Paranormal Activity
Short description
A young couple, Katie and Micah, live together in a house near San Diego. Katie believes an unseen presence has followed her since childhood, and strange events begin troubling the household. To find evidence, Micah sets up a video camera in their bedroom and leaves it running through the night, hoping the recordings will show what happens while they sleep. Instead, the activity around them grows more frequent and more aggressive, and the couple turn to outside help as the situation escalates.
The film is a found-footage horror mystery written and directed by Oren Peli, who makes his feature debut here and returned to directing with Area 51 in 2015. It was produced by Jason Blum, Oren Peli and Amir Zbeda, and stars Katie Featherston, Micah Sloat, Mark Fredrichs, Amber Armstrong, Ashley Palmer and Crystal Cartwright. The small-scale production became a major commercial success, taking around 193 million dollars worldwide at the box office.
On IMDb the film holds 6.3 out of 10 from roughly 271,000 votes, while on TMDB it stands at 6.1 out of 10 from a much smaller pool of voters. Its critics' rating of 7.2 out of 10 from 209 reviews is higher than either audience score.
What's left behind the scenes
- One of the most profitable films in the history of cinema. It earned 13,000 times its budget.
- The actors were not given scripts; they were simply told how to behave and what to talk about.
- Screenwriter and director Oren Peli later stated that he liked the original ending the most. Audiences at test screenings did not like it, the studio allocated an additional budget for reshooting the finale and shared its considerations on the matter. According to Peli, he tried – unsuccessfully – to persuade management to leave the original ending, but he has no objections to the resulting finale.
- All members of the film's creative team were required to wear only black clothing during filming so that other colors would not be reflected in the walls or on the wooden floor.
- A real paranormal investigator named Spencer Marks was cast for one of the roles. He was filmed to provide explanations for some of the phenomena shown in the film, but the scenes with Marks were ultimately cut during editing.
- Oren Peli used his own computer to create all the special effects in the film.
- Before filming began, Oren Peli changed the appearance of his own home for a whole year. Before the renovation, all the rooms were white, and there was no banister on the stairs.
- In the 1990s, producer Jason Blum worked at Miramax as a distributor and missed the opportunity to acquire the rights to Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez's film "The Blair Witch Project" (1999). He soon regretted this, as the film became one of the most profitable low-budget films in history. The market was already saturated with films that were simply made to "make a quick buck" and failed at the box office. At one point, Blum himself released a low-budget film (which became "Paranormal Activity"), and used the money earned from it to found Blumhouse Productions.
- The film was shot at the home of the film's director, Oren Pelikan.
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