Maybe you can't make it to midnight movies anymore, and were left out of Paramount Pictures' cagey late-night weekend release of Paranormal Activity in 33 cities nationwide. Every midnight screening last Thursday, Friday and Saturday reportedly sold out, raking in $535,000 in 99 showings for a stellar $16,000 average.

That's good enough to push Paramount into opening Paranormal Activity wider this Friday, Oct. 9. The midnight shows will continue but now there will be matinee and evening shows to boot.

Paramount's strategy in leaking Oren Peli's $11,000 movie to the masses has been brilliant. At that price, the studio really had nothing to lose. The midnight shows, the online "demand it" ploy, the word-of-keyboard from critics like me, are way cheaper than flooding TV and print outlets with ads, or arranging publicity tours.

It kind of reminds me of a little movie called The Blair Witch Project, not only for the grassroots campaign but because Paranormal Activity is practically Blair Witch II that learned a little from the first movie's mistakes in turning off some viewers.

Allow me to explain.

Ten years ago, The Blair Witch Project made my annual top 10 list. I still hear from people wondering what I was smoking at the time. They hated the home video conceit, the near-absence of blood, the fact that we never saw a witch, and a brilliant ending too logically abrupt for their tastes.

All the things that made me love the movie.

But I saw The Blair Witch Project weeks before ads proclaimed it “scary as hell,” according to Peter Travers of Rolling Stone, no stranger to hyperbole which is why you see his name on ads so often.

That was an irresistible dare for moviegoer, turning a $25,000 movie into a $140 million hit. But “scary as hell” in movies typically involves blood and monsters, filmed and edited in familiar fashion. Anyone seeking that from The Blair Witch Project was bound to be disappointed, and were. And I haven't stopped hearing about it.

Watch the same misguided letdown materialize for Paranormal Activity, an even cheaper production — reportedly shot in a week for $11,000 — in the same shakycam vein. Rather than Maryland woods, the haunted place is an upscale San Diego townhouse (owned by Peli). There are two victims of things going bump in the night, not three.

Otherwise, Paranormal Activity isn’t very different until the final half hour when Peli gives audiences what The Blair Witch Project didn’t; a clear motive for the mayhem, a look at whatever causes this ruckus and nifty shocks leading to it. Nothing complicated; a little wind here, some baby powder there, noises off screen and a visceral finale. But it works, if you allow it.