Just days after Paramount announced that they’re (shockingly!) going ahead with a fourth installment in their runaway scare-em-up success Paranormal Activity franchise comes word that Paranormal Activity 3 co-directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman are back on board to direct. The pair took on PA3 after the success of their “documentary” Catfish, and while that film has certainly had its own share of speculation as to its veracity, the pair’s ability to present fiction as fact (or vice versa) helped make the third Paranormal Activity the best (and most inventive) yet. The fourth film is already slated to hit theaters on October 19, 2012, continuing the franchise’s established tradition of a pre-Halloween opening (the first film was the only one to not occupy a similar release date), effectively stealing the thunder of the Saw franchise now and forever. Our pals over at /Film took this opportunity to speculate about what the next Paranormal Activity would entail, positing that “the story of Paranormal Activity 4 will likely go one of two ways. Either it can go back in the past and show why Katie and Kristi’s grandmother got all wacky or it can jump ahead (something I felt the third film was lacking) and explain what is going on with the now possessed Katie and her nephew, who she’s kidnapped from her dead sister.” Those ideas just got my gears turning for what I want to see in the next installment.

Recently, Paramount sent around one of those pat-yourself-on-the-back sorts of press releases announcing that they made more money worldwide than any other studio last year. Of course, not one to dwell too long in the past, they also managed to slip in a little paragraph bragging about how good their upcoming 2012 looks as well: “In 2012, Paramount’s release slate highlights include World War Z, a zombie thriller starring Brad Pitt and directed by Marc Forster, G.I. Joe: Retaliation, the next installment in the global franchise starring Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson and Channing Tatum, a new chapter in the Paranormal Activity franchise, and The Dictator, starring Sacha Baron Cohen and directed by Larry Charles, the team behind Borat.” The interesting part of this paragraph is that, in addition to mentioning a bunch of high profile projects that we already knew about, the studio is also claiming that they have another Paranormal Activity movie in the works, which is news. All of these other movies are in various stages of post-production, but Paranormal Activity 4 is naught but a glimmer in some profit-minded executive’s eye.

Since we all have a million dollars, our minds are almost always tuned to the day dream of what kind of movie we’d make with all that loose cash just lying around (since banks do nothing but lose things). Would it be a romantic horror film? Would it be a silent action film? Would we blow of all of it on lighting and forget the other elements of production design? Probably. Fortunately, we’ve all had a few filmmakers tread before us in using their million bucks with efficiency and artistry. In a world where Michael Bay needs 200 suitcases full of $1m, these directors made it happen with only one of those suitcases (or no suitcases at all), and they created a lasting legacy despite their lack of foldin’ money. If they can do it, why not us? Here are 8 great films made for under a million dollars that we can all learn from. (And if you enter our contest sponsored by Doritos, you might actually win that $1m you need for all those lights.)

I could probably make this review incredibly brief and make everyone happy. If you liked the first two films you’re likely to like the the third.

I wrote that review while waiting in the line for the men’s room.

Like Paranormal Activity 2, Paranormal Activity 3 is a prequel to its predecessor. It takes place in the month of September of 1988 when the two sisters of the first two films were little girls and the referenced beginning of their experiences with the invisible, kitchen furniture-hating demonic figure began. Seriously, this demon really hates kitchens. I think he hates everything but camcorders.

Remember the salad days, when commercials tried to tell us that Paranormal Activity was the scariest movie ever made? And remember when you finally saw the film, and it had one jump-scare, and that was it? Just me? Well, we can talk about that later. It was a bit of a no-brainer that Paranormal Activity would spawn a franchise – after famously being made on the cheap, and gathering serious word-0f-mouth buzz by way of the Internet (a sort of modern day The Blair Witch Project approach to viral techniques of marketing, paired with a sense of the secretive), Paramount would have been stupid to let the “found footage” smash hit go without pushing out a few more sequels. There was Paranormal Activity 2, which served as the chocolate wafers to the cookie cream that is the Oreo that is the Paranormal Activity franchise. That’s a yummy way of saying that the events of the first film fit into the middle of the second film, making it both a prequel and sequel. Clever! Now we get a real prequel, one that goes way back to the childhood of Katie and Kristi, the sisters at the center of the mystery. Check out the second trailer for Paranormal Activity 3 after the break, which expands on the first glimpses we got of the film from its earlier teaser, glimpses that show us that young Katie and Kristi were, well, pretty damn hard to handle.

You did it, godammit. They just invited us to dinner. Synopsis A small band of American filmmakers departs for the Amazon to document the lives of warring cannibal tribes. Two months after they’ve vanished into the so-called Green Inferno, a rescue team led by anthropologist Harold Monroe (Robert Kerman) discovers the documentary crew died at the hands of the Yanomamo tribe. Monroe retrieves the crew’s footage and brings it back to New York. The found footage depicts an orgy of shocking sadism – perpetrated by both the cannibals and the “civilized” Americans.

