Last year, Paranormal Activity took the box office by storm. Shot for a staggeringly low $15,000 the movie quickly became the highest grossing film of all time, in terms of return on investment. The popularity was due, in part, to a pretty successful viral marketing campaign using Twitter and Facebook.

Paranormal Activity 2 did it again, according to Wikipedia, breaking box office records for the highest grossing opening for an R-rated movie—beating out Watchmen. This, again, with relatively little to no traditional marketing or promotion.

If you didn’t see the first installment what you need to know about the franchise is this: the movies follow the lives of ordinary people who are being tormented by a ghost—an evil spirit—and is filmed in a reality-TV, first-person kind of perspective. In the first movie, it was shot largely by one of the lead characters who captured the poltergeist activity on an HD video camera, sometimes hand held, and during the night, on a tripod using nightshot. This perspective, in the first film, lent to the creepy, restrictive atmosphere of the whole thing and like The Blair Witch Project before it, served to really scare the heck out of viewers.

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OK, so I have a more than passing interest in the paranormal. So a new television show like Fact or Faked: Paranormal Files is going to, in the least, pique my interest for a few episodes. But can it hold it beyond that?

In my experience, paranormal TV runs the gamut from something very scientific and research-based like MonsterQuest (featuring actual tenured academics) to something more akin to a couple of guys running around in the dark without flashlights cursing and swearing to appear cool—like Extreme Paranormal. (For Extreme Paranormal, picture the Jackass franchise done with ghosts.) Somewhere in the middle, is a balanced show like Ghost Hunters, one of the original and most successful series in this genre. A show in which two plumbers and a rag-tag group of other investigators set out to use what they deem to be scientific tools to track and record ghosts. They’ve been doing it for a long time, seven years now, and they’re honest in their pursuit whether or not the “science” they use is altogether scientific.

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Over the weekend I had a man date with my friend Jason. Like all manly men do when they get together, we decided to watch a scary movie. We picked Paranormal Activity a movie we both wanted to see but hadn’t got around to yet because, in both our cases, we didn’t have anyone to watch it with—and this isn’t the kind of movie you want to watch alone!

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