Paranormal Activity is Blair Witch's method applied to a house instead of a wood: a camera the characters are holding or have set up themselves, no score, unknown actors, and a budget small enough that the film cannot fail commercially. The inheritance is structural rather than atmospheric. Both films spend most of their length on nothing happening, both make the audience search a static frame for a change, and both withhold the thing itself. Oren Peli's film was made for a reported fifteen thousand dollars, which is the Blair Witch economic argument repeated.