Original subtitles

Excuse me.

What scares you?

The dark?

I don't like spiders.

Little tiny dogs that snap their jaws.

Sharks.

Demons, or Satan.

Heights.

Natural disasters.

Putting my hands and feet in places I can't see what I'm touching.

Clowns.

Something happening to the kids, for sure.

Weird sounds coming from my basement.

My girlfriend, when she's mad?

Growing old.

Being alone.

Dying.

Ghosts.

Being home alone at night in the dark.

Demonic stuff is always really scary.

Fear of the unknown,

not knowing what you're gonna have happen when you wake up.

Something that's invisible, unknown, comes from a different dimension.

We don't know what it is, how to defend ourselves against it.

That's a scary concept.

- So, Jason, you just yank on... - Michael, will you just sit down...

And away the boat goes.

- Michael... - Okay. It's working now.

Are you sure it's not back there?

It's not back there, I just took a look in there.

We gotta get out!

Before I made my film, which was originally titled.

UFO Abduction, and then later on became The McPherson Tape,

I had never seen a found-footage film before.

I didn't even know that there was something

that was kind of similar for that.

A buddy of mine said,

"Hey, I'll give you a budget to make your movie."

- And I said, "Okay, what do you got?" - And he goes, "6,500."

And I literally said, "Great, for that I can do like a home video."

And then I finished reading this book called Communion,

and it terrified the hell out of me.

So I thought, "How do I experience, an alien abduction without the anal probe?"

And it dawned on me, well, if it was a home video

that you were witnessing this first-hand, and you had improvisational actors,

then it felt like, "All right, that might be a great way to get into it."

So my only experience with the found footage

was out of necessity.

Shit.

Holy shit.

- What the hell is that? - It's a spaceship, Mike.

When you want to be scared, you want to know something is real.

And I think found footage, when it was originally created,

the thing that terrified people and scared people

was the fact that it could be real.

Could they have done this? Could they have faked that?

Could they not? It really looks real, but one of them seems like an actor, it's

that sort of questioning in the back of your head.

And I had a couple of film students who came up to me and said,

"Hey, do you know that you're the father of found footage?"

And I thought they were messing with me

because no one had really kind of tracked that,

that I was aware of. And I said, "What do you mean?"

He says, "Well, you made this film," you know, blah, blah, blah.

And one of the other students had said, "Oh, well there was Cannibal Holocaust."

And I'm like, "What's Cannibal Holocaust?'"

Four young and fearless Americans, children of the space age,

armed with cameras, microphones, and curiosity.

A lot of people say that Cannibal Holocaust

is the first found-footage film, but it's really not.

It's a narrative feature shot on film that has found-footage elements in it.

A lot like Faces of Death, it was sort of the thing

everyone claimed for have seen.

I think a lot of people saw that, they thought it was real and were like,

"Oh, that part's fake. Oh, that part's real."

And I, even as a horror fan, I refuse to watch it.

A found-footage movie is footage that was found, the whole thing.

Ideally, it's not cut, it's not edited together,

it's all one long piece.

We pop the tape in and we were sitting there

on the couch watching it and we just kind of

kept looking at each other like this is Blair Witch.

You know, like they go from the footage for the people,

you know, looking at the footage for the back of the footage.

In the '80s, it was just a different...

You couldn't really pull it off the same way you could now.

I don't think audiences really responded

to the digital look as well as they did in the late...

You know, by the time The Blair Witch came around.

The reason I really love found footage,

and I think it started with The Blair Witch Project,

is because when it's done right, it adds a certain level of authenticity.

And this is like '90 or '91,

and Dan and I had just gone to see a movie called Freddy's Dead.

You know, it was not horror at all.

And we were like, you know,

it's just weird that horror movies are not really scary anymore.

You know, like The Shining and Amityville Horror

and, you know, Jaws and Exorcist.

We kind of started drifting towards

like The Legend of Boggy Creek and Chariot of the Gods.

And we started thinking like,

"I wonder if you could do that, you know, now,"

like you could really do like a pseudo-documentary.

They utilized the early days of the internet

in just a way that's so brilliant,

creating missing pages for people.

And at that point, I don't think mainstream audiences

were so quick to be like, "Oh, it's fake." They want to believe that it's real.

Unfortunately for the actors,

they didn't let them appear and do publicity

because they wanted to maintain the illusion

that the actors were actually dead.

Burkittsville people were calling people

to see if they could help find these kids in the woods.

That's amazing. I don't think that's ever happened before.

It does it in a very raw way,

like we literally had the actors shooting everything

and it very much looks like an amateurish video.

And I remember seeing that and going,

"Oh damn, I should have done that."

So I think it kind of disarms people,

and makes you, like, even if you know it's not real,

your brain's constantly thinking,

"Is this real? Is this, you know, a YouTube video?"

Here were these kids from Florida who don't know anyone in Hollywood,

they just bought some video cameras,

ran around in the woods, you know, with some actors,

and they made a movie that made quarter of a billion dollars.

So I'm like, "This is mind-boggling!"

I didn't know that you could make movies that way.

And maybe if, one day, I have an idea for a film,

maybe I'll give it a shot if I can do it in that style.

Does it feel strange being back here?

I mean, I still care a lot about the house.

I feel like, you know, not only was it my house

for about 12 years,

but it's also the house that changed my life

because of the movie that I made here.

So, you know, it feels kind of weird and special to be here.

So in 2003, my girlfriend and I moved to the first house

that I've ever lived in.

My entire life I grew up in apartments, even back in Israel.

So when you live in an apartment,

you're used to hearing a lot of noises from your neighbors,

walking down the hallway, slamming doors and stuff like that.

And when you live in a house in quiet suburbia,

everything is like super, super quiet at night,

you don't hear anything.

But we would hear some noises like the house creaking

and my girlfriend would get totally freaked out.

She would think there's gotta be something in the house.

I feel something breathing in my ear and whispering and there's noises

and I feel there is like someone walking around

and I hear footsteps and I, kind of like Micah,

was the skeptic.

And I told her, "There's nothing there,

it's just the house, don't worry about it."

And there were a few things that happened that we didn't know how to explain.

Can you hear that?

- I'm going down. - No, no, no, Micah!

I started thinking like,

"Well, in this day of, you know, technology

and access to video cameras,

I could set up a video camera in the house

or in the bedroom, let it run all night and see If it will capture, you know..."

"Maybe there's something walking in the house?"

"Is there, you know, an animal that sneaks in,

whatever it is, maybe we can capture it with the video

and find out what's going on."

And then I thought how scary it would be

to watch footage of yourself while you were asleep

and unaware of it and something is happening.

That would be really creepy.

So I never actually went on with my personal experiment

'cause I wouldn't have had the patience to watch

hours of myself sleeping, but I thought,

"Maybe that's a concept for a scary movie."

What is it?

So I spent about a year doing lots of things,

I was researching film making.

How do you cast people, you know, about editing,

and practiced the visual effects and sound mixing,

all that kind of stuff.

Also had to do a lot of home improvements to my house, to replace...

We had carpets all over that wouldn't have worked

with the footprints and Katie getting dragged out of bed.

So I put hardwood floor everywhere. Painted the house,

just to make it look a lot more nice and cinematic.

And did a lot of research on demonic hauntings,

possessions, all that kind of stuff from a religious point of view,

from the perspective of the people

who believe that they are being haunted or possessed,

I did a lot of research on that. A lot of research on found-footage films.

Are you happy? Do you have enough batteries?

I was working full-time as a video game programmer,

so that was my day job.

So everything I had for do with Paranormal Activity,

both during pre-production and post-production,

had to be in my spare time in the evenings and weekends.

Scorpion wins. Fatality.

Probably the most important thing that I needed to figure out

before I kind of green-lit it in my head,

was that I needed to make sure that I have the right cast,

that can basically carry an entire movie on their shoulders.

What I did at first, is I read some auditions in San Diego

and a few people came from L.A., actually, there was almost no one from San Diego,

and I felt like, you know, I need to go wider.

So I had to research, like, "How do you cast a movie?"

And then ended up renting a theater in L.A.

and put up casting notices.

I was surprised because I didn't have

the name of the project, no name of anyone involved.

Not that it would have helped to put my name,

'cause I had no credits in the film business,

but hundreds, maybe even thousands of people replied.

The behind the scenes of the behind the scenes

is always like an interesting concept because it's so meta, you know?

I had just moved to L.A. I was brand new.

I was actually... Well, I was waiting tables, I had no team.

I knew no one in town, no one in the business.

I was living in a garage

with a sheet hanging down from the ceiling in-between me and my roommate

and the rent was 450 bucks a month.

And I was actually house sitting for my high school theater teacher.

He and his wife had moved to L.A. the year prior.

And I was house sitting for them,

and on their computer scrolling through L.A. Casting

and I saw the audition.

- Hi, Oren, I'm Katie. - Nice to meet you.

Nice to meet you.

Have a seat.

I said, "Fuck this project, this is bullshit!"

I'm not going. That was my

I was like, "This is the most insane casting notice

I've ever seen. This is crazy."

It's like you're going into this house.

