Thank The Paranormal Activity

As a horror fan, I need to take a few minutes here and really thank the Paranormal Activity franchise.  I have never recommended a single one of the films.  The first one was a breakout hit, but it left me agitated with my theatre experience.  I hated the husband of the main character, and I begged for his demise.  There was an understanding by director and writer Oren Peli as to how to create tension for what has become the modern day 'jump scare,' but there was a fragmentation when it came to character development and story telling.

Taking a look at the state of horror at the time Paranormal Activity achieved mass distribution, there was a lot of attention being paid in the horror industry to bring life back into the big named slashers that dominated the 1970s and 80s.  We had seen lifeless and impotent reincarnations of Friday the 13th, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween, and A Nightmare on Elm Street was a year away from thudding into theatres.  There was no lustre to the horror scene.  It was just attempts by studios to hold onto the past, believing that the slasher sub-genre was the way forward for fans.

How wrong they were.

Priced with a budget of only fifteen thousand dollars, Paranormal Activity hit the screens in 2009 and became a phenomenon.  It took in over one hundred million domestically, and another eighty five million from foreign markets.  Regardless of what I think of the quality of the film, it showed that there was something that movie goers were craving, and it did not have to do with nostalgia and stories from yesteryear.

The initial impact was felt right away, with a glut of cheap, found footage films.  This, however, is not the true legacy left by Paranormal Activity.  Sure, it is the most visible impact, and I may have a lot of people disagreeing with me on this, but the mark it left of movie history was something vastly different.  It showed conclusively that budget meant absolutely nothing, and that atmosphere and attention to pacing and tension could bring in the box office numbers.

This was not the first film to hit the low budget, big numbers benchmark for horrors.  In 1999, The Blair Witch Project introduced found footage to the masses and was a low budget success.  It had an immediate impact on films, but its impact was felt in the independent market, with its doppelgängers never seeing the cinema.  And then in 2004, James Wan's Saw raked in just over one hundred million world wide.  It fell in nicely with the established slasher attempts of the day, so it is less of an anomaly.

With Paranormal Activity, it's successful notes were noticed by its producer, Jason Blum.  Blum realized that it was not the fact that it was the gimmick of found footage that made it successful, something that many people equated with it, but rather the fact that a managed budget could mean success for a film whether it found its way to nationwide distribution or simply video on demand and streaming services.

This is what makes Blum a visionary.  Throw stones at me if you will for calling him a visionary, but this is exactly the word that one should use when describing him.  The success of the Paranormal Activity franchise brought him into the game, being able to wield money and not throwing it out in big chunks looking for the next big thing.  Instead, he stuck to the same financial formula that made Paranormal a success.

At first, the films that were coming from him were similar in feel as they focused around hauntings and possession, the rising fad that horror was undergoing.  But, it was his unwillingness to deviate from the movie making formula that led him to being able to branch out and begin producing different types of low budget films.  While the competition was still looking back at Paranormal Activity, Blum was looking forward and allowing directors with new and interesting stories an opportunity to get their ideas out there.

The biggest step forward for Blum and his production company, Blumhouse Productions, was with 2013's The Purge.  It showed that his formula could be completely separate from hauntings and the supernatural and still maintain success.  This is the forward thinking that I had referenced.  He knew that it was not just about recreating the same films in different formats, but by taking fresh ideas and bringing them out by keeping the budgets in check.  Made for a budget of three million, The Purge brought in eighty nine million worldwide.  Its successor, The Purge: Anarchy, had a slightly higher budget of nine million, but took in one hundred and eleven million across the planet.

While horror was the main financial driver for his production company, it allowed for a massive variety of films to be made.  From a suspense in The Creep when he teamed up with Mark Duplass, to  giving actor Joel Egerton a chance to direct The Gift, to producing the Oscar nominated Whiplash, there was a great deal of diversity coming out of Blumhouse Productions.  He even provided a fresh ground to down and out director M. Night Shyamalan with a great come back movie in The Visit.

Without Jason Blum understanding the correct lessons learned from Paranormal Activity, horror would be in a much different place today.  He could have easily stuck with keeping to the same story format, believing that the success lay there, but he thought bigger.  He believed in high concept stories with low budgets, giving the creators freedom to create.  Just like the found footage success took a few years to be really felt in mainstream cinema, Blum's true formula took a while for others to understand and emulate.

Without Jason Blum, would The Shallows be getting nationwide distribution?  Would James Wan's The Conjuring and its sequel have gotten the distribution support that it received?  Would It Follows have been the modest hit that it was?  I could go on and on, but that would just become boring reading.  The important thing to focus is the fact that Blum's ability to take chances on films because of keeping the budgets low while allowing creative freedom has brought many wonderful horrors, suspenses, and thrillers to audiences, either directly or indirectly thanks to Jason Blum.