Paranormal Activity is one of the scariest movies I've seen in 20 years, easily, and there's not one bit of 'gore' in it.
Lately, horror movies equate blood and gore with being scary. They've abandoned the notion that to be truly scary, there has to be a
sense of unknown, that the scare comes from the unexpected. Too many are completely predictable.
I was at the premiere of The Blair Witch Project. Not only was it a great premise, the first entry in the 'found footage' genre, but it did one thing very well: it used your mind against you to build up the fear and the scares. You didn't have to see anything to be frightened by the movie, because your mind filled in the blanks for you.
There've been a lot of 'found footage' movies since then, most notably Cloverfield. But Paranormal Activity is the first that really took what Blair Witch started and expanded on it the most effectively I've seen yet.
Made on a 15,000 dollar budget, Spielberg actually picked it up, liked the premise, and had planned on remaking it with a larger budget. (Ironically, after he screened the DVD at his home, he would no longer keep the DVD in his house, it scared him so bad.) But when they screened it for a team of writers at Dreamworks, then later to a test audience, they realized that they didn't have to do anything to the film, that it was perfect the way it was, so they came up with this Internet/college crowd/word-of-mouth marketing scheme, with staged releases. It's also the highest per-screen gross of any movie out at this time.
4 actors, 1 location, 1 DV camcorder, and all old-school scare effects save for 1 slightly-longer-than 2 second CGI effect at the end, and it has become one of my top five fave horror flicks ever.
