Gregory Plotkin, the director of the upcoming Paranormal Activity 5, is working on a newfangled project at a massive special effects studio in the San Fernando Valley. The actress covered in gore and the monk-hooded masked extras are standard issue for a horror movie–but the massive camera rig in the middle of the room looks like a Dr. Who dalek, and there are all sorts of strange audio sensors up in the air.

Plotkin and his partners, a virtual reality company called Jaunt, are making a horror movie for the Oculus Rift called Black Mass.





Watching a horror movie on the Oculus Rift is a strange experience. The headset straps on you, and you see everything in 360 degrees. Not only that, but your field of vision tilts as you raise your head to the sky or look at the ground. It’s a far cry from the polygon-y virtual reality games many of us played in early 1990s shopping malls.

But the strangest thing is the surround sound headphones. Because you are in an immersive world, content creators are forced to use sound as a cue that instructs you where to look. The footsteps behind you and the screams from a corner make everything that much scarier–just as much as the monster or serial killer jumping out from behind the pile of trash.

Project Black Mass is a five-to-seven-minute short, directed by Plotkin and produced by Plotkin along with the Stan Winston School’s Matt Winston and Erich Grey Litoff, David Sanger, and John Ales. Although distribution details are still sketchy, it’s one of the very first attempts Co.Labs has seen of Hollywood creating straight-to-Oculus Rift content.





The film starts with the user being kidnapped and waking up in a shed filled with torture implements and a blood-stained floor. According to promotional materials, from there it “puts you in the middle of the action–surrounded on all sides by 360 degrees of 3-D video that is terrifyingly real.” To be honest, the plot is the standard horror movie template to show gore and chills.

The real star of the show here is the Oculus’s potential for horror movies. Jaunt’s rigs are set up in the cavernous interior of New Deal Studios, a visual effects studio that has worked on projects like The Dark Knight Rises, Hugo, and The Avengers.