You can't tell anybody where you are, you can't tell anybody what you're doing,

and we're going to torture you while we film it.

It was essentially my memory and what the casting notice was.

I learned later that Micah didn't even like, really want it.

He was just kind of bored and he saw it and he's like,

"Okay, I'll just go do an audition for fun."

It was in this tiny theater

and I showed up with a heads hot, like you do,

and there was nothing to prepare.

And I was waiting in the waiting room and all of these women would go in,

and like immediately walk out.

In and out, like, less than 30 seconds.

People, people, people. And I'm like, "Okay, that's super weird."

What we would do was exactly what they did in The Blair Witch Project casting.

Just hit them with questions

and jump right into the improvisational stuff.

So people would come in and sit in and I would say, you know,

"Hi, thanks for taking the time to come here."

"What makes you think your house is haunted?"

Immediately she's like, "Oh, well, you know,

I'm hearing things happening."

And she was, like, immediately in character

and I could have an entire conversation with her

and she didn't miss a beat.

He's like, "Okay, well, now there's some stuff happening",

and you're in your house,

"and there's like stuff happening," and I'm like...

It's okay. Just stay calm.

You know, just experiencing

all this crazy shit that's happening in my house.

I swear to God, something... Brian, something just grabbed me.

The next step after that was to do callback auditions

with both of them together, basically right after they met.

I'm like, "Have a seat, do you guys need water?"

"And this is Katie, this is Micah."

"So tell me, how long have you guys been together?"

- Want me to tell him? - Yes.

- Okay, well actually, we... - I'm used to getting it wrong.

They didn't rehearse anything.

They never met before, it was all improv.

And I remember thinking then in my head, "This could work."

This could work just because they were so good and so convincing.

Hello, welcome to our house, or, actually, your house.

Oren sent us a videotape of what his house looked like

to familiarize us with the layout.

And he was doing some, like, you know,

like refurbishing of things in the house for, like,

make it look better on the screen.

Our production central.

We have all the equipment here and a whole bunch of stuff.

So this is basically off-limits.

So the actual shoot ended up being in October 2006.

We showed up and we kind of got acclimated,

and I basically moved into the bedroom that's in the movie,

and then Oren and Micah took the guestrooms.

Oren gave us a very, kind of intense collection of videos

of various documentaries about hauntings.

Basically just research into the genre.

But because we were playing a version of ourselves in a way,

there wasn't any sort of intensive character work,

and because we didn't have a script,

there wasn't any need to learn lines or anything.

So the preparation was less intense than, like,

for a scripted movie, obviously.

They never really knew what the story was until I was telling them,

"This is the next thing we're shooting."

So it only had to be sort of, an internal document

for myself and my crew.

And it was like, this weird color coded, line-by-line,

like, scene breakdown and had different...

Like if it's a blue color, then it's a nighttime scene.

If its a green color, it's a daytime scene.

If it's in italics, it means there's a special effects shot there.

All these, kind of, like, things that only made sense to me.

There was no real normal day. Like, we woke up,

we talked about what we were gonna shoot.

We shot it for hours upon hours upon hours.

Just leave me alone.

Will you stop following me with the camera!

The first shoot was a week. So it was seven days,

pretty much shooting around the clock.

Not a lot. I mean, we did sleep, but not a lot.

I think Oren's sort of relentless work ethic

was mirrored by our own desire to make something that mattered

and make something that was good. And we all wanted...

We would not stop until the scene was good.

- Wow! - Let's do it again.

What was the problem? That sounded good.

I think it was good.

I just think we should get another take for safety,

there was kind of a weird moment.

Okay.

The crew pretty much consisted of myself,

my girlfriend at the time that I was living with,

and I told her, "Look, we're to shoot a movie in the house,

you might as well help,

you won't be able to sleep in your bed anyways."

So she was helpful. And then my best friend, Amir,

who I've known since I was 13 years old, in Israel,

and I told him the whole story and asked him,

"Do you want to help?" And he's like, "Sure, sounds like fun."

"But I don't know anything about film making."

And I said, "You know, that's perfect, neither do I."

The only real crew member that we had was a makeup girl named Crystal

to come and help us for a couple of days.

We shot the majority of the nights in the first movie in one night.

God damn it!

I'm tired of this motherfucking poop in this motherfucking attic!

It's time to kick some demon ass!

I remember laughing, sitting in the hallway,

all of us laughing just in this, kind of zone of delirium

where like none of us are functioning anymore.

Just all of us, Oren, Micah and myself, just crying, laughing on the floor.

Oren has just revealed to us

that the name of the movie is Demonic Poop in the Attic.

The name was a problem. We thought about Captured.

We thought it means two things, both like Katie's captured by a force,

and also something's captured on tape. And we just had, like, this notepad,

Anyone that has any idea for a name,

just write a name and people wrote different names,

and Paranormal Activity just seemed kind of, like, accurate,

but dry. So we kind of just said, "You know,

that's the best name we have. We'll just go with that."

- We could use a little... - Be careful. You're about to

- run into the shower. - Extracurricular with this.

In the shots that were taking place in the bedroom,

usually I would be behind the camera unless I was actually executing a stunt.

Like if I was crawling on the floor to move a door or something like that,

then I would have to be there.

But if it's all them, then I'd usually be behind the camera

or maybe just kind of hiding in the corner of the room

that I knew was outside the shot.

The stuff that happens during the day,

and I wanted them to have full freedom with the camera,

then usually I would, like, go to hide in the bathroom

or something like that.

And I could hear much of what's going on. If I need to also see what's going on,

we could just immediately review the footage,

but Micah was such a great cameraman that we never had problems with him.

I am Dr. Yurhan.

I did do enough camera work to know

this is how framing works, this is how zooming works.

And then, when I got the camera and we're shooting,

and Oren was looking at the footage,

he's like, "No, this doesn't look hand held."

He was great with a camera, so great that I had to tell him,

"Don't do as good of a job because it looks too professional."

And I had him close the viewfinder.

I told him, "Just aim it in the general direction of Katie."

Don't focus so much on making the shot look good.

And then of course, later on,

as he's editing these hundreds of hours of footage,

he's like, "Thank God that you didn't

shake the camera more, people would have been so sick."

- Carbon image. - Watch your face.

- That's beautiful. - Yeah!

Look at this.

Now watch this be our best burn.

While I was trying to research how to do visual effects,

what I figured out is that if the camera is steady,

if it's basically fixed on a tripod,

it's pretty easy to have a blank plate, which is basically just the bedroom.

And then I can just mask things out.

So I can split the screen.

And if I'm here walking to the door and pushing the door

and I put a mask here,

I can just replace myself with the background

that was in the other shot.

So that's the basis for most of the shots.

So for example, for the footprints, I simply put all the footprints there.

And then with masking, I said, "Okay, now I'm just going for reveal this one."

"I'm going to reveal this one, and then this one."

One of the trickier ones was getting a Katie dragged out of bed.

That involved a lot of us.

We had to figure out, first of all, the angle.

How are we going for actually drag her?

So what we did is, I got a bungee ankle harness

and tied it to her leg.

And we had my girlfriend pulling her out of bed

towards the room.

And then we had a simple pulley system

where my friend Amir was pulling her into the hallway

and the pulley would, kind of,

get her exactly the right way through the doorway.

And my girlfriend would close the door,

so that by the time Micah opens the door,

my friend Amir can keep pulling her straight into the hallway.

- Micah! Micah! Micah! - Katie!

And Katie was like, "You know what? Just drag me down the stairs."

"Fuck it, drag me down the stairs, I don't care!"

And Oren's like, "I don't think my insurance is going to cover it."

And I was like, "But it will be so good in the movie!"

And he's like, "No." Which was the right call.

Okay, do you want to say, "Take one"?

- Two. - Take 207?

Then after we were done with the first shoot

and I put everything together, we all met and we said,

"You know, we're missing some parts here. These parts don't work too well."

And we had a lot of rounds of reshoots after that

to keep patching the story.

It was the hardest work environment

that I had ever been in, but in a very positive way,

because I think it enabled us

to get a level of investment and buy-in,

that was not possible in, sort of, a union setting.

So I tried sending it to some producers

and to some festivals and got rejected by all of them.

I'm like, "What do we do next?"

And then we had an opportunity to submit the movie to Screamfest.

So that was our premier screening event. And it went really well.

First time we saw Paranormal Activity, it was in 2007.

It was just sent as a regular submission.

We decided to accept it because it was very different.

The chemistry between Micah and Katie was off the chart,

it was kind of very believable.

Sounds pretty good.

So after we watched the screener,

I gave it to a friend of mine who was working at CAA,

Karill Baru, who was a young exec over at CAA.

And I gave it to him and he took it in and showed his boss.

And then, obviously, that was like a month before we even screened it.

They kind of sat on it for a bit.

I gave it to Luke Thompson in LA Weekly.

My review was that it was the must-see of the film

and I'm pretty sure it was on my Best of The Year list.

And then I gave it to Steve Barton at Dread Central.

I put on the movie, and my initial reaction was,

"Fuck, it's another one of these."

And then something really strange happened.

The characters started becoming really relatable.

The acting was way better than I'd seen in this type of movie in quite some time.

