opinion is that this stuff could only catch on because of mass-pirating and watching movies at home, because more than ten minutes of the swooping handy cam motion on the big screen is enough to make any landlubber spill out his guts in the movie-theater. But I digress.

The movie chronicles (what an epic verb!) the story of a couple that experiences some paranormal activity in the bedroom. (No pun intended), and subseqently the boyfriend sets up a hidden camera to observe what goes on whilst they lie asleep. If you wanna know the rest of the story then go see the movie when it comes out on the 26 of November (NL), but the general outline of the plot should be clear by now.

So why am I writing about a horror movie in the first place, you may ask?

Have you ever heard the quote ‘An enemy of my enemy is a friend of mine‘?

You get what I’m going at now right?… ’cause this movie kicked the bujeezus out of SAW VI this Halloween. You heard it, Paranormal Activity kicked SAW right from the top spot of the trick-r-treating box-office season. Something many people considered impossible was done by the most unexpected of movies. Now if that isn’t a Hollywood dream story. Or to put it more delicately, David killed Goliath…but how did he do it?

The Internet!!!! (Insert dramatic drum rolls)

Paranormal Activity’s success is a classic example of the tremendous potential of both a good marketing scheme and the powers that is the Internet. Last year we saw something similar happen with The Dark Knight where mass viral advertising was used to creat Internet buzz. And we all know what happened with that movie. And now P.A. is taking the grass-root element of social networking to the next level. Basically what happened was that once the movie was finished, it got shelved for a couple of years due to the studio not wanting to go for mass distribution. Something similar happened recently to the movie Trick-Or-Treat, and that movie was also saved by such websites as Twitter and the festival-scene. So, P.A. was finally dusted off and starting playing in only a very select amount of theatres in the US. However, the movie was getting such great word of mouth that more and more people started wanting to see it.

This is where Twitter comes in. The studio created an account stating that if enough people would demand the movie to be screened locally, the film would be brought to their town. The result; Millions of people tweeted that they supported the film; it went nationwide and subsequently stormed the box-office charts. Note that whereas most Hollywood productions start out their opening weekend in the Top 5 and then every week slowly retreat down the chart, this movie did the exact opposite, something that only happens VERY rarely.

For the industry, this is big!! If you’re a studio, then of course you want your movie to make big money. That’s why they spend millions of dollars on marketing campaigns, because if one of those big blockbusters isn’t picked up by a mass audience, the studio is gonna be in big financial trouble. The downside of the way the movie-industry works these days is that almost no risks are taken, simply because one big mistake can mean the end of a company. That’s why studios such as FOX, who have been making shitty films still get to keep their big spot, because they make movies that are going to appeal to the general audience no matter what the quality. Another great example is the SAW franchise. Wanna know why it’s really called torture porn? Probably because they’ve got a poor cow somewhere in the basement that they’re MILKING TO DEATH!

Saw costs way less than your average Blockbuster (the last one was 11 Million), but people keep flocking back to the theatres every Halloween because it’s the equivalent of Starbucks coffee, recognizable and dull.

The cool thing about Paranormal Activity is:
1: It’s showing how powerful the Internet can be if used properly.
2: It’s showing studios that audiences are willing to pay cash for original films. (And not sequels)

Sadly though, what effect this is going to have in the near future is still unclear. One the one-hand things are looking good with films such as District 9 making a ton of profit and still being awesomely impressive even though there’s next to no budget involved. On the other hand, films like James Cameron’s upcoming AVATAR 3D movie is going to be the most expensive movie ever made (500 Mill). I think an awful lot depends on how that movie is going to perform. If it makes a good profit, studios will be encouraged to continue pushing out huge hyperbolic movies. If not, well than maybe there is some hope left for smaller movies getting picked up by bigger studios.

And what is SAW doing? Well, at the moment they’re probably still licking their wounds. But this week they already confirmed that the inevitable SAW VII is in production and that the future lies in 3D. An act of desperation according to me, as 3D is only going to make the movie more expensive to produce, and frankly the cheapness was always the whole point of SAW. We’ll just have to wait and see.

As for now, I’m raising my glass to Paranormal Activity!!! Skoal!!

Follow me on Twitter!
Or Friend me on Facebook!