I’m not generally a horror movie fan,
since I spook so easily. The Wicked Witch scared me so much as a kid that I
never watched The Wizard of Oz again.
After seeing The Exorcist as a
teenager, I checked under my bed every
night to make sure a possessed Linda Blair wasn’t hiding there. So it was with
great trepidation that I pursued my morbid curiosity about a unique new horror
flick making its premiere not in a theater or online, but on your iPad: Haunting
Melissa.
“I wanted to tell a ghost story in a different way because
of the way technology was moving,” said movie producer Neal Edelstein, whose past work includes The Ring and Mulholland Drive. “I come from making movies, I love movies, I love
the cinema and storytelling in general,” he told Fox 411. “But I wanted to reinvent the way stories are told and
consumed.” He wanted to bring a ghost story to tablets and mobile devices, but
“it wasn't really until I saw [the iPad] that I went, ‘OK this is it ...
now I can do it.’”
Toward that end,
Edelstein created Hooked Digital Media and invited his writer friend Andrew Klavan to collaborate on Haunting Melissa, a movie for an Apple-only app – the first of its kind – that delivers the
story to your device in fragments at unpredictable times. Edelstein added
another twist as well: “I invented this thing called ‘dynamic story elements’
which means if you go back and watch something it may change. I wanted to have
this story evolve and change, almost as if your device is haunted.”
Klavan’s
screenplay for Haunting Melissa
is about a young woman alone in an isolated farmhouse after her mother has
died, and her salesman father is away traveling. Melissa begins to hear voices
and see visions that she believes are messages from her dead mother. She soon
begins to wonder whether she is going insane – as her mother did before her.
Stephen King, who knows a thing or two about scary books,
has called Andrew Klaven “the most original American novelist of crime and suspense
since Cornell Woolrich” (a crime writer
who has been ranked behind only Dashiell
Hammett, Erle Stanley Gardner and Raymond Chandler).
As a screenwriter, Klavan wrote a great little 1990 movie A Shock to the System, which starred
Michael Caine, and 2008’s One Missed Call,
starring Ed Burns. Now comes Haunting
Melissa, an interesting exploration into what could be a whole new
entertainment platform of the future.
Klavan is a friend of mine, so I asked him to take me beyond the chilling
storyline of Haunting Melissa and tell
me a bit about its deeper dimension, its themes and values, which he was eager
to do. “The story,” he told me, “asks what I think is the central question
facing all of us right now”:
Can we trust our
own conscience to show us the way to what's right and wrong? A lot of folks argue
that, because there are moral gray areas, there can be no morality –
that morality changes with each culture, maybe with each person. Haunting Melissa doesn't take place in
that world at all. It takes place in the real world, where faith and evil do
battle, and even though we have to question our own perception, we also have to
have faith in our conscience. Plus it's really, really spooky!
(This article originally appeared here on Acculturated, 7/25/13)