We had a, you know, great reaction from the audience

and I got in touch with a lot of distributors and press.

We got some great reviews and we won a couple of awards.

Katie won an award.

I saw it with an audience, and also the first time

I'd ever seen myself on a movie screen, you Know.

I remember just thinking, like, "Oh my gosh, these people are excited."

These people are, like, really scared and watching.

And, like, it was just sort of mind-blowing to me.

Micah! Come on! Come on!

After the Screamfest screening, things started happening pretty quickly.

A day after the awards ceremony, I got a call from an agent at CAA.

And I met him a few days later and he was saying,

"Hey, do you want to sign with us?" I'm like, "Yes, sure. Don't twist my arm."

That was good. I mean...

My agent sent the film to a producer named Steven Schneider,

who was like a horror guy and he really loved the film.

I think I sent two emails.

One to an executive at Paramount,

who I was close to and still am, her name's Ashley Brucks.

And he said, "Hey, I think I have something

you might like, but I'm not going to send it to you."

Because at that time, like, everyone was just, like, passing out DVDs

and you just pop it in.

And he's like, "You have to experience it."

And another email to the producer

whom I was working for and with at the time

sort of apprenticing in some ways, I suppose, under Jason Blum.

Steven saw it and loved it and said,

"You gotta see this movie, you gotta see this movie."

And I saw it,

and I definitely thought there was something special about it.

We got a few offers from places like IFC

and Anchor Bay to go directly to DVD, which would...

They were nice offers,

but I always believed in the potential of the film,

to do well theatrically.

I said, "Oren, I'm gonna make a deal with you,

I'll make a deal with you right now."

I said, "Let me come on as a producer of the movie."

"And we're going to sell the movie for sure."

"It's gonna be one of the stories."

And we went about the three-year odyssey

of getting Paranormal Activity from that stage into a movie theater.

Jason and I in particular started strategizing.

We started screening the movie for people. We would invite people over to my house.

He had, sort of, like, kind of, a screening room set up.

And I think there were, like, maybe four or five of us there.

Steven Schneider was there, Jason, and maybe a couple of other people.

And I sat and watched it one night, and it was super fun.

And she loved the film, she became, kind of, obsessed with it.

She showed it to her boss, Adam Goodman.

The first time I heard about the movie, it was probably in a staff meeting

at Dream Works, which I was running at the time,

and Ashley Brucks had brought it up at the table.

And she made mention of the fact

that there was this film, and it was found footage.

And at the time, you know, outside of Blair Witch,

there really wasn't any other example of found footage ever working

or necessarily being theatrical.

I don't know how many times I asked him to watch the movie.

It was multiple.

I think I watched it at my house on a DVD in my laptop.

And he told her like, "I don't get it, not for me."

And she kept bugging him, she's like, "No, you have to watch it the right way."

"Watch the whole thing, not on the laptop."

The first time I really watched it from beginning to end,

we did a screening at Amblin

and we had brought a bunch of other people info It,

and it really got under my skin in that moment.

Like, it was an entirely different experience

than sitting at home on my couch with the lights on

and trying to just get through my homework for the night.

And then we worked on the movie.

And Oren, every time we would screen the movie,

Oren would like go back to his house and futz with it.

He'd like shoot with Micah for ten minutes or shoot with Katie and he'd futz with it,

futz with it. Futz with it.

And, so, I always said he did 50 cuts of the movie after I was involved.

He probably did another 50 before.

And it would just get better and better and better.

We really were at the time planning on just acquiring it

to remake it.

And they are offering us a deal where I'm going to reshoot the movie.

I will direct a reshoot of the film, but with a proper budget and real actors

and make sure that it looks nice,

not like a crappy found-footage film, and do it right.

And I'm like, "No, it's not supposed to look right,

and it's not supposed to have real actors."

"It works because of the lo-fi nature of it,

because of the authenticity,

and because of the performances of Katie and Micah

who are not known actors."

The whole point is it's two people who are everyday people in a house.

So if you see some actors

you're immediately disconnected from the reality.

I started thinking about it and I said,

"Okay, I'll do it under the following conditions."

"One is that we will do everything we can to sabotage it.

So we can release the original version."

"If we do make it, then the original..."

"Original Paranormal Activity, the one that existed,

will be on the DVD as an extra of the remake one."

"And it has to be okay with Katie and Micah,"

because I felt it was like such a betrayal

to have them be part of the movie

and now, it's like, "Okay, thank you, guys."

"Now I'm gonna do the 'real' version for Dream Works."

"Thanks for the hard work."

So the only way I could do it was say

that we're going to make a deal and it's in that deal,

contingent on selling you the rights to remake the film,

you must screen the film in a test screening setting

for 400 people,

we chose Burbank, and you must attend!

It was one of the most

unusual screenings I'd ever been to

because the audience was leaving in droves.

And it was just one theater going, exiting after another theater going, exiting.

And I just kept looking at Ashley and I'm like.

I felt terrible for her.

I was like, "This is such a horrible result."

She was excited about the movie, I kept looking at Jason,

I was like, "See I told you."

And I got up to go to the bathroom,

and I said to one of the security guards as I was exiting, I said,

"What did everyone say when they're leaving?"

And the security guard looked at me and he said,

"They're saying it's too scary."

And right then and there in the lobby,

after the test screening, the Dream Works people

are saying, "Yeah, you know what? Let's just forget about the remake."

"Let's figure out a way to release this one."

And it's why, it was still one of the best nights

in my career. It's like, such vindication, right?

The remake is gone.

Just one more thing, we need to get to the approval

of one more person. Steven Spielberg.

Spielberg heard the test screening of this movie

that his company had bought the remake rights to went great.

He watched the movie.

I guess there was a door that has never locked

in the entire time he had lived in whatever this house was.

The door locked from the inside.

Like, he was the only one in the room and he couldn't...

He had to call a locksmith and open his door,

which is freaky.

He came back to my office the next day

and he handed me the movie in a garbage bag.

Because he didn't want the DVD in his house

and he didn't want to touch it.

And he thought it was so scary, which was great theater.

And he said not only is it so scary,

he said, but there may be something seriously,

you know, kind of, like, seriously off with this movie here.

So that was one of those surreal moments in my life

that I'm like, processing, like, if I heard

that Steven Spielberg watched my movie and hated it,

I'm like, "Oh my God, Steven Spielberg knows I exist!"

You know? And he actually loved it,

that was an amazing moment.

Getting that kind of reaction from Steven was,

you know, that changed everything.

I mean, we started to lean into this in an incredible way.

He changed the ending because we had

I mean, we got the ending that was at Screamfest.

That was a cool way of ending the film.

In the original version, the cops come in, Katie, I believe, is holding a knife,

they shoot her, and I believe Micah dies as well.

So I think everybody dies. It's kind of a grim ending.

Well, that was Steven Spielberg's idea.

He was like, "This is great, reshoot it, don't kill the girl."

And thank you, Steven Spielberg, for that.

But at the time,

Dream Works was going through a separation from Paramount.

What was clear was that Dream Works

was going for be, kind of, going off on its own,

and Paramount, which had acquired Dream Works,

was going to be keeping all of its assets.

I had heard that Adam, that Paramount, some, you know, forces that be,

wanted Adam to come over and run Paramount.

Initially Steven said, "Go to Paramount, oversee all of the Dream Works slate",

you know, into Paramount's system, but then come back home to Dream Works.

He said, "Look, I think Paramount might want you."

"I think you maybe should take the leap of faith."

"I know it's... We don't know what's going to happen."

No one knew what was going to happen at Paramount at the time.

They were going through a lot of changes.

So eventually, I think I knew I was leaving Paramount.

I wasn't going to be there for very long

because I was supposed to be going back to Dream Works,

and at that point I sort of felt bulletproof.

And I walked into my colleague's office

and I'm like, "We've got to figure this out."

And so we kind of created this "Demand It" campaign.

Paramount came out with this "Demand It" campaign

where you would kind of, have to be like,

"I want this movie, I'm gonna go see it in this theater,

in this town."

Their whole gimmick was demand that your city gets this movie.

This movie is getting a ton of festival buzz,

you have to demand it comes to your town.

I remember seeing the marketing for Paranormal Activity

and thinking just how genius it was.

And it put the cameras on, like, in night vision,

on the kids in the theater

getting their reaction,

getting a quick blurb from them in the aftermath.

Fantastic.

I'd see it again, definitely.

And I think that it's like, it's the kind of movie that maybe

it was done out of necessity,

'cause it's kind of, you know, it's a raw looking movie.

It's a movie that's shot on a Handycam,

so if you just were to cut, kind of, a traditional trailer,

I think the audiences hadn't seen a found-footage movie

that was mainstream since Blair Witch.

It's not the house, it's me.

You cannot. I'm in control.

You're not in control.

Paranormal Activity has had abnormal activity at the box office.

Sure has. That's because the little movie that started as a low-budget cult thriller

with hardly any marketing,

took home the number one spot at the box office last weekend.

And it was just enormous. It was huge.

And they put it out against Saw VI, and they won.

I was blown away by it. I mean, it was like

you know, it was perfect.

