Low Budget Film Makes Gold At Box Office

PALM SPRINGS – You asked for it, and you got it!

“Mind blowing. Mind blowing,” says moviegoer Jeff Radcliffe-Nelson.

“It’s just nuts,” says moviegoer Albert Arroyo.

Paranormal Activity, a low-budget horror flick about a California couple being haunted by a demon, is Hollywood’s biggest success story since ‘The Blair Witch Project.’

“I’d give it that ‘Blair Witch’ thing. It was not much money spent, big on word of mouth and hype to get everybody in there to go,” Radcliffe-Nelson says.

Made for less than $20,000, bought for $300,000 and marketed for less than $10 million, director Oren Peli’s scare-a-thon raked in $22 million this weekend. That makes it a winner in the fifth week of it’s gradually widening release and beating out popular movies such as the ‘Saw’ franchise.

“It’s scary, you can’t, you can’t escape not wanting to run. I got up like three times wanting to run out of the theater,” Arroyo says.

“Not even scary. Eerie. There’s a difference,” says Radcliffe-Nelson

“It was fun to watch, like a roller coaster ride and just loved the adrenaline,” moviegoer Sammy Lopez says.

An aggressive marketing campaign including Twitter and Internet word-of-mouth made the movie a success. Websites such as eventful.com allowed people to demand it, intending not so much to sell the movie as to make people ask for it.

“Through the Internet. Everybody was just going online and buzzing…word of mouth. Somebody looked at me and said, ‘Go see it, it’ll make you cry before you leave,’ and that’s really what made me go see it,” says Radcliffe-Nelson.

“I also heard about it through another friend who said she watched it before it was out at all the theaters,” Lopez says.

So far, total box office earnings are more than $62 million and that number is expected to reach more than $100 million.