Povestea ta s-a intalnit cu povestea iubirei tale intr-o luna de vara. S-au placut asa de mult incat si-au dat mainile si si-au spus pentru prima oara: buna dimineata! Au stat asa un timp, nu prea mult, pana sa se dumireasca cum stau lucrurile. Au inceput sa prinda curaj, apoi a venit cunoasterea treptata. Cand au vazut cat de frumos e sa-ti creasca aripi, au strans suras dupa suras si au poposit cu unul in bratele celuilalt. Dupa ce au cladit pas cu pas, si gand cu gand, toata maretia de culori, povestea ta s-a desprins din bratele povestii mele ca sa raspandeasca mireasma dragostei peste alte povesti ce vor urma. Te iubeste cu toata fiinta pentru totdeauna!
Happy Valentine's Day pentru totii cei care se iubesc!
Casa de piatra si copii de xerox (sau de plastelina la preferinte)
After a young, middle class couple moves into what seems like a typical suburban “starter” tract house, they become increasingly disturbed by a presence that may or may not be demonic but is certainly most active in the middle of the night.
Especially when they sleep. Or try to.
Paramount Pictures Presents A Blumhouse Production A Film by Oren Peli “Paranormal Activity” starring Katie Featherston, Micah Sloat, Mark Fredrichs, Amber Armstrong and Ashley Palmer. The film was directed, written and edited by Oren Peli. The film was produced by Jason Blum and Oren Peli. The executive producer is Steven Schneider. The co-producers are Toni Taylor and Amir Zbeda. This film has been rated R for language.
For writer-director Oren Peli, home is where the horror is.
Literally.
“Paranormal Activity” was photographed at Peli’s home during a seven-day sprint in 2006 with a crew of three that included co-producers Toni Taylor, Peli’s then-girlfriend, and Amir Zbeda, one of the filmmaker’s best friends.
Peli, whose name means “wonder” or “marvel” in Hebrew, is a native of Israel who dropped out of school there when he was sixteen to start his own software company. Three years later, he and Zbeda emigrated to the U.S., where Peli developed animation and video game programs.
After meeting Taylor and deciding to settle down, Peli went house-hunting during the height of the real estate boom. After being outbid on several houses, they finally managed to land a suburban tract home. “It was the first time I’d ever lived in a house; I’d only ever rented small apartments,” says Peli. “In quiet suburbia, I quickly learned that you become conscious of every little noise, especially at night.
“The house, or the ground around it, was settling; things were falling off shelves in the middle of the night,” he continues. “I’m not saying there was a ghost or anything, because the incidents, or whatever you would call them, were happening months apart.”
And for the next couple of years those nighttime noises – however intermittent – persisted.
“It all got the techno-geek side of me thinking, ‘Maybe it would be cool to set up video cameras as a way to figure out what was going on,’” Peli says with a grin. “If those cameras caught something good, I thought that could make a pretty interesting movie.”
Once he had written a script, Peli and Taylor decided it was time to make some long-needed home improvements. The couple put in new wood flooring, hung some pictures on the walls and rearranged their bedroom. They even constructed the Ouija board that plays a central role in the narrative.
At a marathon casting session in Hollywood, which yielded 150 aspirants, Peli discovered Katie Featherston and Micah Sloat. “They were among the very few actors we saw who slid right into character when we threw them our standard question, which was ‘So tell me why you think your house is haunted?’
“When we put Katie and Micah together, they were absolutely convincing as a couple that had been together for years,” Peli continues. “They were telling stories about their vacations, talking about how Katie’s mom didn’t approve of them living together. They came up with elaborate backstories for their characters on the spot. That was the moment when I actually green-lighted the movie in my head, because I wasn’t going to do it unless I could find actors who could pull it off.”
Peli’s overall goal was to come up with footage that would “feel very organic – I didn’t want the actors to worry about lighting or camera angles or anything like that. At the same time I didn’t want it to look bad. It was all about the performances and not distracting the actors with filmmaking issues.”
The exception is the static shot that’s established when Micah sets up the camera on a tripod in his bedroom. “I’d worked on that shot for months,” Peli explains. “I was playing with all different types of lighting; it had to be natural. You need to be able to barely see what’s happening in the bedroom while still maintaining a degree of clarity for the audience.”
