‘Paranormal Activity 3’ has a scary-good love affair with fans

The scene Tuesday night at the ArcLight’s Cinerama Dome looked like any other Hollywood premiere: a high-energy mix of bright lights, loud music and enthusiastic crowds. Yet there was no red carpet, no celebrity entourages, no drove of paparazzi — because the real stars of “Paranormal Activity 3” are not the film’s cast, but its fans.

More than 2,200 ardent followers of the “found-footage” horror franchise queued up for several hours for a special “Paranormal Activity 3” preview two days ahead of the film’s Thursday midnight opening. Thousands of other fans in Vancouver, Canada; Melbourne, Australia; Panama City; Tel Aviv; London; São Paulo, Brazil; and Mexico City also got to attend their own premieres — having been among the cities that cast the most Twitter votes for early screenings.

“These are the most passionate fans, the most vocal supporters,” Rob Moore, the vice chairman of “Paranormal” maker Paramount Pictures, said as he walked along Sunset Boulevard, eyeing a raucous and ethnically diverse crowd that circled half the giant block. “We know these are the people who are going to champion it. It’s a phenomenon completely driven by word of mouth.”

Facing the new wide releases “Johnny English Reborn” and “The Three Musketeers,” the third “Paranormal” film should easily win the weekend, capping a remarkable chain of events for the movies about a spectral invasion in the suburbs. Audience tracking surveys suggest that the roughly $5-million, R-rated “Paranormal Activity 3” could gross some $40 million in its first weekend, with little competition in the weeks to come.

Shot in his own condo with an improvised script, time-lapse effects and just $15,000, writer-director Oren Peli’s first “Paranormal” film became a global sensation in 2009, grossing more than $193 million worldwide. Last year’s sequel took in less — $177.5 million total — but disproved the notion that you couldn’t make a successful sequel to a “found footage” film. (“The Blair Witch Project” blazed a trail for such scary faux documentaries in 1999, grossing nearly $250 million worldwide, but its follow-up in 2000 flopped.)

“What works best about the franchise is that it’s tiny and intimate — and that the audience is happy with that,” Moore said. “We’ve tried not to blow that up into something gigantic. Just because you can afford it doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do.”

“Paranormal 3” focuses on the not-very-innocent childhood of Katie, the main protagonist. The horror series emphasizes tension over gore, so it’s imperative to keep the scale small and the scares organic, lest audiences quickly tire of Katie’s ghost troubles. At the same time, the “Paranormal” movies follow surprisingly rigid rules about how and why a video camera is recording something.

“It’s very tricky to do, because you have to remain consistent and always justify why the camera is filming, which you don’t have to do in a traditional film,” said Jason Blum, who produced all three “Paranormal” movies. Said Ariel Schulman, who co-directed the third film with his fellow “Catfish” filmmaker Henry Joost: “There’s basically a list — a manifesto, like Dogma films. And you have to follow the rules, because the audience subconsciously knows the rules.”

In the third film, set in the late 1980s, the film’s recording begins with a sex tape session interrupted by an earthquake. When falling plaster dust reveals the outlines of some spirit in the bedroom of Katie’s mother (Lauren Bittner), her videographer boyfriend, Dennis (Christopher Nicholas Smith), starts placing cameras around the home to see what’s happening. It’s quickly apparent that as children Katie (Chloe Csengery) and her younger sister, Kristi (Jessica Brown), might know someone — or something — named Toby, who or which isn’t keen on leaving the premises.

In “Paranormal Activity 3’s” signature invention, dreamed up by screenwriter Christopher Landon, Dennis places a video camera atop the housing of an oscillating fan, so that it can pan from one room to another, looking for any ghostly mischief. Because the camera moves so slowly over the same sets, it forces the audience to study the frame as if it were examining tiny brush strokes in a giant oil painting. Consequently, you’re so focused on the frame that when something happens, you’re likely to jump that much higher.

As important as the series is to Paramount, the “Paranormal” movies don’t fit the traditional filmmaking model, where a studio revises a screenplay with one or more writers, hires a director who casts the production and shoots the script, and then repeatedly tests the movie with preview audiences to make sure the whole thing works.

The “Paranormal” movies are often improvised during production, and the finished “Paranormal 3” bears little resemblance to the film’s original outline. One of the film’s more shocking scenes, coming near its final moments, wasn’t shot until just a few weeks ago. The film’s third act — in which the protagonists leave their home, in a “Paranormal” first — was a late addition, and the filmmakers made some tiny tweaks after its sole test screening, on Sept. 14.

“These have turned into the craziest production techniques of any movies we’ve ever worked on,” said Adam Goodman, Paramount’s production chief. “We do all of our reshoots in the middle of making the movie. With this kind of production, you have the ability to keep making and remaking it until you get it right. It’s so cheap.”

The first two “Paranormal” films were particularly well received by Latino audiences and teenage girls, and this one should be no different. The built-in fan base means the studio will spend less than $20 million marketing “Paranormal 3” in the U.S, about half of what it typically costs to launch a wide release.

Asked if Paramount would be interested in a fourth “Paranormal,” Moore said with a laugh: “As long as we can find some more footage.”

john.horn@latimes.com