The Sum of All Fears: Behind 'Paranormal's' Big Numbers

Sometime during the past three weeks -- perhaps, appropriately, while we were sleeping -- the film "Paranormal Activity" pulled a pop cultural sneak attack.

Seemingly out of nowhere, this creepy little horror flick about a young couple terrorized by supernatural forces every time they go to bed -- a movie made in 2005 by an unknown filmmaker for just $15,000 -- popped up on the mainstream movie radar, earning nearly $8 million last weekend while playing in just 44 cities, including Washington.

It has become the most consistently popular trending topic on Twitter, surpassing even Music Mondays and "Glee" in its ability to generate breathless, 140-character commentary. (Example: "I went to see paranormal activity last night and now every noise I hear has to be evil demons!")

The movie relies on fake "found footage" to tell the story of a demonic force plaguing the couple within the claustrophobic walls of their San Diego home. Yes, we've seen this deliberately amateurish approach before in "The Blair Witch Project," but for college-age audiences in particular love it. With its haul last weekend, "Paranormal Activity" outsold a 3-D Pixar double feature (the "Toy Story" re-release), a Bruce Willis thriller ("Surrogates") and a Michael Moore documentary ("Capitalism: A Love Story").

How did this happen?

Apparently because we -- the same individuals who relish our right to elect a president, choose our American Idols and watch our favorite TV shows OnDemand -- voted to bring this slow-building shocker to a theater near us. Or at least some of us did. Paramount Pictures, the studio distributing "Paranormal Activity," has dubbed it the "first-ever major film release decided by you," mainly because of an online polling system that guaranteed a nationwide roll-out for the micro-budget movie once 1 million supportive votes had been cast.

But did the people who took to the Internet and demanded to see "Paranormal Activity" really participate in cinematic democracy? Or did they merely fall for a clever marketing ploy that allowed them to think they were running the show when, really, the execs at a major Hollywood studio were calling the shots?

Douglas Rushkoff -- writer, media studies faculty member at the New School and a man often credited with coining the term viral marketing -- has a hard time buying that Paramount's efforts constitute a genuinely viral phenomenon.

"This isn't some piece of propaganda that's so dangerous that movie theaters are refusing to show it, or even so potentially unpopular that theaters don't want to show it," he says. "This is a movie distributor looking for some way to create publicity about itself. . . . They're pretending there is some distribution obstacle that people's popular demand is going to overcome."

Megan Colligan, co-president of domestic marketing for Paramount, wants to assure "Paranormal" constituents that their votes did matter. "We were in search of a tool that would let us know who wanted to see the film, so we could let the demand be defined by the market instead of establishing the demand ourselves," she says. "We wanted to reverse the process."

Paramount found that tool by teaming up with Eventful.com, the Web site that hosts the Demand service, a feature that, until now, was best known for bringing musical acts, stand-up comics and politicians to towns with particularly active online fan bases.