Crowd Funding and The Horror Film Industry

Everywhere you look these days, the term crowd funding is there.  Websites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo are just two of the many sites that people can use to try and raise money for all types of projects from movies to small businesses. 

A few of the most notable success stories are the funding campaign for the Veronica Mars movie project and the Pebble E-Paper Watch.  The Veronica Mars campaign was asking for $2 million and it raised over $5.7 million.  The Pebble E-Paper Watch was asking for $100 thousand and raised over $10.2 million, making it one of the most successful campaigns on Kickstarter.  

Filmmakers use crowd funding sites for different aspects of their productions.  One of the campaigns I have donated to is the Fear Clinic The Movie campaign.  This campaign is to get the film, directed by Robert Hall, into production.  Fear Clinic started out as a web series on the Fear Net website.  It had a huge fan following, so they decide to make a feature film version.  The film brings back favorites from the web series and the horror genre, Freddy Krueger himself, Robert Englund, as well as the man who donned the hockey mask the most as Jason Voorhees, Kane Hodder and the lovely Danielle Harris who captured the hearts of horror fans as Jamie Lloyd in Halloween 4 & 5 as well as Rob Zombie’s Halloween and Halloween II.    

Another one of the campaigns I have donated to is for the film Truth or Dare.  This campaign was raising money for the post-production process as well as marketing and distribution of the film that had already been shot.  Truth or Dare was co-written and stars Jessica Cameron, star of Intrusive Behavior and the upcoming Open House.  This film also marks Jessica’s directorial debut.

As I see it, crowd funding is the future of independent filmmaking.  I used an Indiegogo campaign to raise money for my final project in film school.  We were asking for $2 thousand, and we ended up raising over $21 hundred.  Later this year, I am going to start an Indiegogo campaign for my feature film directorial debut, Blood Thick.