What’s scarier about living in a time of constant surveillance: being watched, or being caught watching?

Paranormal Activity genuinely scared the shit out of me in 2009. Like The Blair Witch Project that preceded it by a decade, it was almost as scary to think about what it was like to film the movie as it was to watch it. Low-budget productions often involve a group of professionals who have no reason to trust each other, and imagining showing up for an early-morning call in the woods is chilling enough for anyone who’s ever downloaded a script in PDF and wondered what they’d gotten themselves into. Paranormal Activity’s release came at a time when we were getting increasingly paranoid about how we shared our information, however, and this made it even more scary than it would have been before we knew that The Government Knew What We Liked and were picking up the geographical pins that we had unwittingly dropped into their database.