French horror director Alexandre Aja has signed on to direct a big budget, interactive haunted house movie for Steven Spielberg. The structure will be branching a narrative that puts the viewers in control of character’s decision in the movie (ie. CYOA).
The film will be written by Jeff Howard (The Haunting of Hill House), Nick Simon(The Girl in the Photographs), and Aja and is based on an idea by Howard and Mike Flanagan who has become something of a horror sensation recently with his series of Netflix projects including The Haunting of Hill House, Gerald’s Game and Hush.
To bring the project to life, Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment is working with Kino Industries’ “CtrlMovie technology”, which empowers filmmakers to create branching narrative, interactive feature films that allow audiences to influence the storyline.
The film is intended to be a theatrical experience where, using an app on their cell phones, audience members will vote to decide what characters will do at pivotal points in the narrative, meaning that Aja’s film will have a different plot, ending and even running time depending on the audience’s choices.
[Related: The First Interactive Movie was Banned]
The CtrlMovie technology was used to create the film Late Shift produced by Kino Industries. It travelled to many A-list festivals, won awards, earned rave reviews by both the press and public and made more than $1.2m in just a matter of months.
Aja recently released the disaster/creature feature Crawl which has grossed nearly $60 million worldwide and is supposed to be quite good. The French filmmaker came to Hollywood to direct the remake of The Hills Have Eyes in 2006 after setting new horror trends in France with films like High Tension.
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