Capturing the action outside of his character’s bedroom would be up to Sloat who, as it turned out, had been a camera operator for his college TV station. “He framed the shots well – sometimes too well – and I would have to ask him to close the viewfinder and just point and shoot,” Peli recalls with a laugh.
Although Peli felt that Micah and Katie needed very little direction, he set some rules: improvisation is okay, but don’t use each others’ names in vain, and no forced exposition.
Peli applied similar rules of naturalism to sound and production design.
“As is the case with films like ‘The Blair Witch Project’ and ‘Open Water,’ I wanted there to be only a little bit of blood in the movie. That’s the way I like scary movies; you don’t have to go over the top. In the same way, I wanted the sound effects to be subtle. We establish the drone of the room tone and then we document a low-frequency rumble, which is really all you need. The fact that we have a lot of scenes in the movie that are totally quiet forces the audience to be quiet and really pay attention to every little thing. Silence only emphasizes that little tap on the wall you know is not supposed to be there.”
Production was so stealthy, Peli notes, the neighbors never knew he was making a movie. Nor, really, did anyone else.
After just seven days of shooting, with support from Taylor and Zbeda, who contributed everything from story ideas to props to stunt design and execution, Peli loaded the footage into Sony Vegas editing software on his home PC.
He submitted “Paranormal Activity” to Screamfest, a boutique festival for cult and homemade horror held each October at the legendary Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. Peli admits today he was “terrified” when Screamfest founder Rachel Belofsky “forced” him to send a DVD of his movie to Steve Barton, editor of the popular horror website Dread Central, which turned out to be a good move: Barton and others at the site were the first to praise “Paranormal Activity” and continued to champion it even after its Screamfest debut.
“It quickly became apparent the community was really embracing the movie,” says Peli. “People were blogging wildly, asking our little website how they could see the film. It was surreal. It got me thinking about ‘Paranormal Activity’ in theatrical terms.”
A few days after the first screening, Peli recalls being approached by all kinds of people from that first audience – men and women in their 20s, 30s, and 40s. They all reported having problems sleeping at night, sometimes for several nights. “At first I thought people were just using a figure of speech to describe a scary movie,” Peli says. “But reports of sleeplessness have persisted after every screening since.”
The Screamfest screening helped Peli find an agent at CAA and a subsequent berth at Slamdance. It also attracted the attention of Steven Schneider, an academic-turned-producer whose numerous books on the horror genre brought him to Hollywood in 2003.
Schneider recalls pulling a DVD of “Paranormal Activity” from a pile of submissions and watching it at home alone one night. “I remember thinking, ‘Wow, this director is really asking the audience to experience what this couple is feeling,’” he says. ”But what really hooked me was that first night scene, after Micah puts his camera on a tripod. We've seen a lot of horror movies with gyrating, hand-held camerawork, so that static shot seemed almost subversive. I could tell the filmmaker intuitively knew how to build suspense. Then the movie slowly sucked me in, my sense of dread kept growing, and Oren's very clinical method of filmmaking - along with the naturalism of Katie and Micah's performances - really affected me. I couldn't sleep.”
Schneider shared the movie with producer Jason Blum. Schneider had a deal with Blum’s production company while both were based on the Paramount lot. “I recognized that ’Paranormal Activity’ was a lot like ‘Blair Witch’ in the way that it delivered purely on an audience level,” Blum says. “Both were designed to be theatrical experiences, exercises in terror told with the intimate medium of video, felt viscerally by large groups of strangers united in a darkened room.”
At Slamdance, the film was seen by a young executive from DreamWorks, Ashley Brucks, who recommended it to her boss, Adam Goodman, now president of production at Paramount Pictures.
Paramount Pictures will release the movie this fall, at the same time as Peli begins his next film, an independent thriller called “Area 51,” with Blum aboard as producer and Schneider as executive producer.
“One of the things I wanted to do was create something that people could say defined horror for their generation,” concludes Peli, “the way after ‘Psycho’ people said they would never take another shower; after ‘Jaws’ and ‘Open Water’ that they would never again swim in the ocean; and after ’Blair Witch’ that they would never again go camping in the woods. I figured, well, sleeping at home is something you can’t really avoid. So if I can make people scared of being at home, ‘Paranormal Activity’ might do something.
