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.
