'Sickhouse' sequel gets greenlight following successful launch on Snapchat
LOS ANGELES -- Sickhouse is ready for another Snapchat close-up.
Indigenous Media's feature-length horror thriller, which was shot in real time and designed for mobile viewing, is getting a sequel, Mashable has learned.
The film, which stars digital influencers Andrea Russett and Sean O’Donnell, follows a group of friends obsessed with social media whose excursion into the woods to explore the lore of Sickhouse turns deadly.
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It was shot over the course of five days — April 29-May 3 — in Los Angeles. The journey of the show's main characters occurred in real time, and was uploaded to Snapchat, blurring the lines of truth and fiction. The Snapchat footage and additional footage has since been combined into a “Director’s Cut” feature film where it has been sold transactionally on Vimeo, BitTorrent and Fullscreen.
Indigenous Media did not disclose how many times the film was viewed overall. However, Indigenous Media COO Jake Avnet said the company was confident enough to greenlight a sequel after seeing the large amount of engagement on social media.
"We didn’t know what to expect with Sickhouse (the original), but the fan response to the film has blown us away," Jake Avnet told Mashable. "It has found passionate audiences across every platform. Sickhouse has a very rich mythology, so creatively we felt like there were great opportunities to continue to explore the material in new, unexpected, and frightening ways."
The film drove over 100 million views in real time on Snapchat.
Engagement with stars also surged. While filming live, a photo that Russett posted on her Instagram page received more than 8,000 comments.
Russett's Snapchat also grew by 50,000-100,000 followers.
Indigenous Media is no stranger to unique projects. The next-gen studio — founded by Jon Avnet (Black Swan), Rodrigo Garcia (In Treatment), and Jake Avnet — focuses on producing premium, original video content for a variety of platforms.
Details about the Sickhouse sequel have not yet been revealed. But Jake Avnet has high hopes.
"Before us, no one had ever produced and distributed a real-time, vertical feature entirely on Snapchat," he said. "We’re going to rewrite the playbook with Sickhouse 2 with the goal of being bigger, scarier, and even more innovative."
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Topics Snapchat
Saba was a Los Angeles-based reporter who covers all things digital entertainment, including YouTube, streaming services and digital influencers. Prior to that, she spent two years at the Los Angeles Times covering entertainment for the Calendar and Company Town sections. Saba grew up in Santa Monica and graduated from Boston University with a B.S. in journalism and B.A. in political science. When not reporting, she is usually binge watching shows online or looking for new coffee shops to frequent.
