Spook Hunt - the beginning

Oh god not again!

That's what I said to myself when I first heard about Paranormal Activity.

What was that sound you heard?  It was the sound of my soul being ripped apart once again.  How many times was I going to let this happen?  How many times have I had ideas that I've played with in my mind, written treatments, maybe even had a few discussions with buddies saying, "Not this time - this time I'm actually going to do it - this time we're going to make this movie...", only to let it slide away like some elusive dream that you try to hold on to upon wakening, but it always is just beyond your reach to remember.

I can't tell you how many ideas for movies I've had that eventually have been made.

Years later.

By someone else.


This time I have to make a stand. This time I'm doing it - I'm making it so dang easy for myself that I have to do it.  I'm shooting it in my own house, with my friends, with gear we already own - no excuses!

 (actors Rob Sandusky, Charles Yoakum, and Director of Photography, Rob Weiner rehearse the first scene)

Spook Hunt came from a kernel of an idea that I played around with about 6 years ago.  My idea was simple - no one had really yet exploited the first-person found-footage horror genre that Blair Witch Project opened up back in 1999.  The beauty of this genre was two-fold.  First, the first-person POV of the camera placed the viewer directly in the path of the horrors unfolding on the screen, and second, the medium allowed you to use inexpensive gear without having to make excuses for it.

I also wanted to tap into the then emerging YouTube phenomenon by not only using it to generate buzz for the project, but by posting clips of the project as if they were found footage.  Basically, I would create 3-5 min clips about a guy documenting the weird things going on in his house.  Eventually, these would ramp up and get weirder and scarier until all hell breaks loose.  I liked the tension of having the YouTube followers not really sure if what they were seeing was "real" or not and I would play that out as long as I could before letting on that the whole thing was fiction.