Unknown Dimension: The Story of Paranormal Activity

Excuse me.

What scares you?

The dark?

I don't like spiders.

Little tiny dogs that snap their jaws.

Sharks.

Demons, or Satan.

Heights.

Natural disasters.

Putting my hands and feet in places I can't see what I'm touching.

Clowns.

Something happening to the kids, for sure.

Weird sounds coming from my basement.

My girlfriend, when she's mad?

Growing old.

Being alone.

Dying.

Ghosts.

Being home alone at night in the dark.

Demonic stuff is always really scary.

Fear of the unknown,

not knowing what you're gonna have happen when you wake up.

Something that's invisible, unknown, comes from a different dimension.

We don't know what it is, how to defend ourselves against it.

That's a scary concept.

- So, Jason, you just yank on... - Michael, will you just sit down...

And away the boat goes.

- Michael... - Okay. It's working now.

Are you sure it's not back there?

It's not back there, I just took a look in there.

We gotta get out!

Before I made my film, which was originally titled.

UFO Abduction, and then later on became The McPherson Tape,

I had never seen a found-footage film before.

I didn't even know that there was something

that was kind of similar for that.

A buddy of mine said,

"Hey, I'll give you a budget to make your movie."

- And I said, "Okay, what do you got?" - And he goes, "6,500."

And I literally said, "Great, for that I can do like a home video."

And then I finished reading this book called Communion,

and it terrified the hell out of me.

So I thought, "How do I experience, an alien abduction without the anal probe?"

And it dawned on me, well, if it was a home video

that you were witnessing this first-hand, and you had improvisational actors,

then it felt like, "All right, that might be a great way to get into it."

So my only experience with the found footage

was out of necessity.

Shit.

Holy shit.

- What the hell is that? - It's a spaceship, Mike.

When you want to be scared, you want to know something is real.

And I think found footage, when it was originally created,

the thing that terrified people and scared people

was the fact that it could be real.

Could they have done this? Could they have faked that?

Could they not? It really looks real, but one of them seems like an actor, it's

that sort of questioning in the back of your head.

And I had a couple of film students who came up to me and said,

"Hey, do you know that you're the father of found footage?"

And I thought they were messing with me

because no one had really kind of tracked that,

that I was aware of. And I said, "What do you mean?"

He says, "Well, you made this film," you know, blah, blah, blah.

And one of the other students had said, "Oh, well there was Cannibal Holocaust."

And I'm like, "What's Cannibal Holocaust?'"

Four young and fearless Americans, children of the space age,

armed with cameras, microphones, and curiosity.

A lot of people say that Cannibal Holocaust

is the first found-footage film, but it's really not.

It's a narrative feature shot on film that has found-footage elements in it.

A lot like Faces of Death, it was sort of the thing

everyone claimed for have seen.

I think a lot of people saw that, they thought it was real and were like,

"Oh, that part's fake. Oh, that part's real."

And I, even as a horror fan, I refuse to watch it.

A found-footage movie is footage that was found, the whole thing.

Ideally, it's not cut, it's not edited together,

it's all one long piece.

We pop the tape in and we were sitting there

on the couch watching it and we just kind of

kept looking at each other like this is Blair Witch.

You know, like they go from the footage for the people,

you know, looking at the footage for the back of the footage.

In the '80s, it was just a different...

You couldn't really pull it off the same way you could now.

I don't think audiences really responded

to the digital look as well as they did in the late...

You know, by the time The Blair Witch came around.

The reason I really love found footage,

and I think it started with The Blair Witch Project,

is because when it's done right, it adds a certain level of authenticity.

And this is like '90 or '91,

and Dan and I had just gone to see a movie called Freddy's Dead.

You know, it was not horror at all.

And we were like, you know,

it's just weird that horror movies are not really scary anymore.

You know, like The Shining and Amityville Horror

and, you know, Jaws and Exorcist.

