Not a Movie Snob - TGMT: Paranormal Activity

Posted on Sunday, January 29, 2012 at 05:00 PM

The Greatest Movie Trailers: Paranormal Activity

Paranormal Activity had a marketing ploy used first and to great effect by The Blair Witch Project back in the 90's. The whole 'found footage' thing has been going steady as a horror film offshoot ever since and it's greatest use since has been this first Paranormal Activity movie. Initially the only way you could see this movie was by going to a website and voting to have it come to your town. If enough people voted, or demanded it, the film would come to a theatre near you. Obviously everyone knows that the movie took off in a huge way, became the most profitable film ever made and spawned two almost equally popular sequels.

The marketing team behind this film had the ingenious idea to throw a trailer together that focused less on the movie and more on the actual reactions of a random audience losing their shit throughout the entire film. This was not fake audience footage, believe me, I went to see this in the theatre when it first came out and the audience I saw the movie with lost it as much or more than the one in the trailer.

Paranormal Activity is probably the scariest film I have ever seen and this trailer is a great representation of that. And of how fantastic it is to see a movie with a packed house, eating the action on the screen up like hungry puppies.