Katie Featherston

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:

Well, congrats are in order to Paramount for slyly marketing its low-budget pick-up, Paranormal Activity, to bona fide box office success with $7.1 million on a mere 159 screens, with a wider release still to come.

But many of the fans savvy enough to seek it out are by now aware that Activity's ending wasn't always as it stands now. In fact, the film runs about ten minutes shorter between its late '07/early '08 festival screenings and its current cut.

So, to answer the questions that I and others fortunate enough to have seen the original version have been fielding, we'll be taking a look at as many differences as we can remember between the two, not to mention the further rumblings of what was different in test screenings for the film.

Naturally, this means spoilers. I know, it says as much right there in the headline, but for the sake of covering our butts, let's make this clear: a spoiler warning for everything post-jump.

There, that ought to do it.

When I first read about the premise of [REC] a couple of years back, I thought it sounded like something with potential, but once I saw an early teaser for it, compiled of audience reactions at Sitges and no footage whatsoever, I knew I was game.

Cut to present day, and I've grown considerably wearier of not only the hokier tactics used to sell horror movies, but the minimal theatrical runs that some are forced to face. Then along comes Paramount, in the wake of burning off whatever Vantage titles they had acquired, who proceeds to not only dust off their long-ago-purchased home-video horror, Paranormal Activity, but opt to forgo their announced remake plans in lieu of releasing the original -- well, with a reportedly re-shot ending anyway.

I saw what would now appear to be the original (and, well, moderately creepy*) cut a good while back, and while I'm sure that, like any good horror, it'll play great with a crowd, the hype machine is in full force as the select blurbs all insist on seeing it in a theater and the select markets next weekend encourage you to insist on seeing it in a theater near you if it won't already be there.

If nothing else, it's a smart sales push, especially among the genre-heavy wide releases of both September and October. However, Sorority Row, Whiteout, Jennifer's Body, Pandorum, The Stepfather, and Saw IV won't have to worry about big-time buzz overshadowing a small-scale movie. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'm glad that Paranormal is getting a proper push, and I hope that its future fans won't think it's the next sliced bread just because they were sold on that idea going in.

Check out the new trailer after the jump.

(*As in impressive-for-its-resources creepy, not hide-under-the-covers creepy, though maybe that's just me...)