Paranormal Activity (2007) | 50 Days of Horror, Day 33

Oren Peli wrote, directed, shot, and edited Paranormal Activity himself, for roughly $15,000, using one ordinary house, a handful of actors, and about a week of shooting. Then the finished film climbed all the way up the Hollywood ladder until, as the story goes, Steven Spielberg watched a rough cut, got so unsettled that he stopped partway through, and finished it the next day. That's the kind of origin story you can't write. It's also a good reminder of how weird the economics of fear can be.

What Peli figured out is that you don't need a ghost to haunt a house. You need a place where people sleep, a camera that stays on while they do, and a little patience. Katie and Micah are a young couple who set up a camera to figure out what's happening at night, and the movie settles into a rhythm that's almost unfairly effective. Daytime scenes are bickering and banter, the kind of bit that makes them feel like real people. Nighttime scenes are a locked-off view of a bedroom, a timestamp ticking in the corner, and the slow realization that you're watching the screen with your whole body. The actors worked from outlines and improvised their dialogue, a technique that gives the arguing a lived-in, slightly irritating authenticity. It's the same kind of approach that helped The Blair Witch Project feel so unnervingly like documentation.

Where Paranormal Activity pulls ahead of most of its imitators is in sound. There's no music to tell you how to feel, so the house itself does the talking: a door that creaks a little too long, a low rumble you can't place, a footstep that might be a settling beam. Many of those effects were added in post-production, which means somebody sat down and carefully designed the quiet. That detail alone explains why the film works better in a dark, still room than almost anything else in this countdown. The movie makes you lean toward the screen, which is exactly when it hits.

And then there's the road it took to get to you. It premiered at the Screamfest festival in October 2007, played Slamdance in early 2008, and ended up in the hands of DreamWorks and Paramount. Paramount ultimately bought the domestic rights for around $350,000, scrapped the original ending, and shot new ones, with Spielberg reportedly the one who pushed for a different finish. The studio didn't just throw it into theaters, either. It ran a "Demand It" campaign where fans voted on a website to bring the film to their city, rolling out midnight screenings in dozens of markets before the wide release in October 2009. It went on to gross roughly $193 million worldwide, enough to overtake The Blair Witch Project in profitability.

Not everyone lined up to praise it, of course, and the found-footage wave that followed gave the style plenty of tired imitators. But the original still stands as a lesson in restraint, in how few moving parts a scare actually needs. It's also one of the great shared-room movies, because it works best when you're sitting next to somebody who hasn't seen it, quietly watching them realize what the camera is waiting for.

For collectors, it's a funny case. The Blu-ray from Paramount carries both the theatrical and unrated cuts, with the unrated one offering an alternate ending, but there are essentially no extras beyond that. If you want the original festival ending that Spielberg's team replaced, the UK Second Sight Blu-ray includes it as a special feature, which makes it the one to chase for completists. Whatever copy you pick, resist the urge to clean it up. The soft, noisy, homemade look is part of what makes it feel like evidence.

So here's what I'm curious about: did the version you saw, with the ending you know, leave you with a different movie than the one that played for festival audiences, and does knowing there was another one change the way you remember it?

Part of the 50 Days of Horror series.