Comic Con: Xbox 360 to offer up new horror shorts

Posted Friday, July 25, 2008 at 3:20 PM Central

by Ken Rhodes

Microsoft held a breakfast meeting today to go into detail about the original Xbox content coming this fall, which features the horror-comedy "pilots" from this week’s earlier press release.

Executive Producer Peter Safran and a team from Microsoft made the presentation. Safran, along with writer-director James Gunn (Slither) conceived the idea, which they pitched to a group of noted horror filmmakers — "What makes you laugh?" For those who joined up - James Wan (Saw), Marcus Nispel (Texas Chainsaw remake, Friday the 13th remake) and Andrew Douglas (Amityville Horror remake) among them - they were lured by the promise of creative control, an ownership stake in their concept, and a frighteningly low budget.

Shot on HD, these five to seven minute comedy-horror shorts will include animation, slapstick, social satire, and good old fashioned weirdness. Led by James Gunn’s "The Humanzee", starring his brother Sean (Gilmore Girls) as the title creature, comedy is the key but throat chomping may soon follow. The presentation included a trailer for Gunn’s project and a comedic behind the scenes for Douglas’ "Miracle of Phil", a man-has-baby bit of fun guaranteed to offend. The shorts are scheduled to arrive on Xbox Marketplace this fall, available free to Silver and Gold members. Xbox360 will have an exclusive window on the shorts, and may take one or more of them to “series” if they gain particular traction with the Marketplace audience. The projects may also appear in an “unrated” format on other media at a later date.

The posters for these shorts were revealed this morning at the breakfast and can be seen below and to the right.

Editor's Note: Since the bigwigs wouldn't let us fuel up the corporate jet with gas prices being what they are, we were unable to attend Comic Con ourselves this year. Our good buddy Ken from popGeezer.com is helping us out with a few morsels of information.