chiller blog

Posted Dec 21, 09 02:48 PM

The $15,000 Question

"The chilling pseudo-doc tale of three amateur filmmakers who literally took a hike and staked there bulldozed beyond the art house circuit, raking in a quarter-billion in global box office. (Thereby ensuring The Blair Witch Project's only competition on the Guiness record for most successful cost-to-profit ratio would have to come from an iPhone.)"

- CHILLED 2 THE CORE, July 20, 2009

Don't make me get out my calculator.

Let's see. According to producer Gregg Hale, the hard cost of the submitted Sundance version of Blair Witch ran $22,000. Of course, that's before the sound package, 35 mm bump, marketing, and the etc.'s. But the campaign novelty lay in the Cinderella/Rocky angle which, absolutely, focused on the earliest price tag. -

Doo ta doo ta doooo. Punching in numbers here.

Okay, Blair's global box office: $248, 639, 099. Divide that by $22K and you've cost a cost to profit ratio of about $11,302 returned for every budget dollar. Good for them.

Yet in the wake of the $15,000 Paranormal Activity and its ingenious posturing as a theatrical sensation, suddenly my iPhone comment doesn't seem so safe (Get your own calculator). Time will tell. But someone at Paramount definitely needs to spring for mochas all around for its acquisitions and advertising desks, to say the least.

The comparisons to Blair Witch, of course, are obvious, if elusive. But don't neglect the significance of 2004's Open Water (which just looked cheaper than its $500K budget, but was released on 2,700 screens, collected just shy of $55 million internationally and spawned a DVD sequel).

Naturally, the permeations of technology haven't just made filmmaking increasingly possible for this generation's genre Cassaveteses. That's missing the point. The POINT is that audiences - survivors of swish pans, thunder editing, poor resolution uploads, and tiny screen downloads - are wholly accepting of a studio-pick-up movie that looks more like a studio exec's home movie.

Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert once mused that the next Citizen Kane might come from a little kid goofing off with his parents' video camera. Increasingly, they're right. Except that the ads spots and one sheets are predestined to be the most expensive elements.

The studio system will always do what the studio system does - develop and package projects that command riskier budgets to secure high-priced talent, then follow proven channels to reach audiences and decrease the risk factor of their investments. With the battered economy, studios have largely shuttered their low budget production arms, essentially putting the "independent" back in independent movies.

It's a throwback to the late '70s/early '80s, when, following the success of indie horror hits Halloween (1978) and Friday the 13th (1980), major studios bought and distributed a string of low budget slasher pics ranging from titles that would brand (My Bloody Valentine) to "uh, what was that one about?" perfunctories like Mortuary. Even in shock, it's survival of the fittest - and story commands the shelf-life preserver.

In short, maverick filmmakers risking maxing out their credits cards to fulfill a dream shouldn't try to make the next Blair Witch by emulating Blair Witch and its conventions. Instead, underscore what you can do by underscoring what you can't. To capture a major's attention, do what writer/director/editor/producer Oren Peli, producer Jason Blum, executive producer Steven Schneider, and co-producers Toni Taylor and Amir Zbeda did with Paranormal Activity.

They made the next "it."

One location: A cookie cutter suburban home. A restricted cast: A young couple, a friend, a psychic (did I forget anyone?). A clean-angled premise with a clever, subtle structure. Extended faux documentary takes shot on video, where what's seen is less important than what's not. And an unsung group of sound effects engineers who truly understand the visceral menace of even the slightest and unexplained auditory hum, footstep, or bang.

For the uninitiated, two intimates experience unexplained goings-on in their residence. There's evidence to the events being a rekindling of what the young woman had experienced as a child, which (conveniently and wisely) no change in geography or local can lift. Her boyfriend, not a believer in the phenomena despite the warnings of a psychic not to engage the forces, determines to document their experiences to get a handle on what's going on.

Oh, yeah, that always works.

But through the slightest (well, not always) movement of a bedroom door or linen sheet, Paranormal Activity , thankfully, lives up to its hype. This is the kind of spooky bedtime story you savor for the effect it has on other, more impressionable viewers (the movie was widely rolled out to capitalize on midnight-only screenings...and the lightstorm of buzz which Twittered, Facebooked, and MySpaced its momentum into wide release).

Welcome to the phenomenon.