'Paranormal Activity': Are we captivated, duped?

LOS ANGELES - The movie "Paranormal Activity" is at killing the box office, topping other movies like "Saw VI" and "Where The Wild Things Are." The movie, made on a budget of $15,000, is presented like a documentary with "found" footage and it centers around a couple in their San Diego home who are haunted by a supernatural presence.

The movie was first released to just 13 college towns around the U.S., with showings scheduled at midnight. Then Paramount Pictures asked audiences to "Demand" the movie come to their town by voting on a Web site . The online buzz began and now the film is available across the country. It has pulled in $62.5 million as of last weekend (the Halloween holiday is expected to give the film another huge weekend.)

But some are wondering if those that demanded the movie really took part in a grassroots effort or were just duped by a smart marketing campaign on the part of the studio. "This is a movie distributor looking for some way to create publicity about itself. . . . They're pretending there is some distribution obstacle that people's popular demand is going to overcome," Douglas Rushkoff, writer and media studies faculty member at the New School told The Washington Post .

Megan Colligan, co-president of domestic marketing for Paramount, countered that voters did matter "We were in search of a tool that would let us know who wanted to see the film, so we could let the demand be defined by the market instead of establishing the demand ourselves," she told The Post.

The movie's buzz has also been compared to another doc-like horror flick, "The Blair Witch Project." Eduardo Sanchez, who co-directed "Blair Witch," described the two movies to The Baltimore Sun as "first-person movies," meaning they're told from the visual perspective of the characters. He acknowledged the similarities and added, "'Paranormal Activity' might be the kind of movie I should have made after 'Blair Witch.' "

Paramount Pictures is already considering a sequel to the movie reported The Los Angeles Times though the filmmaker Oren Peli is having trouble finding a studio for his second film, "Area 51" now in production in Utah.

One company has already used the movie as a template for a product promotion. If you have ten minutes to kill, Nokia has set up a site to promote its new Maemo operating system, Maemoproject.com. The site has a surveillance camera-like video with an acqua-greenish tint and shows an empty room with a table and chairs. At the ten-minute mark a penguin or some paranormal event is said to occur according to Tech Crunch .

Watch the "Paranormal Activity" official trailer :