Alexandre Aja to Direct Interactive Haunted House Horror Movie

Fresh off of his most recent horror hit, Crawl, Alexandre Aja will tackle a new type of terror. The director — best known for his New French Extremity classic High Tension, as well as Piranha 3D, Mirrors, and The Hills Have Eyes remake — will team up with Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Partners to create a “choose your own adventure” horror movie.

The interactive horror film is said to be set in a haunted house and features a branched narrative. Similar to Black Mirror’s Bandersnatch episode, the audience can influence the decisions of the characters on-screen, changing the course of the film as they go.

Amblin is working with Kino Industries’ CtrlMovie technology to give viewers the power to alter the storyline. As detailed by Collider, “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”.

No stranger to interactive horror, Aja has also directed the Campfire Creepers VR anthology series starring Robert Englund. The show provides an immersive watchable experience to viewers, with episodes available on Samsung Gear and Oculus Rifts.

The still-untitled film will be written by Jeff Howard (The Haunting of Hill House), Nick Simon (The Girl in the Photographs), and Aja, based on an idea by Howard and Mike Flanagan.

Flanagan is perhaps best known for his breakout hits on Netflix — Hush, Gerald’s Game, and The Haunting of Hill House — and has quickly become a horror household name. As a longtime collaborator with Flanagan, Howard co-wrote Oculus, Ouija: Origin of Evil, Before I Wake and Gerald’s Game, as well as the upcoming Netflix series Midnight Mass.

That’s a powerful creative team behind this project, so we’re very curious to see how this turns out.

That said, while we love the idea of letting the audience vote to influence the narrative, we can only hope that viewers will be respectful of the film itself and not use their phones for other purposes while in the theatre.