I got up and I moved down a few rows and I went,

"God damn it. Damn this guy!"

It was so terrifying,

and I thought, "I'm not gonna leave the theater."

So I went by the theater and when I drove up,

I thought I was in the wrong place

because there was a line, like, down the street for this.

And I kept looking around,

I'm like, "Is this a line for the movie?"

I kept asking them, "What are you in line for?"

"What are you in line for?" And they said,

"Paranormal Activity, Paranormal Activity, Paranormal Activity!"

I worked at City Walk and it was playing at the theater

right there in City Walk, and across from City Walk

was Buca di Beppo,

and I'd be like, "Hey, guys, welcome to Buca di Beppo."

"My name's Katie. So we have..."

And I'd do the whole spiel, and they'd be like,

"Do you... Are you that..."

And I'm like, "Yeah, I am. Yeah, yeah, yeah."

"I've only got a few more days." This whole thing.

"Did you like the movie? I'm so glad!"

"Can I get you a glass of wine to start off with?"

Struggling actors like everybody else

- out in Los Angeles, 150 people are... - Not anymore.

It was a movie shot in a kid's house on a camcorder

and no one would have believed that this little videotaped film

could actually really change a lot of people's lives

in the process of it.

Paramount, as soon as they saw the success of Paranormal 1, they immediately said,

"You know, we got to do sequels." And they wanted me to direct it.

And I'm like, "I'm done, I'm retiring."

You know, after you win the lottery, you don't go back to the factory.

So the second movie really was a disaster.

How can you make a sequel to a found-footage movie,

like, you found more footage?

It inherently doesn't make any sense, right?

And I remember having this, sort of, discussion with Oren

where we had to, like, prove how many sequels

actually were better than the original, which there aren't many.

Jason Blum, who is an old friend,

came to me and asked me if I wanted to direct

a Paranormal Activity 2. There was at that point no idea.

They immediately, kind of, started the process

of figuring out a story for the second one.

And I said, "No, no, I don't understand."

"I like that form, but I don't understand it."

And then I was like, "But here's what you should do."

"See, it should be a sequel and a prequel,

and we should stretch backwards and forwards,

and there should be this whole mythology thing."

Which I was a little skeptical about

until they come up with the concept of Paranormal 2,

which was making it sort of a prequel, but also kind of runs in parallel.

And I thought the concept was actually kind of pretty smart.

And so there was a lot of brainstorming, a ton of brainstorming creatively.

As I recall, then there were long conversations

about who to direct it when it became apparent

that Oren wasn't going to.

At one point, this was Steven and my's idea,

and it was the stupidest idea in the world,

thank God Adam shot us down, was to give 100,000 dollars

to ten directors, let them make ten versions

of Paranormal Activity 2,

pick the best one and call that the sequel.

That was one of our ideas, which was a really bad idea.

There was like a five-question questionnaire

that they sent out to directors.

Basically sort of saying, "Why did this movie work?"

"What made you think it worked and what would be the right way

to go forward with the franchise?"

Kip's not just a good writer,

he's a good director, he's a good storyteller.

And so we all sat around and continued to make up

what might be the conceit of the movie.

They kind of asked, "What's your plan?"

There's a release date, you know, five months from now."

"How do we do this? Or how do you think we should do this?"

And my answer was that we should start shooting immediately

and shoot a really bad version of it, like, that day,

you know, or as soon as we possibly could,

and then shoot another one and another one and another one

until we ran out of time. That we would just keep shooting,

that we'd get three houses, one for the set,

one for production and one for cast.

And that we would shoot until we ran out of time.

Trying to find the movie

and trying to be able to take Paramount Pictures

and the apparatus that comes with a movie of that scale

and trying to find the sort of bare-minimum approach,

and reverse a hundred years of film making

into now trying to essentially tap into all of what you know.

It was like making a student film.

- You see that thing in the corner... - Yeah.

Looks like a motion detector?

That's a camera.

We're watching you!

Casting was one of the really, really big deals.

And there was again, a lot of voices in that process.

So they said,

"Can you come up to the house and help cut some of the casting footage?"

I said, "Okay, do I have the job?"

They said, "No, but can you come out and cut?"

I said, "Okay, do you have a system? "No.' Okay, cool."

I had Final Cut on my laptop.

Greg was as much of a creative partner as absolutely anybody on the film,

and I was with him every minute I wasn't on set.

"The Friday before the production meeting, they called and said, You have the job."

And I'm like, "Is it 100 percent? Do I have the job?"

They said, "Yeah, you got the job."

When we were looking for people in L.A.

who... were unrecognizable or not broadly recognizable...

If you're in L.A. and you're pretty good, you've probably done something.

You know what I mean? You've done a few things.

So, Akiva encouraged us to go beyond L.A.

Don't look at me, look at the screen.

I played Daniel Rey in Paranormal Activity 2.

I played Ali Rey, she's 16.

She's the daughter of Daniel Rey and Kristi,

who is Katie's sister.

Kristi seems to be somebody who wanted to be an artist,

or an actor and they kind of gave up,

and is being a stay-at-home mom now to a teenager

and a brand-new baby.

Guess who was in labor for a day?

And a dog, an amazing dog. The star of the movie, really.

It essentially introduced the whole idea that the demon was pursuing this child.

And that they did this evil thing to transfer it to Katie.

They essentially were the cause of Katie having her experiences.

When they said there was going to be a sequel,

I was like, "Wow! Another one?"

"What is happening?"

We had had the idea of using them

and sort of letting Micah be in the footage early on

and letting people be completely befuddled.

And then being able to reveal

that this was actually a prequel, not a sequel.

Having continuity of actors,

especially since there were very few of us in the first film,

it lends a legitimacy to the sequels.

This was such a well-crafted idea, the first one.

And you wanted to honor that, kind of, spark of genius,

that thing that the three of them had created.

Okay, we have to have lightning strike twice,

but how you do that now with a studio and with also many more eyes.

I didn't feel a ton of pressure personally,

but I was well aware of the fact that

they were expecting this thing to continue,

you know, like Paramount was on board

and they really wanted it to replicate the success.

Once we had the cast, then we had everything we needed

to go make the movie,

but until we had them, you know, weeks were passing.

October's coming, and it was pretty panicky for a while.

We reached out a lot of writers and heard different takes.

They invited me and a handful of other writers

to come and watch the footage that they had,

which was really only

I think they had something like 15 minutes assembled.

And then they had like a.

I don't even know if it was a...

It wasn't even really an outline. It was just like a two-page document

that was sort of like, "Here's our story."

And I remember looking at Chris the entire time,

he was just sitting there with this, like, shitty look on his face

the entire time as we were talking about this movie.

I'm a very passionate person

when it comes to film making and specifically to horror,

and so I remember just sort of like

I think I had my arms folded and I was, like,

shaking my head the whole time through this meeting.

I was just looking at him, like, "What is this guy's problem?"

"Why is he giving us so much grief about this?"

While everybody else in the room was like,

"Yeah, this is great!"

And the head of the studio, Adam Goodman,

he looked at me and he said, "Chris, what's wrong?"

And I was like, "You guys are in trouble."

I think that was the first thing I said to him.

He's like, "What needs to happen is... ".

And then he proceeded to pitch the sequence

where Kristi gets dragged out of the nursery

and down info the basement.

All I remember is, like, we were all like...

"What other ideas do you have?"

And then after that

they asked me to come on board and start writing more.

And then as I got sort of more involved with the process,

it sort of became clear to all of us, that they just needed a script.

They couldn't just wing it anymore.

Oren authored the first movie,

Chris Landon, and to a slightly lesser degree,

but a very important amount, and Greg Plotkin,

authored all the sequels.

The vision of the movies belong to those two guys.

The release date was getting closer and closer and closer.

And eventually I called our head of post-production

and I said, "I feel like we're... ".

"This is gonna need to be a movie

that we're sort of making and posting at the same time."

Greg Plotkin was moved from editorial,

which was like way across the lot on Paramount,

to down the hall from, yes,

our president of production and my office.

The difference between found footage and a narrative

is that you really have to pay attention to every single frame.

There's going to be something different,

especially if it's hand held and it's an actor holding the camera,

camera's gonna move in a different way. You get some sort of different image.

It could be different story. It could be something different entirely.

So the challenge was, and the fun thing was,

I got to rewrite, which you always do in post anyway,

but I got to kind of rewrite the story or write the story, because I would take

a little bit from this story,

a little bit from that story a little bit from this,

and then sort of cobble it together to create

what I thought was the stronger narrative.

We'd shoot for a handful of weeks, look at the footage,

see what worked and rework the story,

maybe jump in and shoot for a couple of days.

I would be writing something and then they would be shooting something.

And then I would, hot off the press, like, run downstairs and like be like,

"Here's the scene you're gonna do now!"

And it was incredibly challenging, especially for the actors.

The process that we shot, that we used in the first film,

just wasn't there in the union setting,

you know, like, we're getting this scene to work

and then someone's like, "Lunch!" And everyone leaves.

That doesn't allow for what we did in the first film

to come into the second film.

Because of how we were shooting, things could change pretty quickly

and you could get something that was amazing.

