Are you prepared to sit down in the theater and whip out your smart-phone for a choose-your-own-adventure film? That just might be in our futures as Collider has reported that Alexandre Aja has signed on to direct an interactive haunted house movie for Steven Spielberg's Amblin Partners.
Alexandre Aja, the horror director behind HIGH TENSION, THE HILLS HAVE EYES, PIRANHA 3D, and the recent CRAWL, will co-write the script along with Jeff Howard (The Haunting of Hill House) and Nick Simon (THE GIRL IN THE PHOTOGRAPHS), which is based upon an idea by Howard and Mike Flanagan (DOCTOR SLEEP). Now, how will this interactive project work? I'll let Collider do the heavy lifting.
To develop the project, Amblin Partners is working with Kino Industries’ CtrlMovie technology, which empowers filmmakers to create branched narrative, interactive feature films that allow audiences to influence the storyline. Using an app on their cell phones, audience members will be able to vote in the theater 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.
We've seen a resurgence of interactive projects recently, notably Black Mirror: Bandersnatch on Netflix, but bringing this concept to the big-screen with a theater full of people seems like a much trickier prospect. That said, done right, this could be a hell of a lot of fun as well as a potential money maker as audiences would return multiple times in order to experience different plot twists. Thoughts?