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Steven Spielberg was certain his copy of "Paranormal Activity" was haunted. It was early 2008, and the director's DreamWorks studio was trying to decide whether it wanted to be a part of the micro-budgeted supernatural thriller. As the story goes, Spielberg had taken a "Paranormal Activity" DVD to his Pacific Palisades estate, and not long after he watched it, the door to his empty bedroom inexplicably locked from the inside, forcing him to summon a locksmith.
While Spielberg didn't want the "Paranormal Activity" disc anywhere near his home -- he brought the movie back to DreamWorks in a garbage bag, colleagues say -- he very much shared his studio's enthusiasm for director Oren Peli's haunting story about the demonic invasion of a couple's suburban tract house.
"Paranormal Activity" was hardly a typical studio production. Peli, an Israeli-born video game designer who had no formal film training, shot the $15,000 movie in a week in 2006 with a no-name cast, a crew of several San Diego friends and a hand-held video camera.
But as Spielberg and the DreamWorks team believed, the movie held a special appeal -- it was original and scary. The challenge was to fit this round peg into a DreamWorks square hole -- a process that would ultimately take more than a year and a half, the delay exacerbated by the slow collapse of Paramount's acquisition of DreamWorks. For a time, it looked as if Spielberg was right: "Paranormal Activity" appeared cursed -- to sit on a shelf.
But now, supported by one of the more unusual marketing and distribution strategies conjured up for a studio release, Paramount is finally opening the film in 13 college towns on Friday, with a wider national rollout planned for mid-October. Scary movies are a dime a dozen these days -- at least 75 horror movies have been released theatrically in the last three years -- and "Paranormal Activity" doesn't have the franchise awareness or recognizable actors that help separate a handful of genre films from the teeming herd.
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