We'd be shooting out by the pool and someone would have an idea,

"What if, you know, we use that pool cleaner

and the pool cleaner, like, crawled out?"

Instead of like waiting a week to do that and prep it and try to shoot it,

you could do it in a matter of minutes.

There's a sequence where the dad

is playing with the controller for the pool cleaner,

and then the pool cleaner ends up jumping out of the pool.

We must have tried six different ways

to mechanically get the thing out of the pool,

to digitally get the thing out of the pool.

None of them looked right.

And they were talking about like,

"How are we gonna tie strings to the vacuum?"

I said, "We're not gonna tie strings to the vacuum."

"I'm gonna go in, I'm gonna hold my breath,

you're gonna shoot it, and I'm gonna throw it

out of the pool."

Yeah!

The big scenes in the movie were experiments, were things that

that people had doubts would work,

or that shouldn't be in the film, like the whole part

of the security camera guy who comes over. That was a real security camera guy,

because there was a lot of push back of the idea

that this family would ever install security cameras.

So we invited a real guy over and asked him to take us around the house

and tell us where the cameras would go.

And we filmed him doing it and he ended up in the movie

and by showing that to the studio and showing that guy talking about it,

they became believers that this is something a person might do.

We wanted to add a few big scares,

and I think what we did, we had a meeting

with some of the stunt teams and the practical effects team,

and we just ask them, "What can we do?"

"What can we do that looks big?"

And one of the ideas was, you know,

we can, like, blow open some cabinets and cabinet doors.

And he said, "Okay."

And then, you know, "Just this cupboard right here

is gonna blow open, this one right here." I was like, "Okay, great."

So what you see on camera is the reality of me not knowing

that all the cupboards were gonna blow open.

And that is actually the first take.

We actually, probably, didn't tell her well enough

how big it's going to be.

The scene I think where I'm watching TV

and there's the demonic shadow that sort of comes over me

and I wake up.

This happened often because, you know,

we're working late hours and I'm tired and I'd say,

"Can I take a nap?"

"Yeah, sure. You can take a nap."

"Just know, like, we're gonna go into this scene."

"Okay, cool."

And then they'd put some guy behind a wall

that just goes bang!

And, like, that's a real reaction?

Place to go for affordable prices

on the best quality all-wood kitchen cabinets.

Paramount had a lot more confidence in it than they originally did in Paranormal 1.

And they knew it was going to go wide, so it was a totally different approach.

They had the marketing budget to go wide from the first place.

And they went, you know, really big with It,

but still wanted to maintain a sense of... It's sort of like it's a big movie,

but it still has, kind of, small origins.

So they wanted to make sure that they're always

in touch with the fans and they make the fans feel like,

you know, it's their film.

So it was a pretty clever way to both go big,

but make it not feel like a big Hollywood movie.

I was very skeptical on how they'd do a sequel,

obviously because of Blair Witch.

The Blair Witch sequel was an interesting mess,

I think, to put it mildly.

Two had this great idea of, "Well, let's just go back a few weeks

to when this stuff was almost just about to start."

And people were very, very scared.

And that's when I knew that we had succeeded.

We all started feeling, like, "Maybe it could be okay",

maybe it wouldn't be embarrassing,”

but I don't think we expected it to be as successful as it was.

When Paranormal 2 opened, it set the record for,

biggest weekend opening for a horror movie.

Honestly, a week before, if we'd screened our previous rough cut?

We weren't there.

It's very hard to keep mythology working

with found footage. It's very...

A found-footage movie is much harder to do

than a not found... No one understands that,

because you have to always...

You don't have to justify where you put the camera

when you're shooting a normal movie,

the camera can be wherever you want because...

You have to always justify where the camera is.

You have to justify why the camera's on,

why it's recording.

And mostly what you want for see in horror movies

is situations in jeopardy.

Most of the time when you're in jeopardy, no one's holding a fucking camera.

Like, you know, that's an endless problem.

Katie referenced her childhood quite a bit in the first film.

And then it really sort of became a thing

in the second film between Katie and Kristi.

And so I think we were all kind of fascinated with the idea

of like, "What was that childhood experience like

and what really happened?"

We all thought that the idea of having a prequel

happening in the '80s, focusing on Katie and Kristi

when they were little girls was a winner.

We felt very confident about the concept from the very beginning.

And it was also fun to think like, "Oh, wow,"

we, like, did this little movie and now this young actress.

Is playing a younger version of this role

that we originated in a house in San Diego years ago.”

I was finally able to really step in and take ownership of the story.

Instead of inheriting somebody else's idea

and then sort of running with it, this one was mine.

What I realized was how important it was for the franchise

to be true to the vocabulary of 1 and now 2.

Doing that again wasn't something I wanted to do.

We had to go out looking for new directors

and we were talking to everyone.

And we were interviewing everyone. Because the second movie

was both well-received and was a financial success,

the level of directors that were interested in it

had really changed.

We happened upon Henry and Rel, and really liked their stuff,

and though, maybe on the surface

they didn't scream, like, horror movie directors,

it doesn't really matter for this.

Yeah, before this, we weren't even big horror nuts.

Horror nuts.

I mean they were young, they were fun,

they were charming, they were really talented.

They had... this funny edge.

It kind of came out of the blue

because everyone thought Catfish was a found-footage...

Which it kind of is.

If you find it.

I mean, we found it in the camera after we shot it.

The directors who made this are very talented

and they did an incredible job at found footage

of making a story that seemed, you know, totally credible,

but it was obviously cast and it was, you know, it was all make-believe.

So, we must've flown out to L.A. within 48 hours...

- Yeah. - To sit down in front of,

it would seem like a Kafka-esque, endless...

Most intimidating meeting.

I think I said to them in the meeting, I said,

"Look, I think you guys are great, but you have to just tell me,

like, Catfish was bullshit."

"If you tell me right now that catfish is fake,

you got the job."

They stuck to their guns, they're like,

"The movie's 100 percent real, there's nothing to it."

So, I remember going back to my office

and talking to Jason and Ashley and saying like,

"I really like these guys. I think they're great,

but I think they're full of shit."

- And we didn't get the job. - Yeah.

Ultimately, cooler minds prevailed.

Ashley, Jason probably beat me up and said,

"They're our guys, they're our guys."

And Jason called and was like,

"Can you be on a flight 6:00 a.m., tomorrow morning

to direct Paranormal Activity 37".

And I was like, "Yeah, sure. How long are we going for?"

"Six months."

Only been here for a few months,

but thank you for welcoming me into your family.

So, I played Dennis, I think his last name is Smith.

He is Julie's boyfriend. He's a wedding videographer.

And he has this feeling

that there might be some creepy stuff going on around the house.

So he sets up cameras to capture it.

We went to a house and had Chris Smith...

It was important, could he operate the camera?

And did he sound authentic behind it?

It was more important when, if he was the filmmaker,

he was auditioning and following her around the house.

It's time.

- Don't film this. - Why not?

It's illegal.

Well, I played Julie.

Julie is a mom. She has two girls.

And she is with Dennis, who's her boyfriend,

who has become part of the family, he's a father figure to the girls.

Yeah, the cast was incredible.

And the girls, I think, most of all.

I watched some of the tapes on the camera

and I saw you talking to somebody late last night.

If you saw me talking to somebody, it would be Toby.

I thought that Toby was a clever way to, sort of, like

deal with the subject of an imaginary friend.

Toby was my neighbor's chocolate lab

that they walked by my house every day.

And this was truly the cutest dog I've ever seen in my life.

And so that's why I named him Toby, because I thought,

"Well, if this lab is the cutest thing ever,

like, Toby should be the cutest thing ever

to this child. She should trust him."

The witches, a lot of us were very skeptical about it.

And we thought maybe it's a little goofy, but it seemed to have worked pretty well.

I was genuinely terrified by the idea

of a coven of witches and the terrible things

that they were willing for do to get their way.

Post-production was exactly the same on PAS.

I think we had a little bit of a better idea

of how everyone worked, we have a better shorthand.

But it was constantly shoot, cut, you know, write, at the same time.

We'd shoot for like, a week or something and stop for two weeks.

And then we'd sit in the editing room and cut it together and we'd be like,

"Okay, here's a first act."

And then we'd go back in the story session,

throw out everything that we shot, except for maybe one scene

and rewrite the whole thing around that one scene

that we liked and do it again.

I would get new pages on the day.

"Here's the new scene we're shooting."

"We're not shooting what we were talking about yesterday,

we're shooting something completely different."

As an actor, you want to stay present, but you are of course insecure.

Like, well, what if I need to prepare

for what we're doing today and I don't have enough time?

But we just kinda had to throw ourselves in.

And that's what was so great about having Chris too,

because he was so lighthearted and funny and I felt so comfortable with him.

The oscillating fan was definitely one of the coolest parts of the movie.

It just created so much suspense in the movie.

It was such a smart, smart idea.

These films deal with space, with framing

and sort of how you can manipulate the audience

and create suspense by showing them things,

but also not showing them stuff.

My initial idea was that Dennis

was gonna build his own, sort of, custom rig

that would oscillate the camera back and forth.