After invisibly slamming doors against the faces of the movie-going public with a modern day ghost story, director Oren Peli is getting a bit more traditional with his next project. He’ll be adapting “The System of of Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether,” which either means he’s making a film version of an Edgar Allen Poe short story or of a funky single from The Alan Parsons Project. Apparently it’s the former (since we’ve already ruled out credit going to the Edgar Alan Poe-sons Project), and apparently they’re changing the name (since that whole thing won’t fit on a title card) to simply Eliza Graves. The original story is a black comedic take on the lunatics taking over the loony bin, and the synopsis for the film seems to at least follow the bread crumbs home there. According to Variety, the plot focuses on a recent medical school graduate who begins working at an insane asylum without knowing that it’s been taken over by the inmates. The goosebumps are already forming. Specifically because Mel Gibson is executively producing.

Sequels are rough waters to navigate. Ideally they need to accomplish two things: enhance, expand, and support the world of the original and still stand on its own as an individual film. If you’ve ever seen a sequel that does too much of the former without any attempt at the latter, you get a pandering sequel that feels completely unnecessary; a la The Ring 2. If the movie missteps in the opposite direction, the sequel will seem so severed from the original and you will be left wondering why it bears the same name; the woe bore by the likes of 30 Days of Night: Dark Days. Whether you loved, loathed, or were indifferent towards the first Paranormal Activity, it’s hard to deny that its follow-up succeeds in both criteria.

This week, Fat Guy Kevin Carr puts on his ghostbusting gear to take on the two big spiritual flicks in the theaters. He suffers through a tsunami in Hereafter and struggles even more to get through Clint Eastwood’s latest Oscar-bait flick. Then he sets up a stationary video camera to capture any strange goings-on while he sleeps. He plans to sell the film to Paramount as Paranormal Activity 3: More Shots of Nothing Happening.

There’s nothing scarier than being relatively alone and hearing mysterious noises in the middle of the night. It’s even worse if you’re possessed by a demon.

With an announced production budget of under $2 million, The Last Exorcism undoubtedly won big this weekend, pulling in an estimated $21 million. Numbers like that get noticed and, unfortunately, get undeserved sequels greenlit. I openly admit to walking into The Last Exorcism with a prejudice: I don’t like fake documentaries or “found footage” films. It’s a tired trick. Hollywood doesn’t mind them though, because one mediocre weekend turns a big profit, and the film can be sent immediately to DVD. We’ve seen films like The Blair Witch and Paranormal Activity use this formula to great success on limited budgets. Since I’m not a Hollywood executive, I don’t really give a damn if they make a ton of money. There are more entertaining ways to earn it, like just releasing more medium budget horror movies. Or releasing horror movies on Halloween. But I digress. I don’t like faux documentaries or found footage films because they rarely work and they’re never even close to real.

Last year Paranormal Activity proved to be the little engine that could, going from a $15,000 indie about to be dumped to DVD and possibly remade to a $107 million domestic box office powerhouse. If we’re talking return on investment, it doesn’t get much better than that. It should come as no surprise then that Paranormal Activity 2 has been advancing rather quickly and now we’ve got a teaser trailer to show you.

With recent events involving fresh piracy lawsuits, and people vehemently defending their right to steal, it’s important to check out what filmmakers think about piracy. In the case of Kiowa Winans and Rhett Reese, it’s not as black and white as you’d think.

It’s like nothing you’ve ever seen. That’s what they will tell you. And the most frightening thing about the entire situation is that they are right.

Paranormal Activity director Oren Peli announced today via a note to fans on the film’s official site that Kip Williams, director of The Door in the Floor, has signed on to take the reins of the upcoming sequel, Paranormal Activity 2.

Paramount is on an impossible mission (see what I did there? I referenced an old Commodore 64 game) to find a director worthy of helming a sequel to their blockbuster hit, Paranormal Activity. The original film from first-time director Oren Peli was produced for under a million dollars but went on to gross over a hundred million at the box-office. A profit that size made a sequel inevitable, and the studio has already announced a release date of October 22nd, 2010… less than eight months away.

Seeing as it is the week after Christmas, you might expect a little more out of the Blu-ray release schedule. But as you will will see in This Week in Blu-ray, it is a light week for Blu-ray buyers.

Rob Hunter loves movies. He also loves working for the Ghostbusters to serve all your supernatural elimination needs. These two joys come together in the form of cash money payments that he receives every week and immediately uses to buy more DVDs. This week: Paranormal Activity, A Perfect Getaway, Glee, and more!

To movie critics (including myself): yer doin’ it wrong.

Here are my thoughts on what happened this weekend at the box office, with Disney’s A Christmas Carol leading the way at $31 million.