I don’t care much for scary movies (they tend to bore me), but I do enjoy watching other people reacting to them. That’s why I love the new trailer for Paranormal Activity, a $10,000-budget horror flick that’s been frightening film festival attendees since 2007 and which finally opens in regular theaters next week.

The trailer focuses on footage of the audience of a recent screening of the film while showing very little of the film itself. The idea is to show us that people are indeed scared silly. But what I appreciate, as a strong advocate of moviegoing, is that it kind of tells us we need to see this thing in a theater with a large crowd for the optimum experience.

I guess you could still wait for the film to hit DVD and do your screaming and jumping from your couch, but doesn’t it look more fun with a bunch of strangers? Personally, the trailer makes me want to watch the rest of the night-vision audience-cam footage more than the actual film, but hopefully going to the cinema to see this will be just as good. As long as nobody minds me sitting in a lawn chair in front of the auditorium, facing the seats instead of the screen.

Unfortunately, on September 25, Paranormal Activity is only opening in 13 cities and the closest to my home of NYC is State College, PA (and that’s a very long bike ride to see a movie!). But so far only myself and 429 others have “demanded” it play here, so I’ll probably never get the chance to experience the film as it should be. Maybe I can sneak into the homes of people who’ve rented it, though, and watch their reactions?

Check out what other film blogs are saying about the trailer after the jump:

• Dustin Rowles at Pajiba is sold now that he’s seen that audience reaction:
  

  I actually dig the new trailer. Paramount has taken a novel approach: Much of it is what you saw in the first trailer (plus a few new images), but it’s spliced together with reaction shots from an audience during an earlier screening. They look terrified. That’d never work for a major studio picture, but it really helps to sell this one. I, for one, will be queued up when it arrives in my town.

• Mark at I Watch Stuff isn’t sure why we should trust this particular audience:
  

  Sure, the audience seemed scared, but what if that’s the same audience you see laughing uproariously at All About Steve?

• Josh Tyler at Cinema Blend also seems dubious of the audience here:
  

  The trailer itself uses a horror movie marketing technique which I thought went out of vogue twenty years ago. The idea here is to convince you that it’s the scariest thing you’ve ever seen by showing you “real” audience members being scared by it. They’re about half a step away from handing out diapers at the box office, as a way of convincing you it’ll be so scary you’ll crap your pants.

• Dr. Cole Abaius at Film School Rejects wishes the trailer went further into the retro strategy:
  

  It’s also nice to see 1950s style marketing come back in a modernized way. I was genuinely waiting for them to say something about women who are pregnant and people with heart conditions needing to leave the theater.

• Ross Miller at ScreenRant loves the trailer’s strategy, even though it’s been done before:
  

  I love the way the trailer splices nightvision footage of an audience watching the film, with actual footage from the film. The same technique was used for the trailer for [REC] a couple of years ago - I think it’s a great idea, especially when you’re going to end up like those scared audience members, jumping in the dark at every loud noise.

• Seth Abramovitch at Movieline compares it to another recent trailer:
  

  Like the teaser for Capitalism: A Love Story, unwitting members of an actual audience are turned into marketing pawns. In this case, though, they aren’t required to make contributions to bogus charities, but rather just watch the movie and let the infrared cameras capture their reaction. It’s an interesting strategy, as if to say, “What do you mean this doesn’t look scary — check out that fully grown man clutching his date and screaming like a little bitch! This is pants-crappingly terrifying entertainment, people.”

• Capone at Ain’t It Cool News believes the hype:
  

  I love  THIS TRAILER. I love that it isn’t just about summarizing the plot; it’s about the reaction. It makes it perfectly clear that this is not a film to be seen alone; this isn’t a film about excessive gore or cheap scares; there are no big stars or monumental effects budgets at work here; this is a film that wants to get inside your head and make you scared to walk home at night. Think BLAIR WITCH before you knew it was fake. We see a lot of horror hype all over the internet, and usually it turns out to be bullshit. This one strikes me as the real deal.

• Meredith Woerner at io9 lets us know the hype is real, having heard directly from the kind of people quoted in the trailer:
  

  The fake home video flick is being heralded as one of the best scary movies of all time, but is it just hype?…Horror blogs generally support this movie’s overall spookiness. Last year I asked Uncle Creepy of Dread Central what the scariest movie he had ever seen was, and without hesitation he said Paranormal Activity. Bloody Disgusting says it’s one of the scariest movies of all time, and Fear Net supports it as well.

• William Goss at HorrorSquad assures us that it’s worth seeing but not to have such high expectations as you might thanks to the hype:
  

  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.

• Alex Billington at FirstShowing also praises the film but isn’t a fan of the trailer:
  

  If you want to stay completely fresh going into this (which I suggest), then don’t watch this trailer, but if you need to be convinced then go ahead. I’m not fond of their choice to use the camera footage of the test screening audience, but that’s just me.

• Gabe Toro at The Playlist hopes you won’t be turned off by the bits of familiar-style footage we do see in the trailer:
  

  The new trailer highlights the extremely strong word-of-mouth the film has received, from both enthusiastic festival and test audiences as well as genre critics who have raved about the film as its been kept under lock and key by Dreamworks for the last year and a half…Yes, it’s another found-footage horror film, and yes, we’re getting a little tired of that, but we’re sure the horror genre’s move in that direction will be worth a term paper or two for some of you film students out there. Mention the war.

• Whitney Matheson at PopCandy directs us to another bit of viral marketing for the film from which I can still take some delight in people’s horrified reactions to stuff:
  

  Pop reader Cat S. points out the film has set up an interesting Twitter feed over at @TweetYourScream. Fans are using it to write about things that have made them scream, like, “When I was 6, I poured a bowl of cereal, only to discover maggots in my cereal” (nice) and “having a giant banana spider walk on my face when I was sleeping.”

Check out the trailer and let us know what you think below: