Thanks to a new trend of competent filmmakers actually putting in some effort beyond picking a new group of teenagers for Jason to stab, the horror genre is enjoying a bit of a mainstream spooky renaissance. Now, in what seems to be an attempt to capitalize on horror’s resurgence, Sony’s Screen Gems studio has put together an initiative with production company Ground Control called the Screen Gems Horror Lab that will promote the development and production of horror-based “proof-of-concepts.”
That comes from Deadline, which explains that Ground Control has a history of turning short films into features, and the plan here is to do exactly that. The Horror Lab will be bringing in “exciting new talent” to come up with horror ideas that can then be turned into short films, and if those short films are any good, they can then be used as a pitch for a full-length horror movie. It’s sort of like when someone pitches and publishes a graphic novel just so a studio can use that graphic novel as a storyboard for a feature film version, since saying “based on the graphic novel by so-and-so” adds some legitimacy to a project.