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PARANORMAL ACTIVITY
Directed by Oren Peli

By Peter Travers
September 30, 2009

Rolling Stone

With a $15,000 budget too puny to empty a petty-cash drawer, the no-frills Paranormal Activity comes packed with thrills. Oren Peli’s movie from nowhere owes much to The Blair Witch Project, and, OK, suffers by comparison. But make no mistake, this potent frightfest will fry your nerves and creep you out big time without spending a dime on obvious special effects.

The plot needs three sentences.  Katie (Katie Featherston) and boyfriend Micah (Micah Sloat) are freaked out by noises in their San Diego home. To catch what¹s out there, he sets up a night vision video camera while they sleep. We watch the found footage. That’s it. Over a period of about three weeks in the film, the tension builds and builds and builds until the dread ties your stomach in knots. No need to say more. If ghost stories have your number, this one will get you good.

Last weekend, Paramount opened the film with midnight screenings in 13 college towns, and asked audiences outside the selected zones to go on the movie’s website and vote if they wanted the movie at their local multiplex.

More than 200,000 did just that, so Paranormal Activity will open in 20 more cities this weekend. And many more cities after that if the pace continues. It’s a new kind of marketing campaign and perfect for a movie that proves you don’t need stars and computer mashups to make audiences shriek at things that go bump in the night.