This past weekend, Paranormal Activity, a $15 000 shot-on-video feature about a couple recording evidence of a supernatural entity in their new house, ruled the box office, beating the annual Halloween cash cow installment in the Saw franchise. A slow roll-out that had fans requesting limited midnight screenings in North American cities gave the movie the word-of-mouth it need to become a phenomenon along the lines of The Blair Witch Project. So far, Paranormal Activity – which seemed to come out of nowhere – has earned nearly $65 million for Paramount. Israeli-born writer/director Oren Peli, a former video game programmer, answers seven questions about his phenomenal feature debut.

The style, budget and marketing of Paranormal Activity has it being compared most often to The Blair Witch Project; how did that inspire you?

I loved the movie and found it to be really scary. It was to me really amazing to think that this small group of people got a video camera and came up with a cool story and shot it with almost no budget, and here I am watching it in a theatre. And then a few years later when Open Water came out, it all made sense to me: why don’t I buy a video camera and do the same thing?

Aside from Open Water, were there any other ghost tales that helped guide you when making this movie?

I love the ghost movies that are more subtle and not too gory or over-the-top – movies like The Sixth Sense or The Others. Once I started doing research for the movie, I started watching any and every TV show and movie on the subject.

Why were you attracted specifically to the concept of a caught-on-tape ghost story?

It made me think about how vulnerable you are when you’re asleep and you don’t know what’s really going on, and what if some people set up video cameras to capture what was happening at their home while they were asleep, and the cameras actually caught something – that would be pretty scary.

OK, so you get your friends together and shoot a low budget movie in your house; how do you go from there to opening in theatres across North America?

The first step was when the movie was shown at the Screamfest Film Festival. It got great reviews and a lot of people noticed it. Shortly thereafter, we signed with [entertainment agency] CAA, so that’s when things really started moving. After that, they sent the movie to a couple of producers, Stephen Snyder and Jason Blum, and they wanted to come on board. They saw the potential for theatrical release. They showed the movie to DreamWorks, and DreamWorks loved it, and that’s when we signed with DreamWorks.

In order to get the most realistic performances possible from their cast, the guys who made Blair Witch often kept their actors in the dark as to what was going to happen to their characters and make them feel genuinely afraid. Did you do anything like that for Paranormal Activity?

Sometimes when the actors “went to sleep” we didn’t tell them what was going to happen and we surprised them. But honestly, they were so good, that wasn’t necessary. They were unbelievably natural no matter what we were doing.

Obviously it worked. Paramount has based part of the marketing campaign for the film on showing audience members freaking out in the theatre. What makes the scares so effective?

It taps into people’s primal fears of what happens in your own home while you sleep, when you’re the most vulnerable. It doesn’t matter who you are, where you are, you should always feel safe at home, and if you can’t feel safe in your own bed, that’s pretty creep. The other things audiences are responding to is the realism of the movie – the style and the way it’s shot and the really amazing performances of the actors makes it easy for people to connect to it on a personal level.

Lastly, got any great ghost stories from your own experiences?

There is one story running in our family. My mother’s cousin was killed in the Israeli Defense Forces and his mother saw him appear to her that night. His head was bandaged and he said something along the lines of “Good-bye mama, I’m leaving now.” She was so shaken up by it that she told her neighbours and friends that morning, and later that night she found out he was killed from head injuries.