And I just knew that like, we're gonna start to see something

and then we're going for lose it.

And then when we come back, like, "Is it there? Is it gone?"

And it just, it created SO many opportunities

for scare the crap out of people.

I loved it. Again, I love not cutting.

I love just sitting in the moment and so forth.

And Henry and Rel were really smart about how they staged stuff.

It was six months from the time

that the wheels of our airplane from New York landed in L.A.,

to the movie being in theaters.

Whatever it was, it thrived on fear.

I was so pleasantly surprised with the actual outcome.

I thought the movie was great. I thought it was super fun and scary.

I became a horror fan working on the movie.

Yeah, me too.

I mean, I was, you know, casual horror fan.

Like before that, I loved The Shining.

- I've seen the classics. - Rosemary's Baby.

Three is when it really got into, like, the witchcraft

and Toby and all that sort of stuff that really,

you know, opened up the mythology in ways

that are barely even hinted at in the first film.

I think the format certainly helps to still maintain this amount of,

you don't have all the information,

even though you're getting bits and pieces,

you're not literally cutting to the scene.

You're always limited by this viewpoint.

So as much as you know, you still don't really know everything.

The ending is then you're going into the witch's house.

And you know, it's not just gonna be something invisible

that comes out, you know there's tangible people involved.

And of course, you're going to want to go see Four

because it comes right at the end, and they don't fully explain it.

It's not funny.

After the success of Paranormal 3, I don't think that anyone said, you know,

"We should stop milking the cow."

One was massive. Two was less so.

Three ended up being bigger when they didn't expect it,

so we were like, "We've earned some room to maneuver."

They were really put through the ringer on the third movie, Henry and Rel,

like they really, you know, Adam tortured them

and Akiva tortured them. And they were just tortured.

We had fun with those guys from the beginning of end.

We were always giving them grief.

They were really playful. They had great ideas.

But they made this movie that was great and it was the biggest most successful,

I think, of all the movies,

and so they, kind of, reluctantly came back

for the fourth movie thinking,

and now we're gonna have the keys to the castle

and we're just going to...

- Four is gonna be, like, insane. - Right.

And they just got hammered all over again, they were just, right in the same thing.

- Opposite. - Opposite happened.

And that combination, where the first time they kind of had the will to fight back.

The second time, I think they were so mad

that they were being treated so badly that the movie really suffered.

I thought the worst movie that we did was...

The fourth and the sixth movie were the two worst ones.

I remember the first thing we did. We went in there and we were like,

"So, guys, it's time to get out of the house, right?"

Yeah. No more house.

There's three movies in the house, like, enough with the house.

Right? Let's get on the road. We pitched like a road movie.

Right or wrong, I always felt like part of what created

the magic of the film was that we were in these contained spaces.

It was always what you didn't see that scared you

more than anything.

We got excited about it as we get about everything,

but I still do always feel like it shouldn't have been in a house.

I think that with Paranormal 4,

that may be when we started to lose our way.

And even though Paranormal 3 did so well

it was hard to top.

You know, what had been done in all these films,

it was hard to, kind of, change the rhythm of it.

And so I think at that point,

there was a fear of, "Uh-oh, have we peaked?"

Paranormal 4 takes place after the events of Paranormal 7 and 2,

and it has to do with following Hunter, the baby from Paranormal 2,

and seeing what became of him as he realizes,

and his family realizes,

he may be the spawn of the witch coven, demon, whatever it is.

We started to think that we were becoming experts in,

you know, in how these films were playing.

The stuff that Micah and Katie say in the first one,

Just offhand, because I don't think Oren had this plan,

seven movies down the line became like the anchors.

They were like Talmudic anchors

that we would look back to as the Holy scripture.

- Yeah. - Like...

"Oren, what did you mean when you said, 'The fire?"

He's like, "I didn't mean anything. She's just said it."

And so certain things became, like, rules of the franchise,

that maybe in retrospect, we should've lightened up on

because the film probably had even more flexibility to it.

And then after that, it's sort of like anything goes?

And you start auditioning,

and just, like, open the cast and you see who you like.

And I think we really fell for Kathryn.

She had that improv quality, but she looks like a movie star?

They gave you, like, a paragraph, a synopsis.

They're like, "So your brother is dead. He died in a car accident."

"You guys fell off a bridge and your car was in the water

and you came out of the water and... Go."

You're fucked.

I could hear everybody. I heard everybody go,

"Oh my God, my brother died!"

And they started crying and I'm like, "Well, I'm not gonna do any of that."

- When are your parents leaving? - I don't know, soon?

I wanna get this party started!

The thing was just that there was no script,

so it wasn't like I knew what I was getting into,

all I knew was what I had seen before.

The boys were great.

Yeah! Yeah!

- The boys were wild boys. - Right.

Shit!

So I played Wyatt/Hunter.

- Yeah? How old are you? - Six?

I played Robbie in the film, the creepy kid across the street.

Wow! Dude!

We also thought that the fans really appreciated

and wanted to see Katie.

And were always sort of, like, waiting, like, "When's Katie's gonna show up?"

So I think we were trying to, sort of, balance that as well.

- Katie's the Terminator. - Yeah!

Like, you have to bring her back.

Katie is, like... lovely, and sweet, and charming.

And so, you meet her and you're like,

"Wow, this is tough to make her Michael Myers now."

She knows how to do it,

she can do this demon walk better than anyone.

She teaches people on set how to do it. She can do, like, dead eyes really well.

You throw the contacts in, and you just, you bring her in like a closer.

Like, "Katie, you've got, like, one batter

and we win the world series," and she's like, "Got it."

"You want me to do the demon walk? All right."

"Katie, we just need a demon walk down this long hallway

on night vision and tear through that door."

Henry and Rel are super mega-positrons, they're the most positive people.

I was always in a good mood. It felt like my birthday every day.

They were the most, like, fun down-to-earth people

I've ever met.

They just wanted me to have a lot of fun and be comfortable with everything.

Their chemistry together,

and I don't know if it's because they were friends forever

and this is what they did together,

was so great that I always felt very comfortable on set.

We're on the hunt. We need the gear. Know what I'm saying?

We filmed for four months because the script was changed a lot.

They give you a scene and there's like,

six or seven lines and you're supposed to hit that,

but they don't ever really say cut.

So then you just, kind of, start having conversations.

It's this huge studio film and yet for some reason you have freedom?

That was really cool because it gave me a lot of freedom

to determine that I knew who my character was

and that I could do whatever I wanted.

Okay. Here we go.

We were like, "Shit, we gotta top the fan,"

which was really hard to do.

So we pitched the Xbox Kinect. We brought one into the studio,

where, like, it throws out these 3D tracking dots.

It's a field of green. It's super cool.

You can see Toby emerge in the shape of the green.

Like that should be the hook of the whole film.

- No, no, no, no. Turn the lights back off! - Okay. Why?

Just do it! What the fuck?

We were gonna reveal Toby, but in 3D tracking marks.

Lights on. That was awesome.

And it just got shaved and shaved, and shaved

until it's just this tiny moment.

What was that?

Paranormal 4 ends with the reveal of the coven in the backyard.

- That was awesome. - Yeah.

Wyatt!

I don't know that Alex really was... That that was her demise.

I think that it's left to be like, "Well, did she become a witch?"

"What'd they do to her? Did they sacrifice her?"

"Did she kill them all? I don't know."

There was Paramount's ending and our ending

and they were really similar.

They were like, maybe it was like an extra 15 seconds

- or something on our ending, right? - That's it?

It was like... I don't think it was a... They were not radically different endings.

- One more story beat. - And we couldn't come to an agreement.

And so they say, "You know what, guys?"

"This is what we do in this kind of situation,

we screen both versions and whoever gets the highest score,

that's the ending we go with."

And we were like, "That's totally fair. Fair enough."

So we get to the... They screened the Paramount ending first

and we get to the screening, it's on the lot.

And there's, like, burrito trucks and, like, food,

you know, dessert trucks and ice cream and everything.

It was, like, everybody is having a party.

- And they're like... - Pumping CBD into the air.

And they're, like, the audience gets into the theater and they're like,

"You're about to see the new Paranormal Activity movie!"

And everyone goes "Yay!" And flips out.

And we were like, "Okay, this is really good."

So they show the studio ending.

Then a couple of days later, they do our ending.

No food trucks, people like,

- glumly file into the theater... - They'd been making them wait.

And the guy goes,

"You're about to see the new Paranormal Activity movie!"

And everybody boos. I'm not kidding.

They're like, "Boo!" And then the next day,

we had this meeting with marketing.

They're like, "Guys, we have this pie chart right here

that says your ending sucks."

I don't know what it is, but I've just been

hearing noises a lot of noises.

And, like, all this weird stuff has been happening

since the new neighbors moved in.

Even though I think that the movie itself,

the cast, and I think everyone did a great job.

I think it was executed well,

I think the story was a little bit too all over the place.

Well, I watched it.

And I slept with my mother for a couple of weeks

because I was terrified!

My dad saw it with me for the first time

and he was the loudest person. Like, he's old!

And he was in a scary movie, like, he was gonna have a heart attack!

