Last weekend the movie Paranormal Activity officially opened. It was the #5 earning movie for the weekend in the U.S., bringing in a little over $7 million in ticket sales.
Nothing is really unusual about that.
Except however, that Paranormal Activity appeared in only 160 theaters…a fraction of the normal number of theaters movies are released in. And oh yea, Paranormal Activity was made for just $15,000 (a small budget for the typical Hollywood movie is around $20 million).
The movie was originally made in a raw, point-and-shoot style by an independent film maker (think web video style). It was aquired by DreamWorks under the assumption that they would re-shoot it under a big budget Hollywood format. But then they decided to leave it as-is.
A clever marketing campaign that included Facebook and Twitter followed, building up word-of-mouth advertisting…which led to it’s huge opening weekend.
The lesson? Well, once again it’s proof that you don’t need expensive equipment or a lot of money to strike it big with video…whether your videos are online or off. You just need an idea and the discipline to take action on it.
Most of the ‘horror’ films put out by Hollywood these days have very little cinematic merit; in addition to not being scary.
Paranormal Activity doesn’t rely on special effects and camera tricks. It uses basic camera (and audio) techniques to play off the innate fear of vulnerability while we sleep.
There are only a handful of scary films that actually get to me. After seeing Paranormal Activity, I actually had some difficulty getting to sleep 🙂 I would highly recommend seeing it in theaters to get the full impact.