I find it enormously pleasing that the gore-free, low-tech, $12,000 horror movie, “Paranormal Activity,” trounced the latest picture in the “Saw” franchise (“Saw VI”!) at the U.S. box-office over the weekend.
Say what you will about “Paranormal Activity” — for me it wasn’t very scary or anywhere near as clever as “The Blair Witch Project” — but the success of the movie is a triumph of old-fashioned showmanship, combined with Internet-fueled anticipation and word-of-mouth.
Not since the sleeper success of “Blair Witch” a decade ago has there been such a phenomenal dark horse hit that flies in the face of everything that mainstream Hollywood holds dear — i.e. expensive stars, elaborate technology and blast-in-the-face national TV advertising.
Paramount decided to make the movie an “event” by leaking word many months ago of early screenings that reportedly terrified audiences. (Entertainment Weekly ran one of the first national stories on the brewing phenomenon.)
The studio then let moviegoers do most of the marketing work by setting up a Website that would clock requests for a full-scale national release of a movie that Paramount had been sitting on for more than a year (rumor has it that the studio was pondering remaking the film as a major release with real stars but then decided — accurately, as it turns out — that the crude look of the cheaply-made film played a major role in the story’s power with young audiences).
Paramount heightened the anticipation by doing a small-scale opening in a handful of college towns in early October that produced staggering grosses. Two weeks ago, the studio added more theaters but in many areas limited the film to midnight showings.
So, it wasn’t easy to see “Paranormal Activity” until last weekend. By then the teen and 20something tribal drums were beating so loudly that the movie debuted in the number one slot.
Younger movie industry people forget that the wide release of new films was largely an invention of the 1980s and the explosion in multiplex cinemas. Before that, new movies would roll out across the country very slowly — opening first in New York and Los Angeles to garner national media attention, then widening out to exclusive runs in the top 20 or 30 markets, and finally going into a second-run release at small neighborhood and rural theaters. In the old days, off-beat films, such as “Bonnie & Clyde” (1967) or “The Manchurian Candidate” (1962), had months to create buzz while they slowly traveled around the country.
Now that the marketing divisions of the film companies have been set up primarily for the mass international releases of $200 million films such as the latest Harry Potter film or a new “Spider-Man,” it isn’t easy to hand tool campaigns for odd little movies, but “Paranormal Activity” shows that if you take the time to release a picture carefully (and slowly), you can make a lot of money without spending much.
