"Would you prefer to be buried, or cremated?" a smiling attendant asks me as I sit down to try out Mule, a new virtual reality film from Catatonic director Guy Shelmerdine that premieres today at Austin's Fantastic Fest. I'm taken aback—all I know about Mule is that it's going to be creepy and it's advisable not to watch on a full bladder. "Uh, cremated," I blurt out, adhering to my actual after-life plan. I put on the Galaxy Gear headset and am transported—into the naked body of a fat old man. I don't know it yet, but this story doesn't have a happy ending.
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As I'm being rustled awake by a prostitute demanding money for the sex we apparently just had offscreen, my first thought is how weird watching this must feel for female viewers. Shelmerdine confirms that some of the most memorable reactions to the film have been from the fairer sex. "Women always go, 'So that's what its like to have a penis!' They get a kick out of that," he tells The Creators Project. The most memorable reaction, however, had nothing to do with gender. "There was a viewer who actually wet themselves… I recommend going to the bathroom beforehand."
The semi-naked woman's impatience quickly turns to horror as the body that has replaced my own begins convulsing. This is probably where someone got so scared they lost control of their bodily functions, since it's freaky as hell. I flinch as she screams, grabs money from "my" wallet, and hides my body under a table. I spend the rest of the 10-minute experience as a corpse, a narrative trick Shelmerdine uses to solve one of VR's major problems: you can't control where the viewer is looking.
Catatonic, Mule, and a serial killer thriller called Burlap also premiering at Fantastic Fest, are all being distributed through Shelmerdine's new VR film studio, Dark Corner. Apart from developing physical tools to bridge the gap between what VR is capable of now and what it will become, Dark Corner has partnered with innovators like audio design company Q Department and VFX house The Mill to push the envelope in immersive tech.
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The director and producer says there are five more experiences on the way, including an experiment with room-scale VR—another solution to the technology's problems that involves letting viewers walk around inside the digital experience.
Despite the fact that I died in the first few minutes of Mule, there are still plenty of surprises that you've got to see to believe. Shelmerdine views VR as a rollercoaster with the potential to tap directly into human emotions through narrative. "I feel like I've heard the 'empathy machine' thing about 100 times more than I need to," he says. "I'm looking to explore provocative, thrilling experiences."
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