Paranormal 4 was the first film in the franchise

that was actually a direct sequel to the original.

So now we were not sure anything of where it was going to go.

Was it totally successful? Probably not.

But it was a really tall order to try and do that, because now,

being that the first three films were so well received and so embraced,

now you're venturing info unknown territory.

It was very polarizing. It's probably the most polarizing of all of the sequels

because it's such a different movie.

There was quite a bit of camera use. Did we get a little bit carried away?

I'm not sure, I never felt like it went too far,

but I think there was definitely an interesting trend

to, kind of, make the look of the film more interesting.

So it's not just like always a hand held video camera.

What?

I think when Four didn't perform as well,

both financially and critically, a lot of people started thinking

like we really need to change things up.

We tested the movies constantly. So when we were in production,

we were always putting the movies up in front of an audience.

The movies were always performing pretty well

in the Hispanic community and in Latin countries.

So we said, "Let's start to, kind of, lean on that."

And of course who is the first person you call,

when you have half of a bad idea? It's Chris Landon.

Well, Chris had been an incredible asset

throughout the whole entire... Since the second Paranormal.

And he had been a director,

he had directed something and he really wanted

another chance at a studio.

And there was a good working relationship with us.

And we really believed in him.

At that point, Chris probably knew the franchise

better than most people.

He had been so essential in helping craft the mythology

and working on story and characters.

I felt like I could, kind of, just try some different stuff,

and just have fun with it.

It really was the first time that we ever greenlit one of the films,

knowing what the beginning, middle and end was.

- Who? - Oscar!

- Who? - Oscar!

Oh my God!

That film follows a couple of young kids

who realize that someone that lives in their apartment

is somehow involved in bad witches and demons

and stuff like that, and they ended up getting involved in it.

We ended up throwing a really wide net.

They all came from very different backgrounds

in different worlds, but the lead, Andrew,

he was really a guy who was, like, dancing on Hollywood Boulevard.

Before that, I, you know, and it still to this day,

I was just a street performer.

I break dance in the street of Hollywood with a group of my guy friends.

There was something about him that I found watchable

and incredibly likable.

I never really thought about being an actor or anything like that.

But my mom, she's an acting manager. So she's always pushing that on me.

Like, "You have, you know, a good look

and you're used to, like, smiling in front of people,

you should give it a shot."

And the same went for Jorge, who is incredibly funny.

Shit!

I play Hector...

Damn it, I forgot my last name in it! I should know this.

And then Gabrielle, who just was smart and interesting.

I played Marisol, and I was Hector's cousin.

We did sort of like, a chemistry read of the three of them together.

And then that's when the directors and everybody

were like, "Yep, these are our guys."

There was no second-guessing.

It was, like, these three people feel like close, close friends to me.

And that for me, if that didn't succeed, then the movie would never succeed.

There was that blend of, be serious about your role,

but be happy that you're working with each other

and the kids were, they were wonderful. I still have all their phone numbers.

I'm going to start bothering them.

Get off of me, man! Stop it! Stop!

I had a lot of fun with that in The Marked Ones,

sort of playing this idea that Jesse suddenly feels like

he has supernatural abilities

and that they'd been imbued by something else.

And he starts transitioning and he

starts getting these superpowers, I guess, you would say.

And he has fun with that at the beginning with his best friend, Hector,

and it goes bad shortly after that. And I become the bad guy.

Fuck!

Marked Ones was by far the easiest of all the films for me to work on.

Again, Chris and I had to shorthand from Paranormal 2

I mean, from, from Burning Palms then from Paranormal 2 on.

If there's one sort of, common denominator

I've really tried to bring, not only to this franchise

but I think everything that I do, is humor.

I like these movies to be funny.

Go!

Grandmothers in and of themselves are funny.

Because they've already lived their lives and they've raised their children,

they've seen everything, and they have that comedic side.

Chris was able to keep in the fear factor, but still make it funny.

The biggest challenge on The Marked Ones

was ending the movie.

On possession?

It's not gonna work, Marisol.

I had a very different ending that I started with.

Get out! Go, Marisol! Hold his head!

We shot some in a church actually that never made it into the film.

Fuck.

What the fuck was that?

And basically this demon just starts coming towards like...

Go! Move!

And he, like, has a shotgun,

and he's like, "Run! Run, Motherfucker, run!"

Jessel.

They actually shot some scenes where you could see the demon.

I think it's cool. It's okay...

Fuck!

And when we were in the edit together, looking at where I had started,

it suddenly felt like a different movie. It just didn't feel like it belonged.

And if was something that everybody felt in their gut.

And I didn't even try to defend it.

We thought it would be nice to sort of,

and kind of fun, to tie it into the original movie.

Chris Landon called me and was like,

"Hey, we've been trying to figure this out,

we really need you. Can you come for a day,

and be part of the team and shoot the scene?"

I thought it was really fun, actually, the way that they played with the genre

and played with the franchise.

I also think that Oren's house,

Katie and Micah's house from the first movie,

it was so iconic, that going back there felt like a fun,

clever pop at the end of the movie,

and a good way to tie this spin-off to the other,

you know, to the other movies in the franchise.

That was when I, sort of, came up with this,

just completely bat shit crazy idea of going back to Lois' house,

that this house was sort of the nexus

of the coven's activity in that they would take Jesse there.

And that our, that his friends would have to rescue him

and that in the process of doing so,

they would discover a portal that actually took them

to different places in the franchise.

Micah! Micah!

What's the matter! Where are you?

What the fuck!

There was an operating logic behind it in the sense that,

like, the coven,

because they're witches, you know, they have powers.

Like they have the ability that they can conjure demons

and they can put demons in people, and they can do all kinds of stuff.

So why can't they, sort of, create doorways

into other places and other times?

It also gives me, as an actor,

just a sense of sort of resolution of continuity

to know, definitively, how she kills me.

And I have to, like, wonder in my head

all these different ways of Katie slaughtering me.

Jesse.

What's wrong with him?

I feel like I'm losing time.

What the hell's happening to me?

I don't think The Marked Ones made as much money

for two reasons. One, fatigue. And two, it wasn't marketed

as part of the Paranormal canon. It was marketed as a spin-off.

I think it was the story and also found footage.

I think people were not into found footage anymore.

Which is a shame because it's super fun.

It's smart, it's creative, it's inventive, it's everything.

And it actually kind of, answers more questions in some ways

than all the other films do.

I think that movie was quite good and it underperformed because people left.

Paranormal Activity 4 with a bad taste in their mouth.

It really over-performed internationally,

but it was being comped to all the other Paranormals.

And so it continued to give the sense that the franchise

was on a decline,

when, in a weird way, what we were trying to do

was expand the franchise.

It didn't follow a lot of themes of Paranormal Activity,

and they sort of spun the series off,

and I credit them for taking that challenge

and jumping in that direction.

You know, the series started using toys.

Teddy Ruxpin, I think, was the big one in 3,

and then the Kinect in 4, this one had Simon,

we've all played Simon.

What if your Simon games started answering,

you know, the red button for no and the green button for yes.

Shit! Shit.

In addition to being one of the better later entries,

it... really paid off.

It's more essential than some of the other sequels, I think.

It's ready for you.

You know, Chris, although not involved directly,

or initially, he kind of created a blueprint

for where we could go with the franchise.

So the conversations had been happening for a while

as to how The Marked Ones fit into to the canon

and how we could progress.

Greg wanted to direct something himself as well.

Like he felt like he was ready and it was his turn.

But then he was given a story

and an idea that was just impossible.

At the end of the day, they wanted to do 3D,

they wanted to go big.

They wanted to make it very visual, to do all these time travel games

and stuff like that.

Just to make sure that we can say,

"We're not like the other films, this is something very new,

for the first time you're gonna see the activity."

There were a lot more, low budget,

found-footage type movies that came after Paranormal,

and we were just worried that the marketplace

also was saturated.

What happened on The Ghost Dimension

was 3D was something that we were talking a lot about

at the studio.

I kept saying like, "No, that's a really dumb idea."

"Please, please don't do 3D, that'll ruin the franchise."

The idea of making a 3D Paranormal movie had come up prior to the third film.

And when that idea started to float up, I kind of came in with a fucking bat

and was like beating it down.

We needed some hook to be able to grab the audience

and say there's, like, a new reason to come see this thing.

A family moves into a house. They find a batch of tapes

and they find a camera that has special abilities,

to actually be able to see beyond

what the naked eye can show. And in watching those tapes,

they find a connection to Katie and Kristi, and little Leila,

their daughter, is special to the coven and that at the end,

Toby is going to, sort of, be born finally.

I played Ryan Fleege, sort of, the father...

Well, essentially I find this camera

in our basement while I'm cleaning it out.

I played Emily Fleege,

and she was the mom, wife of the Fleege family.

Leila, who's Toby?

Leila?

Finding the Leila part was really difficult,

but when Ivy came in again,

it was super late, like days before we started shooting,

but she just had this kind of magic quality.

She was awesome.

Greg was nice and he was sweet and he was, again, very playful.

Fuck!

We had ILM come on and said, "What would you do to these scenes?"

And it just empowered them to say,

"Oh my God, be fun if they did this, this and this."

