Staying Home on Halloween just got a whole lot scarier.

Keeping with the season, interactive experience guru’s Fourth Wall Studios have dropped a supernatural thriller in our collective laps! Yea, and this will creep you out, surely, in a most transmedial way. Let me explain…

HOME: A Ghost Story mixes up a classic tale of house haunting complete with narrative crossing into video, telephone calls (!) and even text messages (!!) to freak you out in the (dis)comfort of your own home. How cool is that?  Forget the candy chase… I’ll be glued to my computer for at least twenty minutes this weekend. My Attack on the Block alien costume (and The Candy) will just have to wait.

Here’s a great breakdown of the game experience posted by Micheal Andersen, at ARGNet:

“For Home: A Ghost Story, direct communications take on a supernatural air as manifestations of a mother’s attempt to drive one of her daughters beyond the brink of madness. As the chapters progress, “mama’s” communications grow increasingly ominous and slowly shift from communicating with the characters themselves to you, the viewer. The story’s omniscient narrator at first provides a voyeuristic view into the digital activity taking place around the house to complement the traditional video narrative. But as the story progresses, it becomes harder and harder to view the messages as being intended for anyone but you.”

Elan Lee, Founder and Chief Creative Officer of Fourth Wall Studios, has some really cool perspectives on interactive experiences and storytelling. Check this interview from TedX Seattle:

Home: A Ghost Story got me thinking about the last time I’d played around with an online, creepy cross-platform experience. I realize I haven’t been too impressed with this kind of action since Lance Weiler’s mind-blowing interactive experience (wrapped around his feature film HEAD TRAUMA). A screening of HEAD TRAUMA was truly an experience: it’s a full out thriller playing on the big screen, with the added weirdness of all manner of weird antics playing out on the little screen of your mobile phone. In that, phone messages and text’s begin appearing while you’re in the audience, watching his film. In 2007, that was pretty freaky for me.

Carrying on with the creepy, I received  HEAD TRAUMA-related calls on my cell phone after I was ‘safely’ home. Things got even wilder with my computer spewing crazy audio messages over my speakers (from the HEAD TRAUMA experience). Cool, creepy, crazy…. and a helluva lot of fun. In that vein, Home: A Ghost Story creeps onto the back porch, looking to play….

This time, I might even be ready for it.

Fourth Wall Studios     Home: A Ghost Story      ARGNet      HEAD TRAUMA     Lance Weiler