First Shot: Leaving ’Normal

So I finally hauled my ass out to see Paranormal Activity, and my morning-after musing of “What was THAT all about?” just happens to roughly coincide with Advertising Age’s breathless marveling at what a marketing phenom this thing is.

It seems the trade sheet is particularly beguiled by the success Paramount has had in courting online votes to determine where to book the film. (Yay! Corporate America finds another way to get unpaid minions to do its work for free! Layoffs all around!) Yes, all of those TV ads you saw urging you to DEMAND Paranormal in your city, town or hamlet have netted the latest big score for Eventful, a company that’s made its name by pioneering the concept of “fan-routed” music and comedy tours -- and maybe a tax protest or two.

I guess I shouldn’t feel too upset or surprised that Paranormal left me entirely underwhelmed. Ordinarily, that sort of disconnect between advertising fancy and celluloid reality would roll off me like a dry martini off Don Draper’s back. When it comes to actual scares, latter-day “thinking man’s horror” has a 50 percent success rate at best, and every year can’t bring another Let the Right One In. But what really has me steamed is the glee with which Ad Age has gone about bashing The Blair Witch Project to make its point, dismissing the latter’s campaign as mere “hype” in order to trumpet Paranormal’s comparative “credibility.”

To Ad Age, it somehow matters a whole hell of a lot indeed that Blair Witch was playfully presented as a true documentary – a winking, essentially harmless stratagem that has since somehow been reinterpreted as deception of the rankest order. (Next on the to-do list: We string up Christopher Guest by his balls.)

Now, I know people who were intimately involved in the making and selling of Blair Witch, so I guess I’m somewhat biased – but I can also tell you that they were (as the saying goes) simply out for a good time, giddy at the prospect of doing something a little bit different for a change – both onscreen and off. They were not in any way looking to score a quick buck by hoodwinking the sort of homeschooled valedictorians who think those late-breaking, 30-second “bulletins” about America’s collapsing credit economy are a genuine part of MSNBC’s news programming. (With a toll-free number to call, just in case you’re all het up and want to talk about it some more.)

Yet here’s how Ad Age quotes Josh Greenstein, Paramount’s co-president of marketing, in comparing his film to Blair Witch:

Audiences are so sophisticated now, pretending this movie is something it’s not would feel false to people,” Mr. Greenstein said.

Yep, that’s what passes for virtue in Tinseltown: courageously refraining from aping the successful sales strategies of 10 years ago.

The ironies here are so thick that even Robert Rodriguez’ Machete would have a hard time cutting through them (especially after he discovered that what looked like a grass-roots uprising was actually Astroturf). For one, the Paranormal ads are indeed selling the movie as something it’s not – i.e., scary. George Romero once said that he could make an audience jump with nothing more than a reel full of leader, interspersed at odd intervals with white frames and a loud noise. What we get in Paranormal is little better or more effective. And for another, the movie owes a ton of debt to Blair Witch for just about everything – all the way up to its entire caught-on-video conceit (which seemed novel and salient a decade ago, but now just looks like a fast track to raking in those big-time director bucks without having to learn anything about lighting, framing or art direction).

So what we have here is actually a contrast between one movie that was assailed as “just a hype” by people who were jealous and suspicious of its genuinely out-of-left-field success, and another that’s relying on a big studio’s Internet push-polling to advance its largely undeserved cred. And when you realize that knocking down one for the benefit of the other is a spurious and bratty approach, and should probably be withdrawn, don’t be surprised that there’s nowhere you can go to Demand It!