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.
Blair Witch filmmakers blending fiction and reality to hype up a rather simple movie. Countless other low-budget horror films have tried to replicate this technique, but very few have 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 achieved this with Paranormal Activity, a surprising hit that garnered $193 million on a budget of only $15,000.
The main reason why Paranormal Activity succeeded was because it perfected the formula The Blair Witch Project popularized: the camera became a crucial element inside the story, the characters were deliberately presented as non-actors, and most importantly, the essence of the movie was based on how the evil entity is not there. Director Oren Peli wrote the movie with his readily-available resources in mind, both reducing the budget and making the story much more easily relatable— it turns out people tend to be more familiar with houses than with cursed forests.
Beyond Paranormal Activity's clever concept, one can find lots of tricks to cut costs and intensify horror in the movie's production. Peli shot Paranormal 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 be concordant with the equipment he 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 Activity avoid the dizzying motion of the fully-handheld camera in The Blair Witch Project.
Peli also kept things simple for the most intense moments. For instance, for the now-famous climax where Katie is dragged outside her bedroom, actress Katie Feathers was pulled by her leg with a concealed rope, which was easily masked out in post-production. The moment when Micah comes flying toward the camera at the end was done by simply having him jump a few times, gradually approaching the camera, and later stitching the shots together, thus creating the illusion that he hit big air with the same basic concept of stop-motion. These tricks are easy to do, practically free, and incredibly effective when coupled with the preceding suspense of the story.
Paranormal Activity became the most profitable horror movie with a fraction of what a regular Hollywood movie spends on a single actor, and Oren Peli didn't even have to exit his house. It all proves how a good premise and a careful execution is more important than the initial budget of a studio-backed production. Recent movies like David S. Sandberg's Lights Out have continued to reaffirm how an indie movie can easily become a blockbuster. Paranormal Activity stands out because it was so good that it didn't even need to get a major Hollywood makeover to leave its mark on history.
