When the “Midnight Movie” was in its heyday, the actual movie was a mere side dish to the experience of going to a theatre at midnight and encountering whatever low-budget oddity was currently in vogue. One of the best movie trailers of all time is for John Waters’ midnight movie breakthrough Pink Flamingos (1972). The trailer shows not a single frame of the film; instead, we see interviews with people exiting the theatre, still reeling from what they’d seen and calling the film things like, “The most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen in my whole life.” Kinda makes you want to see what all the fuss is about, right?
The trailer for Paranormal Activity—a much buzzed-about horror film with a $11,000 budget, or just about $1,000 more than that of the 37-year-old Pink Flamingos—works much the same way, featuring supposed night-vision documentary footage of a preview audience being jolted and shocked by spooky happenings of the film. Through a brilliant Blair Witch-style ad campaign, word of mouth has been spreading to the point where last weekend the film hit number four on the Box Office Top Ten, despite playing on only 160 screens (a gargantuan $49,379 per-screen average).
Oren Peli is a first-time director, and so far out of left field that at press time he didn’t even have a Wikipedia page (I gleaned from his sparse IMDb profile three facts: he emigrated from Israel to the U.S. at age 19; he studied graphics and animations; and he has a spouse whose name is unlisted). As with Blair Witch, Paranormal Activity has benefited from the various myths and tall tales that have sprung up around it. According to lore, Peli was inspired by strange goings-on in his own home: the story of a couple that films their room while they sleep to monitor for supernatural activity is reportedly based on an experiment Peli himself performed. And get this: no less than Steven Spielberg reputedly believed the DVD was haunted when his bedroom doors “locked by themselves” while he was watching the film.
Fun stuff, but to his credit, Peli is much more interested in the nuts and bolts of filmmaking than perpetuating any myths. Key to the strength of a mockumentary horror film such as this, he stresses in a phone interview, are naturalistic performances. “I knew from the very beginning that once we had actors that could pull it off, which was not easy to find, we wanted to make sure that they could speak freely and naturally. So we gave them a little bit of an idea of what the scene is and a little bit of guidelines, but by having them come up with their own dialogue we were able to make sure that everything feels very natural in the setting and doesn’t feel like it’s some sort of a scripted, theatrical performance.”
Peli became interested in the film when he realized the vulnerable state we enter during sleep. “I knew that by placing the setting of all the scary things that are happening in the people’s bed, in their bedroom, that’s the one thing that you can’t really escape. And after people watched The Blair Witch Project people said, ‘I’m never going to go camping again.’ Or after Jaws people said, ‘I’m never going to go swim in the ocean.’ But if you set up the setting for all the horrific things in someone’s bedroom, then that’s what you’re going to be thinking about when you’re lying in bed trying to fall asleep.”
The Blair Witch Project is invariably mentioned in any discussion of the film, a comparison Pelin takes in stride. “It was definitely an influence. Blair Witch is the most successful movie that employed this kind of style, the cinema verité mock-umentary style, but I’ve been a fan of that since before Spinal Tap.”
“I think the style is similar,” he continues, “but the story and most of the other elements are different. So it’s still a different story. And I love that people say that it’s unique and original.”
Will Paranormal Activity really make you afraid to go to sleep at night, as many of its fans contend? “When people tell me they have trouble sleeping after watching the movie I take it as a compliment,” Pelin says.
A pause. “Hopefully it’s not going to become like a real medical problem for anyone where they… you know, they can’t sleep at all.”
