Petscop

Petscop is a psychological horror film directed by Ari Aster, and is based on the original creepypasta of the same name created by Tony Domenico. It stars Lucy Hale, Stephen Dorff, Trevante Rhodes, and Anya Taylor-Joy as a group of people who are searching the whereabouts of a game known as Petscop, which was reported to give people night terrors, depression, and possibly heart attacks.

It had it's worldwide premiere at the Los Angeles Film Festival before getting it's theatrical release by Sony's Screen Gems and Stage 6 Films, respectively.

Plot
In 1998, a mysterious person named Rainer developed a game

Production
While promoting Midsommar at the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, director Ari Aster ran into original Petscop co-filmmaker Tony Domenico and producer Gregg Hale, and asked them why there were not any more Petscop films. Although nothing came of the meeting at the time, a few months later, Ari Aster were asked to meet with Lionsgate to potentially work on a secret project. Barrett recalled that, in the initial pitch meeting, Lionsgate had already crafted a story for a new Blair Witch film, and simply asked if they would be interested in making it. Barrett said that the "only thing I really pitched was the other characters; they’d originally conceived the film as more similar to the first film, following its narrative fairly closely, with only three or four characters, I think, but I wanted more characters to give us more scare sequences. I also wanted a unique dynamic within the group from the start, so I pitched the idea of introducing some Burkittsville locals to the group."

Barrett would later note that the team found the found footage genre more challenging, as they have only previously worked with it on the V/H/S anthology movies. Barrett noted that with the V/H/S series, there was an inherent entertainment value, where the segments "were never meant to feel entirely real", an element that did not work for the Petscop series. Speaking on the issue to Bloody Disgusting, Barrett stated "even if our scares didn’t work in V/H/S, hopefully people would still be entertained, and if they weren’t, well, another short would start in a few minutes"; he added that if a scare did not work in Petscop, "we’d have nothing to fall back on, we’d just have failed completely, and publicly." To prevent this from happening, Barrett and Winger extensively went over each "scare" to discover why it was scary and how the audience would react to it. For some sequences, multiple approaches were tried differently, "to give us options in the editing room."