Oren Peli: One of the advantages of this found footage format is that...

There is so much misinformation out there. If you give people even a little bit, it gets blown out of proportion then you have to go put out fires. So it's much easier to say, 'No comment.'

Oren Peli

fire giving people

Gory stuff can be shocking but it doesn’t really scare me. I’d say the kind of stuff that gets under my skin is the unknown. You hear a knock behind a wall and you don’t know what it is. Is there something there or not?

Oren Peli

scare wall skins

For a found-footage-style movie, there's a definite advantage in using unknowns, because it helps sell the illusion that it's real. A known actor would get in the way of the suspension of disbelief.

Oren Peli

style real way

I'm having fun with what I'm doing but I'd never categorically say no to something because it's not horror. I'm keeping an open mind.

Oren Peli

horror mind fun

After I watched 'The Exorcist' I refused to watch any other movie that had anything to do with ghosts or demons. I didn't even watch 'Ghostbusters' until I was much older.

Oren Peli

demon ghost watches

Almost any movie, no matter how original, is borrowing from some other movies.

Oren Peli

borrowing originals matter

In many cases your imagination is much more effective than what can be shown. It primes you to know something is about to happen - the anticipation and anxiety is worse than what ends up happening.

Oren Peli

anxiety anticipation imagination

In many places around the world, all over the U.S. and Europe there are active nuclear power plants. And for many years during the Cold War the threat of nuclear war was a permanent fear. There's always the concern that human kind is biting off more than they can chew in harnessing nuclear power.

Oren Peli

europe war years

Not knowing the thing that’s chasing you is a lot scarier than seeing it right in front of you

Oren Peli

chasing seeing knowing

By trade, I am a software programmer, so I never really had any experience with movies before. I started out with 'Paranormal Activity.

Oren Peli

paranormal software trade

I don't know. I think that horror, in general, is fairly popular. It's definitely popular in film. There's just not a lot of good horror on TV, so whenever there is good horror on TV, people rush to it.

Oren Peli

tvs people thinking

Because of the way we let the actors improvise, it feels like you're watching people react rather than actors reading lines - so I think that's always going to be something I like.

Oren Peli

reading people thinking

I pay a lot of attention to box office because I understand it. TV ratings? I don't know how to interpret them, since I'm new to TV, so I'm just going to wait for somebody to tell me.

Oren Peli

office waiting attention

I feel like when you do things with such a small budget, it actually makes you be more creative... and allows you to concentrate more on the story and the characters. I think that there is something about dirty, gritty and raw filmmaking that makes it feel a little more natural and makes it easier to connect with the action.

Oren Peli

character dirty thinking

I don't know if I would say that I'm specifically a history buff. I do find a lot of things fascinating, especially anything that's bizarre or mysterious and unknown and we don't have all the answers for.

Oren Peli

mysterious bizarre answers

Really it's always things that scare me like loss of control, dealing with the unknown and the unseen... Something that's not supposed to be there and you don't know where it came from, or what it wants from you, or how to defend yourself against it. That's the root of the things I find scary.

Oren Peli

scary roots loss

I do not buy CDs any more; I usually stream Internet radio. For movies, I hardly every buy any DVDS. I have a DVR, so just record things off HBO, Showtime and so on.

Oren Peli

dvds cds hbo

Personally I like the slow burn; I don't think there is anything wrong with it. When I think about the movies that were most effective on me as a viewer I think of the original Haunting and the Exorcist, Rosemary's Baby, the Sixth Sense, the Others. These movies are not over the top at all, they are movies that rely on good story telling, good acting, good premise, good exposition and I want to stay true to that in future projects.

Oren Peli

acting baby thinking

Even when I was making the first 'Paranormal Activity,' I didn't tell anyone I was making it, not my friends or neighbors or co-workers. I just kind of found that there was nothing to gain by announcing to the world that you're doing something.

Oren Peli

gains world firsts

Usually I don't find gore or slasher films scary. What works for me is the slower build where you are tightening the noose around the situation until you are running out of options and then really have no idea what to do.

Oren Peli

scary running ideas

One of the advantages of this found footage format is that you can have deliberately badly composed frames. Here we can put a camera in the weirdest angle and it kind of throws you off. You never know what you are supposed to be paying attention to. It's deliberate chaos.