Steven Spielberg is writing a horror series you can only watch after dark

There’s something special about watching horror movies at night. Much of their effect comes from the idea of things that go bump in the night, with the darkness and eerie stillness exacerbating their terror. There’s a sanctity in watching scary stuff at night, that watching in daylight ruins.

It’s a sanctity that Steven Spielberg wants to preserve that sanctity, with a series of horror shorts he’s writing that’ll only be watchable after the sun goes down.

Spielberg’s After Dark is a horror series that will play out over a dozen or so short episodes on QuiBi (short for Quick Bites) a new video platform for short-form video spearheaded by former Disney exec Jeffrey Katzenberg and former HP CEO Meg Whitman. Speaking at the Banff World Media Festival, Katzenberg said Spielberg had already written “five or six episodes.”

What makes this interesting is that QuiBi has made it so that the videos will only play when it’s dark. The platform, which is aimed at mobile phones, will use the device’s clocks as a measure of time, and only allow After Dark to be viewed…well, after dark. Of course, it’s something that could be bypassed with ridiculous ease, but it’s a neat idea.

QuiBi itself sounds like an interesting platform. It’ll house high-quality premium content, with a goal of around 125 pieces of content every week, a mix of short films and TV-shows. Of course, it‘s aimed at the youth.

“What Quibi is doing, it’s not really short-form,” Katzenberg said. “We’re putting those sciences together. Chapters or act breaks that are 7 to 10 minutes long. They are specifically shot to be watched on the go. If you’re 25-35 years old, you get up and you’re on [a smartphone] for over five hours.”

If it’s good content (and has the likes of Spielberg involved) then I could be interested.

Last Updated: June 13, 2019