“Paranormal” Marketing Campaigns.

Am I late to the game on the whole Paranormal Activity marketing story? Actually, I was early. Really early. I first saw this lo-fi spookfest back the Slamdance Film Festival in 2008, when director Oren Peli was still building early momentum for it. When we met on Main Street, he revealed the complex strategy he had in mind for tricking people into believing the movie’s content—“found footage” of a couple filming dangerous supernatural activity in their home—had a basis in real life. Things moved slowly for Peli after that. It seemed like a big deal when Dreamworks bought the remake rights, but then it appeared they had shelved it. When Dreamworks left Paramount later in the year, the studio abandoned the remake plans once they saw how well the original played in theaters. So they concocted an original scheme—well, not so much an “original” scheme as a Blair Witch 2.0 scheme—to build audiences’ interests. They discovered people wanted to see it around the country. And so Paranormal Activity delivered the goods.

But when I wrote about the movie, I focused on a different phenomenon: “This year’s program includes several markedly similar attempts to tell fictional stories within a documentary framework,” I wrote. “These aren’t lighthearted mockumentaries of the Christopher Guest variety: YouTube generation filmmakers have adapted the style as a non-ironic storytelling device—and when the tactic works, it’s stunning.”

In addition to Paranormal Activity, I noticed that two other Slamdance narratives—Fix and The Project—functioned as fake documentaries with strong dramatic intentions. If this reflected a new wave of storytellers moving toward a deeper understanding of the language of non-fiction cinema, then it had already begun to encroach on the mainstream. To wit: At the time I wrote my Slamdance report, Cloverfield was making bank at the box office.

Now, that encroachment has gone even further. Paramount realized it didn’t need to “enhance” Paranormal‘s effect with a do-over. Regular audiences, who have grown comfortable with amateur entertainments on YouTube and the like, respond to low budget entertainment on nearly the same level of a polished Hollywood product.

But if studios are picking up on grassroots techniques for catching viewers’ attention, it’s important to call them out on subpar efforts. Transmedia storytelling should have aesthetic standards like the movies themselves.

Thus: The “viral” campaign behind Universal’s The Fourth Kind represents a lesser attempt to take advantage of audiences tendencies toward “fake-fiction” thrillers. So I decided to break it down on the Wall Street Journal‘s Speakeasy blog. Read more here.