We kind of started drifting towards

like The Legend of Boggy Creek and Chariot of the Gods.

And we started thinking like,

"I wonder if you could do that, you know, now,"

like you could really do like a pseudo-documentary.

They utilized the early days of the internet

in just a way that's so brilliant,

creating missing pages for people.

And at that point, I don't think mainstream audiences

were so quick to be like, "Oh, it's fake." They want to believe that it's real.

Unfortunately for the actors,

they didn't let them appear and do publicity

because they wanted to maintain the illusion

that the actors were actually dead.

Burkittsville people were calling people

to see if they could help find these kids in the woods.

That's amazing. I don't think that's ever happened before.

It does it in a very raw way,

like we literally had the actors shooting everything

and it very much looks like an amateurish video.

And I remember seeing that and going,

"Oh damn, I should have done that."

So I think it kind of disarms people,

and makes you, like, even if you know it's not real,

your brain's constantly thinking,

"Is this real? Is this, you know, a YouTube video?"

Here were these kids from Florida who don't know anyone in Hollywood,

they just bought some video cameras,

ran around in the woods, you know, with some actors,

and they made a movie that made quarter of a billion dollars.

So I'm like, "This is mind-boggling!"

I didn't know that you could make movies that way.

And maybe if, one day, I have an idea for a film,

maybe I'll give it a shot if I can do it in that style.

Does it feel strange being back here?

I mean, I still care a lot about the house.

I feel like, you know, not only was it my house

for about 12 years,

but it's also the house that changed my life

because of the movie that I made here.

So, you know, it feels kind of weird and special to be here.

So in 2003, my girlfriend and I moved to the first house

that I've ever lived in.

My entire life I grew up in apartments, even back in Israel.

So when you live in an apartment,

you're used to hearing a lot of noises from your neighbors,

walking down the hallway, slamming doors and stuff like that.

And when you live in a house in quiet suburbia,

everything is like super, super quiet at night,

you don't hear anything.

But we would hear some noises like the house creaking

and my girlfriend would get totally freaked out.

She would think there's gotta be something in the house.

I feel something breathing in my ear and whispering and there's noises

and I feel there is like someone walking around

and I hear footsteps and I, kind of like Micah,

was the skeptic.

And I told her, "There's nothing there,

it's just the house, don't worry about it."

And there were a few things that happened that we didn't know how to explain.

Can you hear that?

- I'm going down. - No, no, no, Micah!

I started thinking like,

"Well, in this day of, you know, technology

and access to video cameras,

I could set up a video camera in the house

or in the bedroom, let it run all night and see If it will capture, you know..."

"Maybe there's something walking in the house?"

"Is there, you know, an animal that sneaks in,

whatever it is, maybe we can capture it with the video

and find out what's going on."

And then I thought how scary it would be

to watch footage of yourself while you were asleep

and unaware of it and something is happening.

That would be really creepy.

So I never actually went on with my personal experiment

'cause I wouldn't have had the patience to watch

hours of myself sleeping, but I thought,

"Maybe that's a concept for a scary movie."

What is it?

So I spent about a year doing lots of things,

I was researching film making.

How do you cast people, you know, about editing,

and practiced the visual effects and sound mixing,

all that kind of stuff.

Also had to do a lot of home improvements to my house, to replace...

We had carpets all over that wouldn't have worked

with the footprints and Katie getting dragged out of bed.

So I put hardwood floor everywhere. Painted the house,

just to make it look a lot more nice and cinematic.

And did a lot of research on demonic hauntings,

possessions, all that kind of stuff from a religious point of view,

from the perspective of the people

who believe that they are being haunted or possessed,

I did a lot of research on that. A lot of research on found-footage films.

Are you happy? Do you have enough batteries?

I was working full-time as a video game programmer,

so that was my day job.

So everything I had for do with Paranormal Activity,

both during pre-production and post-production,

had to be in my spare time in the evenings and weekends.