del Toro Partners with Legendary Entertainment & YouTube Spaces for a Horror Talent Search

Guillermo del Toro is ready to welcome new talent into his House of Horrors…

Legendary Entertainment will combine a talent hunt with promotion of the 49-year-old Mexican filmmaker’s upcoming horror film Crimson Peak.

Guillermo del Toro

The contest has been announced in concert with Google’s YouTube Spaces, which provide production and post-production facilities for YouTube creators in four big cities.

As part of the deal, Gothic-horror sets “inspired by” del Toro’s work on Crimson Peak will be installed in YouTube Spaces in Los Angeles, Tokyo, London and the soon-to-open New York locale. The sets will vary by site, but are billed as the sorts of creepy backdrops worthy of any Gothic horror film, including “a Great Room from an old manor house,”  “a sinister staircase and Gothic windows that lead out to a haunted garden,” and “an abandoned Solarium cluttered with over-grown plants, birdcages and weathered tools.”

YouTube creators at each site will be invited to make video shorts with horror themes using the sets between September 22 and October 28. The videos will go live between October 21 and Halloween, and will run on each creator’s YouTube site along with the channels for YouTube Spaces and Legendary.

del Toro will pick the best videos from each site, and consult with the creators on further fine-tuning.

Legendary will offer a development deal to the creator behind the best resulting short to further flesh out their project into a possible film. If it all works, Legendary could find a ultra-low-budget creator similar to Jason Blum, whom Universal recently signed to a long-term deal after a lucrative run of cheap and extremely profitable horror pics.

Here’s a video of del Toro introducing the YouTube House of Horrors project: