PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 3 - DEMON SUMMONER APPThe trailer for “Paranormal Activity 3” – one of Paramount’s most highly anticipated releases of 2011 – contained a clue: Two little girls playing the old “Bloody Mary” game with a candle and a mirror, trying to make the demon-witch appear. Could *this* be the reason the demon had tormented the girls all their lives? While this topic was the subject of increasingly heated debates on social networks and movie chat sites, we launched an app called “Demon Summoner” to build on the buzz and whip fans into a frenzy.

“Demon Summoner” invites fans to “experience paranormal activity for themselves.” A modern, mobile update of that old “Bloody Mary” game, it instructs the user to find a dark room – even supplying a virtual candle that flickers and shifts position depending on the angle at which the user is holding the phone. The app takes advantage of the phone’s camera to sense whether the room is dark enough – the game *must* be played in a dark room, of course – and employs voice recognition technology to confirm that the user has repeated the phrase “Bloody Mary” three times. (If the user says something else, it doesn’t work.) The resulting appearance on screen of Bloody Mary herself – accompanied by frightening sounds and video, realistic technical glitches and the sudden, out-of-nowhere vibration of the phone itself – scared the bejeezus out of the 150,000 people who downloaded the app and probably resulted in more than a few dropped devices and shattered screens. Sorry about that.Best of all, at the height of all this paranormal activity, the app triggers the phone’s camera, capturing a picture of the user just at the moment he or she was most apt to be wide-eyed and screaming. The app then automatically overlays the terrifying shadow of Bloody Mary herself, adds the “Paranormal Activity 3” logo and invites the user to share via Facebook, Twitter or email. Which thousands and thousands of users did.Propelled by pre-release buzz, “Paranormal Activity 3” enjoyed the highest-grossing opening weekend of any horror movie *ever*. Be sure to look for the fourth installment in this successful franchise – and an even scarier app experience – this coming fall.