A still from the VR horror experience Catatonic.
Keith Coleman
There are few things scarier than insane-asylum horror. The creepy corridors, the twisted psychiatrists, the subtle sense that maybe the crazy one is you; it’s all just too much. But there’s one thing that could make it spookier: putting it all in virtual reality.
Director Guy Shelmerdine’s Catatonic does just that. The experience, currently making the rounds at South by Southwest events, straps you in a wheelchair and takes you on a five-minute tour of a 1950s mental institution, steering you through the psych ward and eventually into a chapel where you…well, where you die.
“As the story goes along the route becomes more and more disturbing,” Shelmerdine says. “There are some supernatural things that happen and then you end up basically being medicated to death and actually find peace.”
Sounds fun. And totally horrific. (If there’s one place the intense intimacy of VR should tread lightly, it’s horror, which is scary enough when you still have the ability to cover your eyes.) WIRED asked Shelmerdine, previously a commercial and music video director, how he came to make a horror film in VR and what surprises Catatonic has in store. Pro tip: Don’t blink or you’ll miss the masturbating guy.
Shelmerdine Made Catatonic on a Dare
Ask the director why he wanted to make a scary experience for VR and he’ll be the first to tell you horror isn’t his go-to genre. But shortly after he joined Chris Milk’s VRSE.works team, Milk’s business partner Patrick Milling Smith challenged him to come up with a horror film for VR. Shelmerdine hadn’t been impressed with any of the live-action VR filmmaking he’d seen, so he decided to take the dare—and do it right. “If you’re going to go to the trouble of giving somebody a VR experience, you’ve got to throw them into a world they’re not used to,” Shelmerdine says. “So I liked the idea of horror because I could give them something that they don’t get to see on a day-to-day basis.”
Shelmerdine Built a Special Wheelchair for Catatonic, Complete With ‘ButtKicker’
For optimal asylum impact, Shelmerdine designed a wheelchair to better immerse people in the experience of being pushed around by an orderly. The rig comes complete with a customized “ButtKicker“—aka those things that rattle your seat when you play racing videogames. “When you watch our film the wheelchair vibrates,” he says. “So you get the feeling that you’re in motion.” Those not at SXSW will be able to experience Catatonic soon with the VRSE app and Google Cardboard—but alas, no ButtKicker functionality. (If you’re trying this at home, maybe try a rolling desk chair and a vibrator?)
The Insane Asylum Looks Spooky, But It’s Just Pasadena
When considering shooting locations, Shelmerdine had originally envisioned a mental hospital he knew of in Prague. But he ended up shooting closer to his current home base of LA. “This used hospital in Pasadena had an incredible psychiatric wing,” he says. “Just the right amount of decay.”
Keeping It Short Was Liberating
There’s a lot of talk in VR filmmaking circles about how long is too long to ask someone to stay in the goggles. “Obviously, Hollywood is getting really excited by VR, but it’s not there to have a 90-minute experience,” Shelmerdine says. But even at five minutes, it felt like an indulgence for a guy used to making commercials for the likes of Coca-Cola and VW. “Five minutes is a luxury to me,” he says. “It was fantastic.”
Casting the ‘Masturbating Guy’ Was…Awkward
Like many asylum films before this one, Catatonic has a “masturbating guy.” So, um, how did he find his? “Are you going to write about this in WIRED? I’m going to get shot by somebody,” he jokes. “My casting director, as casting directors do, put out [a call] and we had some people come in. It wasn’t like we were sitting there watching guys masturbate, it was just like one guy came in and said, ‘I’ll do it.’ And we trusted that he was going to do it, and he did.”
Catatonic Isn’t Trying to Scare You That Much
As scary as his short film is, Shelmerdine says he was smart enough to be careful not to freak people out too much, or, for that matter, make them sick. “There’s a health and safety aspect for anything in VR,” he says of the danger of simulator sickness (not to mention catching an eyeful of “masturbating guy”). “You have to be really careful with what the camera does. We did speed tests and turn tests. We ended up having to really slow down the pace of how fast the wheelchair was being pushed.” Ultimately he thinks the film will make people’s skin crawl more than it will make them jump out of it. “If you’re in a theater it’s one thing; in a headset it’s a different experience,” he says. “I think it’s more creepy than it is scary.”
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