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Xbox is not content doing battle for videogame platform supremacy with PS3 and Wii. It wants to carve out a chunk of the online TV world, so on Monday, Microsoft launched "Horror Meets Comedy," an online network of downloadable programs for the new Xbox’s Independent Video Channel that gives eight horror filmmakers the chance be funny for a change.
Directors including James Wan (Saw), James Gunn (Slither), Adam Green (Hatchett), David Slade (30 Days of Night) and Lucky McKee (The Woods) received short-film budgets and a straightforward assignment: “No horror. Be funny.”
Xbox owners will be able to download the comedy shorts for free on their game systems, their laptops and PDAs with one film debuting each week until the new year. More than 14 million members of the Xbox Independent Video Channel in 26 countries are expected to access the films in conjunction with the New Xbox Experience launch.
Gunn, Green, Slade and McKee talked to Wired.com about crossing over from blood and guts to giggles and snorts.
As executive producer of “Horror Meets Comedy,” Gunn recruited his director friends to take part in the project. A devoted Xbox player, Gunn said he wanted to “give horror directors a chance to do something outside of the box. It was also a perfect chance for me to work with my friends who direct horror. It’s just fun for me to work with these guys.”
“One of the most exciting things about this is we don’t have that much money to work with in the budget, so we get to try some different things," Gunn says. "That process turns out very unique films unlike anything we’ve ever done before.”
Gunn’s Xbox short film is Sparky & Mikaela, the story of a teenage girl superhero and her crime-fighting companion — a puppet raccoon.
For Green, the transition from horror was no big deal considering he’d been making his own comedy shorts for about a decade. Green’s “Fairy Tale Police” (trailer above) is a COPS-inspired reality show about two human police officers (Rachel Leigh Cook and Parry Shen) trying to maintain order in a land full of "storybook villains."
Green added, “It was great to be able to do it with guys I’m a fan of — with guys who are better filmmakers than I am.”
Slade agreed that he was, in fact, a much better filmmaker than Green. His household’s Xbox amounts to little more than a fancy DVD player, but Slade enjoyed the chance to fill it with his darker comedic efforts. “It’s not a difficult transition for (horror directors) because horror filmmakers go to violence for humor instinctively,” Slade explained. “You saw that work for Monty Python, for example, with The Black Knight in Holy Grail. I think you will often end up with a physical comedy emerging from that mix.”
Slade enters the fray with Meatdog: What’s Fer Dinner, the tale of an animated mutt made up of cold cuts. His pork-based physique is pitted against a church of evil occult pigs.
While some of the short-film productions took a matter of days to write, shoot and edit, Slade decided to use animation — without a crew of animators. He said, “I had to learn software and do the animation myself so mine took forever. but I really wanted the chance to work with animation.”
The first film up for download is McKee’s Blue Like You (trailer at top). It follows old friends Patrick and Cyndy as they get to know their mysterious new friend Blue, a beautiful young woman who doesn’t grok how "the simplest of things work.”
Half-joking that he took on the short-film challenge in the hope that someone would send him a free Xbox, McKee compared his short comedies to “the cartoons they would show in front of movies in the ’40s and ’50s. They were five to seven minutes long. The audience enjoyed them, and there was a level of violence to the comedy — especially if you look at the work of Tex Avery or Chuck Jones.”
“Not only did we all get to write and direct,” McKee added, “we got to step into other arenas. I acted in mine and did the music.”
Gunn said that the "Horror Meets Comedy" series, sponsored by the U.S. Air Force and produced by Safran Digital Group, grew out of the writers strike and artists’ ongoing war with Hollywood’s corporate ownership. “With writers and directors getting so little money out of their own work, this project splits the revenue evenly between the filmmakers and Xbox.”
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