Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on October 13, 2009, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
Recent film history is littered with exciting and ambitious genre films that wound up bypassing theaters and going straight to video; Michael Dougherty’s Trick ’R Treat and Thomas Jane’s would-be 3-D Dark Country are just two of the more recent examples. And for a couple of years after chilling audiences at festivals, Oren Peli’s Paranormal Activity seemed destined for the same fate. DreamWorks snapped up the $11,000 production following a Slamdance Film Fest screening in January 2008—and then announced its intentions to remake Activity on a bigger budget, consigning the original to be seen only on DVD, if at all.
All that changed in the last couple of months. After previewing the movie to enthusiastic audience response, Paramount (which had taken over handling Activity) decided to send the movie into high-profile midnight bookings and give the public the chance to Demand It! for their areas via the official website. Huge per-screen box-office averages followed, with the release expanded quickly to 160 theaters last weekend, resulting in an astonishing gross of nearly $8 million and the accruing of the million on-line votes the studio sought to justify a nationwide opening. As Activity (see our review here) prepares to frighten audiences across the country beginning this Friday, Peli is one happy man—and relieved that Activity’s two-year odyssey to the screen is over.
“It wasn’t fun,” Peli told FANGORIA RADIO last week. “Let’s just say I’m not good with sitting and waiting; patience is not my virtue! For a long time, we didn’t know what was going to happen with the movie, but now we’re very excited that Paramount is really behind it, and so far things are going pretty well.
“One of the deal points,” he added, recalling his original agreement, “was that all the DreamWorks executives had to attend a test screening with a real audience—because usually, executives watch movies on a DVD in their office or at home, and it’s not the same as seeing it in a theater. So they watched the movie with a live audience, and once they saw the response and the test scores, basically that was the last time anybody talked about doing a remake.”
Born and raised in Israel, Peli was working as a software programmer when he decided to create his own homegrown feature, based on strange noises in the new house he was sharing with his then-girlfriend Toni Taylor. “I don’t really have any background in filmmaking,” he acknowledged. “I’ve always loved movies and always dreamed about being involved in filmmaking, but that was really the first time I actually tried to do something.”
With the help of Taylor and good friend Amir Zbeda, Peli spun those odd occurrences into the story of Katie (Katie Featherston) and Micah (Micah Sloat), “a boyfriend and girlfriend who live together in a nice, normal upper-class home. Katie believes that she has been haunted by some sort of entity her entire life. Every once in a while, she goes through an episode of hauntings that last a few weeks and then go away. Micah is very skeptical about this kind of stuff, but recently he has heard and seen some weird things. He’s not really sure what’s going on, so he decides to buy a video camera and just let it run at night and record the bedroom while they’re asleep. This way, in the morning he can review the tapes and see if anything happened.”
What happens is that the supernatural presence begins to make its presence known through simple tricks—a door moving by itself and the like—and then gets serious about terrorizing the couple. Paranormal Activity plays out entirely through Micah’s tapes, though its most unnerving moments are poles apart from the shaky-cam aesthetic of The Blair Witch Project and other modern vérité horror films. Here, the key scenes are static shots of Katie and Micah sleeping late at night (often fast-forwarded to get us to the important parts), as the malefic force invades their room and eventually their bed. Yet there was more to getting those scares right than just setting up the camera and letting it roll.
“I was messing with the timing and tweaking everything for months,” Peli revealed. “It was literally about 10 months of editing and experimenting to get it to feel frightening. It can make a difference of a few seconds here and there between unleashing something on the audience before they’re ready for it or delaying it too long before it starts to get boring. That was definitely something I was aware of, just looking at the static screen, and any audio or movement that heightened the tension and anticipation, which makes it better than the payoff itself.”
Even so, Peli admitted he was uncertain about how others would respond to his homegrown feature. “When I was making it, I didn’t have any idea how it was going to turn out because I wasn’t really objective,” he recalled. “One day I would think, ‘Wow, this could turn out great,’ and another I would think, ‘No one’s going to buy that.’ I really didn’t have any idea until I started showing it to friends. At one screening at a friend’s house, there was this couple who came to watch it, and the girl was very cute, very petite, and her boyfriend was like a 6-foot-4-inch big jock type. And the whole time, he was holding onto her going like, ‘Oh crap, oh crap’—so that was the first clue. What really made me think about the movie in terms of a theatrical release was that for a few days after the Screamfest screening, I had all these people—adults in their 30s and 40s, some of them filmmakers—tell me they hadn’t been able to sleep very well since seeing the movie. At the beginning I was like, ‘Are you kidding, are people just trying to be flattering?’ but I kept hearing the same thing from person after person.”
And while the current theatrical climate is indifferent, if not downright hostile, toward low-budget horror fare, “After seeing movies like Blair Witch Project and Open Water, [I figured] anything can happen. A lot of the story of how we ended up going from the festivals to now being in theaters also had to do with luck and timing and the right people seeing it, because almost every studio in town passed on the movie, and said, ‘We like it, but we have no idea how to market it.’ [Only Paramount] said, ‘We love the movie and we’ll figure out the way to get it out there.’ ”
Peli revealed that he hasn’t been directly involved with the carefully calibrated on-line campaign, and praised the studio for its efforts and attention. “Every once in a while, they ask me to do interviews,” he said, “but the whole thing with Demand It! and the way they’re rolling it out, that’s all Paramount. They told us what their plan was, and we thought it was great. These kinds of movies are really hard to advertise in a traditional way. You don’t have famous actors that you can use, and there’s not that much you can show in the trailer. It’s not like a CGI-fest. We knew if the movie could get out to theaters, it would get good word of mouth, so that was basically the essence of the campaign. And so far, Paramount has been doing a really good job of just letting the fans take ownership of the movie and using the Demand It! feature to request the movie in their own towns.”
The cut of Activity now playing in theaters was altered somewhat from Peli’s original; a few trims streamlined the running time and, most notably, the conclusion was changed. “The movie tested really well,” Peli explained, “but one of the sticking points was that most people didn’t really dig the ending. So we figured we’d experiment and see if we could come up with something better. We tried a couple of ideas, and one of them came from Steven Spielberg, who happens to know a thing or two about movies. We tested two endings, but we shot a couple more that we didn’t test, and once we saw how well this one played, we said, ‘This is it, we’re going to go with it.’ That ending is what you’ll see now, and everyone loved it.”
Just what that climax entails won’t be revealed here, but suffice it to say that Peli’s Activity story has come to a significantly happier ending than that of his characters. He’s currently busy at work on his follow-up feature, Area 51, which reteams him with Activity producer Jason Blum and executive producer Steven Schneider. The story involves three teenagers with the legendary alien storehouse and incorporates the same found-footage approach with unknown actors—but beyond that, the writer/director is keeping mum. “My preference is always not to talk about future projects, so I’m going to remain very tight-lipped about it,” he said. “Hopefully it will turn out well and you’ll get a chance to see it in the near future, but for now I’m trying to keep everything secret. We’ll see with this one if [Activity] was just a fluke, or maybe I’m onto something.”
