10 Movies That Are Actually Good Besides The Marketing Gimmick

Paramount's handling of the original Paranormal Activity is nothing short of marketing genius, emphasising the supposedly "real" nature of its scares but, even more brilliantly, focusing on the scarcity of available screenings.

Paramount slowly expanded the film's release in the U.S. and around the world, first showing it in a number of college towns where they recorded audience reactions, which were then memorably shown in the movie's trailers.

As word-of-mouth from preview screenings began to spread, Paramount insisted that audiences had to go online and "demand" screenings in their city, and if it received a million demands, the film would rollout nationwide.

FOMO (fear of missing out) is one of the most compelling psychological phenomena that can be exploited when marketing anything - nobody wants to feel like they're missing out on what everybody else is talking about, and it worked perfectly here.

Paranormal Activity ended up playing wide in the U.S. and around the globe, where it grossed an unthinkable $193.4 million against a mere $15,000 original production budget.

Better still, it felt like a massive breath of fresh air for the found footage genre at the time, and though its many sequels soon enough ran the formula into the ground, the original's low-fi inventiveness still makes it hugely watchable today.