Things that go zzzzz in the night

A more precise name would be “Paranormal Inactivity,” but that would not be as marketable.

And marketing is what “Paranormal Activity” is all about. The film is a triumph of marketing. Story, character, dialogue, photography -- not so much.

Reportedly shot in one week on a budget of $15,000, the picture is in a theater near you as a result of a brilliant viral advertising campaign. The studio, Paramount, let it be known that this is the scariest movie ever made. It will terrify you so much that you will sleep with the lights on for a week after you see it. But the studio didn’t know whether it should show it. If you want it to come to your town, you have to go to a Web site and vote to see it.

How could it fail? The people who came up with that idea are marketing gods. They deserve a hefty portion of what are sure to be massive profits -- it’s hard not to make a profit when the picture only costs $15,000.

What they don’t tell you is that you’ll be so bored by the movie that you won’t have to sleep with the lights on, you’ll just be able to.

Katie Featherston and Micah Sloat play Katie and Micah (another clever idea), an attractive but insanely dull young couple who are hearing bumps in the night. Micah has bought a camera to record whatever goes on in their house while they sleep, and it is these tapes that make up the entirety of the film.

In other words, it is another version of the camcorder first-person point of view pioneered in “The Blair Witch Project” and “Cloverfield.” It seems like an effective tool, but it would be so much more effective if we wanted to watch the tapes. At least in “Cloverfield,” the camera catches the characters in reasonably interesting lives before the beastie comes calling.

In “Paranormal Activity” Katie and Micah are banal. Their conversations become repetitive -- each character has about three things to say, and they say them over and over and over. He wants to get a Ouija board to help find out what is happening. She doesn’t want him to. He wants to keep the camera on at all times. She doesn’t want him to. She wants to call a demonologist, he doesn’t want her to.

Thirty-five minutes into the film, you wish the demon would come out and eat them, already -- if just to shut them up. Every once in awhile, Katie and Micah hear a thump and a low-frequency hum, which isn’t scary. It might be scary if there were something interesting to distract us, such as other characters or a subplot. But all we get essentially is these two characters and their house.

When Micah in frustration addresses the unseen demon, “Hey, we haven’t had anything interesting happen in awhile,” we can’t help but agree with him.

Featherston and Sloat do a fine job of making their relationship believable, and their conversations seem true to life. We just don’t want to hear the same ideas repeated so many times without any frights to enliven them. And when something does happen -- they find a photograph -- it is only unintentionally funny. The demon hasn’t just been stalking her, it turns out to be a bit of a perv.

A man named Oren Peli wrote and directed the film, but you wouldn’t know that from watching it. Neither his name nor anyone else’s appears in the credits. That is because there are no credits, another devilishly clever ploy from the marketing department.

Those guys are great. Maybe they should be the ones making the movie.