ABOUT THE CAST
Katie Featherston (Katie) makes her feature debut with “Paranormal Activity.” A native Texan, Featherston attended Southern Methodist University, where she majored in acting. She currently lives in Los Angeles, where she studies acting.
Micah Sloat (Micah) makes his feature debut with “Paranormal Activity.” In addition to his acting duties and being the de facto cameraman, Sloat’s original music is featured in the film’s soundtrack. He holds degrees from the Musician’s Institute in Hollywood, as well as Skidmore College, where he created television shows for the college’s station.
He lives in Los Angeles and is represented by Elevate Entertainment.
Mark Fredrichs’ (Psychic) media career began a number of years ago with a long list of print and national commercials. These efforts lead to supporting roles in the film ”Wristcutters: A Love Story,” the TV series ”The Bold and the Beautiful” and ”Lost in TV Guide.” His role in ”Paranormal Activity” also builds on his background of over 15 years as a practicing psychologist.
Amber Armstrong (Amber) got a taste of performing as a freshman at the University of Nevada-Reno. She has since continued acting and a bit of directing, splitting her time between Reno and Los Angeles.
Ashley Palmer (Girl on Internet) began her acting career at age five when she played the title role in a community production of “Chicken Little.” Since then, she has originated a role in an off-Broadway play, performed in a national tour, shared the stage with Elaine Stritch, and been directed by Darren Star. Palmer has a BFA in musical theater from Otterbein College and works in film, television, theater, commercials, hosting, print, web series and improv, and had always dreamed of appearing in a horror film.
ABOUT THE FILMMAKERS
Oren Peli (Director/Writer/Producer/Editor) is a native of Israel who came to the U.S. at the age of 19. Back home, he had dropped out of high school at age 16 to write a highly commercial painting program, then became a full-time software designer, using his skills to create animation programs and, ultimately, game software. “Paranormal Activity” is his first film.
His next project, “Area 51,” which he also wrote, is produced by Jason Blum and executive-produced by Steven Schneider and begins production this fall in Utah.
Jason Blum (Producer) and his Blumhouse Productions signed a three-year first-look deal with Paramount Pictures in 2005. Prior to that, Blum had a two-year producing deal with HBO Films and, before that, a two-year deal with Miramax Films. From 1995 to 2000, he served as co-head of the acquisitions and co-productions department at Miramax Films in New York. While there, he was instrumental in acquiring over 50 films, including “The Others,” “Smoke Signals,” “A Walk on the Moon,” “The Reader” and “The House of Yes.”
Since opening his own company in 2000, Blum has produced 12 feature films that demonstrate his unique taste and creative sensibilities. Blum served as co-executive producer of “The Reader” directed by Stephen Daldry, for which Kate Winslet won an Academy Award®.
Currently, Blum is in post-production on “Tooth Fairy,” for 20th Century Fox, starring Dwayne Johnson. The film is scheduled for wide release on January 22, 2010. Blum is also in pre-production on “Area 51,” to be directed by Oren Peli.
In addition, Blum has produced “The Accidental Husband” starring Uma Thurman, Colin Firth and Jeffrey Dean Morgan for Yari Film Group; “The Darwin Awards” starring Winona Ryder and Joseph Fiennes; “Griffin & Phoenix” starring Amanda Peet and Dermot Mulroney; “Hysterical Blindness” starring Uma Thurman, Gena Rowlands and Juliette Lewis, which aired on HBO and garnered Thurman a Golden Globe Award; “Hamlet” starring Ethan Hawke, Bill Murray, Sam Shepard and Kyle MacLachlan, released by Miramax; and Alexandra Shiva’s documentary “Stagedoor.”
Steven Schneider (Executive Producer) moved to Hollywood from New York in 2003, after completing MA degrees in Philosophy from Harvard and Cinema Studies from NYU and publishing a number of books on film, with a focus on foreign horror movies.
After being in a first-look deal at Gold Circle Films, where he helped find and develop the script that became the sequel to “White Noise,” Schneider entered into a first-look producing deal in 2006 at Paramount Pictures, where he remained for over two years. Over the course of that time, Schneider expanded his purview to include all kinds of ”dark genre” movies, from horror to thriller to sci-fi and everything in between. Shortly after entering his producing deal with Paramount, Schneider started working with Jason Blum, who was already on the lot, in a collaboration that proved so enjoyable and productive that he eventually segued into a partnership labeled Blumhouse.
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