Paranormal Activity was advertising genius. I hate
movie theaters and everything they did to sell it made me go watch it opening
night. The first commercials weren’t as long as this one. They began about 30
seconds long with a note at the end asking customers to vote online. If a state
had enough votes, the movie would be shown at their local theaters. Later on
they began showing commercials like this one, containing scenes from the movie
and the reactions of those watching it. After so many terrible horror movies,
this seemed very refreshing. We were confused, intrigued, and definitely
curious. The commercials didn’t tell us anything about the plot but it didn’t matter
because the point was that it was scary.
They used a trick that’s seen a lot in retail: exclusivity.
By claiming a product to be unavailable to the majority, they convinced the
customers into thinking that it’s more valuable than it actually is. Showing
the movie in only a select number of theaters made customers want it (or “demand
it”) more, like the common saying goes: you want what you can’t have. Why did
we need this in our theaters? It was just a horror movie but it claimed to be
different from the rest. The clips of people’s reactions during the trailer
seemed to authenticate its horror status. It was claimed to be “the scariest
movie of all time”. They made customers think that they needed to be scared (or
maybe test their bravery?). It also contributed to the myths of ghosts and
demons, which nowadays seems to be the only theme in horror films. Paranormal
Activity was the beginning of many mockumentaries in the preceding years. Spoken
out loud, the whole thing sounds ridiculous but I, unfortunately, fell for it for
their clever advertisement strategy.
