ExperimentalActivity

I love Paranormal Activity. It's one of my favorite horror films (for a variety of reasons), yet its absolutely insane success has proven to be a double-edged sword for horror fans. On the one hand, it gives a level of legitimacy not often seen within the horror genre outside of the throngs of fans who live for it. Conversely, it gives The Asylum an opportunity to make another movie.

In the wake of the film Walking Distance changing its name to Experimental Activity, which much like the very existence of The Asylum is nothing more than a shameless attempt to capitalize on the success of others, it would seem the company behind stellar films such as The Day the Earth Stopped and Transmorphers (which may or may not be better than the film it's emulating) has decided to make their own adaptation of Oren Peli's smash hit, known simply as Paranormal Entity.

Those wonderful folks over at Quiet Earth even got a look at the poster and revealed a brief synopsis for the "mockbustermentary" (my word, not theirs):

"Actual found videotape footage of the 2008 "murders" of the Finley family."

Short and sweet. The film will pollute video stores on December 29th of this year.

It didn't take long for the shock waves of Oren Peli's incredibly successful, record breaking Paranormal Activity to start influencing other horror movies. However, this time around we're not (yet) talking about The Asylum banging out Abnormal Activity in a weekend. Nope, this is a revival of an old twist on the cash-in-on-something-popular formula.

In the two years since PA finished production, Katie Featherston, the gal at the center of Peli's haunting tale, started laying down roots in the acting world. She took on a role in another indie horror production called Walking Distance about a small town that befalls government medical experiments. That was before PA exploded like a pipe bomb packed with money, giving theater goers all over the country a new use for talcum powder in the process. Now that Peli's title is rolling off the tongues of viable demographics the country over, THR tells us the owners of the finished-but-unreleased Walking Distance have seen fit to capitalize on Katie Featherston's new found popularity by renaming their otherwise off-the-radar film Experimental Activity.

Yes, it's shameless, but what's saddest about this story isn't how low independent filmmakers will stoop to get their work noticed, rather that poor Featherston has fallen into a trap she probably wanted to avoid. Fledgling actors, particularly those who start in the horror genre, normally hate to be typecast as, say, the curvaceous, girl-next-door type. It's tough to avoid this repeated casting at first, but even if the actress was thrilled to get another role in an indie horror film, now she's going to have to have this conversation the next time she auditions for anything: