How Paranormal Activity Became The Most Profitable Horror Movie Ever Made – Screen Rant

Few movies have rivaled the unprecedented profitability of Paranormal Activity, a massive hit due to its simple premise and even simpler execution.

Paranormal Activity holds the record for the most profitable horror movie ever made, but how did it achieve such a feat? Horror movies have a great advantage when it comes to return on investment. Audiences will always have a knack for stories that terrify them, and the film medium makes it easy for filmmakers to create a sense of fear with limited resources.Darkness and suspense,two key elements for horror, are always cheaper to attain than action sequences and fantasy worlds.

The Blair WitchProjectcracked the formula to exploit this simplicity. The 1999 low-budget horror moviebet all its chips on anticipation, both in terms of marketing and in terms of story, with the Blair Witchfilmmakers blending fiction and realityto hype up a rather simple movie. Countless other low-budget horror films have tried to replicate this technique, but very fewhave come close to the success of The Blair Witch Project. When a humble 2007 movie built upon this technique with an even simpler premise, the found-footage sub-genre exploded once again.Director Oren Peli achievedthis withParanormal Activity,a surprising hitthatgarnered $193 million on a budget of only $15,000.

Related:Why The Blair Witch Project's SyFy Mockumentary Was Better Than The Sequels

The main reason whyParanormal Activitysucceeded was because it perfected the formulaThe Blair Witch Project popularized: the camera became a crucialelement inside the story, the characters were deliberatelypresented asnon-actors, and most importantly, the essence of the movie was based on how the evil entity isnot there. Director Oren Peliwrote the movie with his readily-available resources in mind, both reducing thebudget and making the story much more easily relatable it turns out people tend to be more familiar with houses than with cursed forests.

BeyondParanormal Activity's clever concept, one can findlots of tricks tocut costs and intensify horrorin the movie's production. Peli shotParanormal Activity in his own house, requiring only a few tweaks here and there to make the setting look scarier as the story progressed. Likewise, Peli designed the aesthetic of the movie to beconcordant with theequipmenthe already had. All the shots in the movie are either handheld or static, justified in-story with the characters using the camera themselves. The house setting also helped Paranormal Activityavoid thedizzyingmotionof the fully-handheld camera inThe Blair Witch Project.

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How Paranormal Activity Became The Most Profitable Horror Movie Ever Made - Screen Rant