Two years ago Andrew Jacobs, a talented breakdancer from Los Angeles, didn’t have a single film or TV credit to his name. A young man with a complicated past – born into a gang-affiliated family and adopted by a French woman – Jacobs decided to get into acting on a whim, having not done any dramatic work since acting in a few commercials in his pre-teen years.
Thirty-year-old Jorge Diaz had a list of credits that included a few small independent films, a few TV shows, and voiceovers in video games including Grand Theft Auto V and Dead Rising 3. Having been in the business for several years, Diaz sought to get recognized and start acting in major films.
In 2012, they both decided to audition for a film at Paramount studios, although neither had any idea what exactly they were auditioning for. Just a few weeks later, the two of them had the lead roles in Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones, the fifth installment in the wildly popular horror franchise that has grossed over $700 million worldwide since the first film was released in 2009.
“We had no idea it was a Paranormal film at all,” Jacobs said. “It was very secretive. They try to keep these projects quiet so it’s not out in the public. They want it to be as real as possible when it comes out. It’s the whole point of these films.”
Paramount struck gold when they acquired the rights for the horror “mockumentary” Paranormal Activity in 2007. Shot on a home video camera on a budget of about $5,000, its unique, first-person angle of horror captivated critics and fans alike, and turned the film into one of the biggest cinematic hits of the year. It spawned three sequels in three years after the film was released in theatres in 2009, each raking in over $100 million worldwide.
Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones was released in theatres Jan.3, the first film in the series that isn’t a direct sequel but rather a “cousin” of the franchise. It’s the first pure spin-off, and while it still consists entirely of footage that the main characters capture on a home video camera, it deviates from the previous films in a few ways. While the first four films have largely kept the scares inside a single house, the supernatural events in the new film occur all over the town, so the characters truly have nowhere to run from the entity haunting them.
The setting also moves from suburbia to Oxnard, California, a primarily Latino city about an hour's drive from Los Angeles. The story mirrors that change of environment, as the horror and carnage moves into a Catholic area where it wouldn’t be rare to find a weird old lady who practices black magic and has candles all over her apartment. The scares in the film delve into a realm of Latin American superstitions, and Jacobs and Diaz (both Latino) both got a real taste of it on set.
“We go to a ritual store called a botanica,” said Jacobs. “There’s a guy who blesses eggs to my grandma. That’s a real place, and he’s real. We call him a curandero. It’s legit. When we first walked in, we didn’t want to touch anything. There are statues and trinkets…it’s definitely creepy.”
Although in person the two young actors seem like they have been best friends for years, they had never met each other before the audition (which they happened by chance to do together). Director Christopher Landon, however, immediately saw chemistry between them. He was quickly sold on Jacobs and Diaz, who were both told to conduct a mock interview as the characters they were portraying. Only after they had gotten the gig were they informed which roles they were auditioning for.
“Finally, when we were screen testing, we found out it was Paranormal Activity, and we were like, 'what!?'” Diaz said. “We figured it was something legit and kind of big because we were at Paramount studios, and we were like, ‘I guess it must be a good movie,’ but they were top secret about it.”
Assigned the role of playing teenage best friends, who had just graduated high school, the two knew they would need to get to know each other. So just days after they got the job, Jacobs called Diaz and invited him to hang out at his house. Soon, they found they had a lot in common and developed a friendship away from the camera, which they believe enhanced their characters and the relationship between them.
“The director really wanted to depict a bond between friends,” said Diaz. “Once he got to know our personalities, it gave him freedom to have fun with his ideas. We really were goofing around.”
For the first half hour of the film, Diaz and Jacobs indeed goof around quite a bit. The film begins as almost a buddy comedy, centered on two kids fresh out of high school, who perform stunts like sliding down staircases in laundry baskets and drawing genitalia on each other’s faces. With the freedom to ad-lib throughout much of the film, they were told by Landon to talk like they normally do, and sprinkle as much slang into their vocabularies as they wanted. They joked around with each other on camera without specific lines to say, and their chemistry made it seem very natural.
“Some jokes I’m kind of glad didn’t make it,” said Diaz. “There were some super dirty jokes. But whenever we didn’t feel comfortable saying something, or it felt fake, he said to make it your own.”
But while they had no trouble goofing off on camera, the candid nature of the film created scenarios for the two young actors that they had never experienced before. Since the entire film is composed of found footage, shooting it proved to be very unconventional and challenging for everybody. Diaz, whose character operated the camera throughout most of the film, did almost all of the shooting himself. In fact, he found himself constantly acting behind the camera, rattling off his lines as he simultaneously moved the camera in specific ways that Landon wanted. As for Jacobs, his face time was extensive, but he wasn’t interacting with the camera in the same way as one might in any other film. Sometimes, he had his back turned from the camera in the most crucial parts.
“A lot of people might think it’s easier,” said Jacobs. “People watching it may think that we’re just acting like natural guys, like ourselves. But in reality, it’s actually a bigger challenge. It needed to be as authentic as possible.”
After eight months of shooting, with a large break in the middle of the process during which the production team decided to scrap much of the story, the film was wrapped and the January release date was set. With their first major motion picture in the bag, the two young actors have been actively pursuing other movies. Diaz has two projects lined up, neither of which he can reveal yet, and Jacobs is starring in the upcoming independent film Angel of Death. The film was their first foray into the horror genre, and neither would be opposed to working in the genre again in the future.
“I’m not a big horror guy, but this has definitely opened my mind to it,” said Jacobs. “I watched Insidious, I watched The Conjuring, and now I have more of an appreciation for it. It’s hard to scare people, and being scared is hard too. Besides this project, we’re definitely happy to see what’s going to come our way.”