And then those got incorporated in the film.

So, we do this extermination scene.

Father Todd comes over and he says,

"If we can put this holy water sheet, trap him in this circle,

put the holy water sheet over him, then we can exterminate him."

We kind of had the whole room rigged with filament,

so I could just pull anything off at any time.

I had someone behind the Christmas tree,

shaking the Christmas tree and throwing stuff.

You have no idea what you're acting with.

You're just, sort of, making it up as you go.

So that was kind of a trip to just, sort of,

see X's on the floor and not even know

what the visual effect's gonna be at the end of the day,

but you're reacting to it.

It was just kind of, like, pretending someone was there.

It was chaos because it was like in the middle of it,

it would be like, whoever had the camera would,

someone would be telling them, cause they're in video village, like,

"Pan down, pan up, look over here!"

"This person, say something! This person, look here!"

"Toby's huge! Now he's not! Now he's this!"

And then I guess I pull somebody out of the...

Ivy's getting sucked into the demon... vortex.

It wasn't scary, it was actually pretty fun.

I think that, I wouldn't say the worst part,

but a part that I had some difficulty with,

was there was a really bright light.

And there was a lot of whips and a lot of whips

and just trying to, kind of, build it in post.

And we thought it might be a fun opportunity

with the 3D to, kind of, show the demon moving around

and so forth, but it was, kind of, all hands on deck,

just like throw as much shit in there as you can

and make it sound crazy and fun.

I think this camera can see things you cannot see with the naked eye.

I've heard of spirit photography before, I've just never seen it in person.

- Here I am. He'll do... - What are you doing in here?

The big thing for us was that we thought that the 3D,

that that Ghost Dimension aspect of it, that we wouldn't market it as a 3D movie,

that we would give people the 3D glasses to kind of see this new thing.

And it was very complicated.

I think a lot of people were a little put-off

by the 3D and some of the effects and so forth.

You know, obviously, there was a lot of people

that loved it and thought it answered questions and so forth.

But I think there was a lot of,

or a good amount of frustration that it didn't

quite answer the questions in the way you want.

Ghost Dimension isn't a terrible movie, but it's not the way I think

it's not what I would want from a finale, or a franchise finale.

The problem with the Ghost Dimension is it kind of painted itself into a corner.

It was being portrayed as the last of the franchise.

This was gonna be the end.

Come on, we've all watched Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter.

It's never the end.

The series started off with a guy in his house

and his tripod, you know, and I'm like,

"Now we have ILM effects and 3D and all this stuff," and it's just like,

it's really, kind of, gone away from what made the first one really work.

I don't think I had as much creative control

as I would've liked.

So there were a lot of creative decisions that I just had no say in.

Would they have been better? I don't know.

But it was definitely sometimes difficult to try to go down a path

that I didn't necessarily think was the healthiest for the film.

They actually released it at about half the theaters

that they released the other films of the franchise in.

And I can remember not being able to find it at a theater.

Paranormal 6 is the only movie in the franchise

I did not see in theaters.

It was just a weird thing. I don't, to this day, quite know

all the politics involved.

- Oh my God! - Father!

Here I am. He'll do.

Here I am. He'll do.

The decision was made by the studio

when they saw that, basically, their revenues are declining,

it's not becoming as profitable, and I said, "You know what?"

"We should just kinda quit while we're not even ahead."

We were flat out of ideas. It was...

You know, the movie had created so much success

for everyone involved with it,

that Jason, especially, had had such a big,

booming business that was happening that I also, was holding him back

from being able to launch his empire, that he's since created.

And... you know, bands have to take a break

and get off the road every once in a while.

We just said, "You know, let's just quit for now

and take a long break from Paranormal Activity."

Those movies were probably the most fun part

of my job and running all of Paramount.

My personal relationship to Paranormal Activity

is it gave me my business model and I built a huge business off it.

I went from knocking on the door to now, being in the room and being able direct

and sort of, fulfill all of my creative dreams,

so I couldn't be more thankful to the franchise.

Those movies were, kind of, our studio film school in a way.

- And, like... - It was a crash course.

It was a crash course, and, like, we learned from Akiva and from Chris,

and these guys who are just the best.

One of the cool things about making these movies,

and one of the humbling things about making these movies,

is that it truly was a... it was a group effort.

Yeah, I can't describe it.

It's been an emotional roller coaster,

but also I loved working on these movies.

I loved working hard.

I learned the most I ever have in terms of being behind the camera

and the physical production of it all.

I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world.

I think the Paranormal Activity films appear to be real.

I think that we believe that next door, down the block, in our house

there are stories, and not all of them are good stories.

Maybe deep down, you know that it's not real,

but it feels real.

And it's easier for you to, kind of, get more attached

and invested in the characters.

What that guy did with not a lot of money and two actors in his own house

changed the horror industry, changed the genre.

There's, like, a specialness that I get to share it,

not only with Oren and Katie,

but with all the fans and we're doing it together.

We were in the moment and we were focused on making the best movie

we knew how to make because it was fun, and because we cared about it.

I mean, the whole thing is very surreal.

I mean, I'm mostly really proud of the success of the first one.

I think the other sequels had a lot more people involved,

but, yeah, anything and everything

that happened around the success of the franchise

has been, kind of, mind-boggling to me.

And I'm just happy to go along on the ride.

I think Oren's conceit of a couple, "I see ghosts, I don't see ghosts,

I'm gonna get a camera to you to prove that there're ghosts,"

there's absolutely no better, and there never has been a better,

and I'd be surprised if there ever will be a better setup

for a found-footage movie. It was brilliant.

You know, it was extraordinary.

What's up, everybody?

We're here on set shooting the next installment

of Paranormal Activity.

Hi, my name is Emily Bader and I'm playing Margot.

Yo, you're killing my interview!

Hi, everybody. I'm Dan Lippert and I play Dale.

This is my time now, okay?

Hey, I'm Will Eubank, the director of Paranormal Activity 7.

And this mic is ridiculous.

We're filming the new Paranormal Activity 7

in Buffalo, New York.

It's always fun shooting scary movies

where you just feel like there's adrenaline

around every corner and scares, and little rushes, and whatnot.

But I think when the cast and crew come together

and they work in, like, that kind of environment,

it's just a hell of a lot of fun.

It's been, like, a weird little summer camp.

It was five weeks on a farm.

Like, we are our support system because we're really out here alone.

You kind of, either got to love each other or hate each other.

I think we came out with some love.

We have to be, like, super-together.

And like, scary, crazy nights. Everybody, kind of, has to buckle in.

So, yeah. Oh my fucking God!

Paranormal Activity films have always represented,

like, this crazy level of just true fear, but fear that feels like

something that could sort of happen to you.

The new direction that Will Eubank is taking the movie.

He's really, added a lot of new, exciting visual elements to the film.

I'm really excited to see the reaction of people

to the cinematography of this particular piece.

The other Paranormals,

you know, you kind of are secluded to one environment.

I'm super excited for fans to get to see, sort of,

an expansion of the world in a lot of ways.

In this one, we get out of one environment,

we're in many environments.

There's not a lot I can tell you about this PA,

but the things I can tell you is there are going to be some new scares

and some really wild, dark things going on.

We hang out, and as you can see, like a lot of laundry and just good vibes.

Yeah. People die!

Brace yourself and get ready for a ride.

And I know you haven't been scared since the last Paranormal movie,

so we're excited to do it now.

And we hope you guys really love what comes next.

Stay tuned for the next chapter of Paranormal Activity.

It's about to get poppin'.

What scares you?

That's an interesting one.

Katie is frightening.

School pickup?

It's a madhouse.

Spiders.

Studio executives.

Lasers in my eye.

Candyman was always the scariest one for me.

Tony Todd was really

like the big bad when I was growing up.

I mean, real life is so scary right now, and I could go into all that...

Like, Nazis are scary and they've made a comeback.

MapQuest. Yeah.

Scared me this morning.

There's a fear that maybe still lives in me,

which is that I've sold my soul to the devil

at some point and forgot about it.

I do a lot of hiking, and... so, bears,

and, you know, scary creatures,

mountain lions, coyotes, even raccoons can be feisty.

My chandelier was moving two days ago.

I was like, "No!"

I was like, "You hit that, right, Mom?

Like, that was you, you hit it?" She's like, "Uh-huh."

'Cause I'm like so freaked out by that stuff now.

I believe in ghosts, so, if something moves that shouldn't.

I can find that pretty disconcerting.

I'm very jumpy.

And so all of my friends and my family make fun of me

because I make these movies,

but if you, like, pop out of something,

I will scream and jump away. You know, I'm very jumpy that way.

My dad took me to this ride where, like,

they were literally would hit you with brooms,

the ends of, you know, broomsticks, not sticks,

but the soft part of it.

And I was, like, four or five years old

and it terrorized me. I don't know why my dad

took me to that.

What scares you guys?

- This interview. - Oh man.

The sound that occurred when you're watching.

Paranormal Activity, the first one.

That did it for me.

That got me to move up a couple rows.

That's it?

Cool! Thank you, guys.

Thank you so much.

- No problem, no problem. - Yeah, this was great.