The Animal Crossing horror short Don't Peek is being expanded into a full-length feature film by Timur Bekmambetov. The Russian director is best known for adrenaline-filled action films such as the Angelina Jolie-led thriller Wanted, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, and for producing the first-person live-action shooter Hardcore Henry in 2015. Though he also has some experience with the horror genre, producing Unfriended and its sequel Unfriended: Dark Web in 2018.
Written and directed by Julian Terry, Don't Peek features one young woman (Katie Cetta) alone at night playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons on a Nintendo Switch when one of the video game's characters suddenly begins to cross over into the real world. According to the film's description, it was "made with 3 people and a Blackmagic pocket camera during quarantine" and then uploaded to Terry's YouTube Channel, where it now sits at over one million views. The seven-minute short then made its official debut recently on March 15th on the first day of SXSW Online.
Now, the Animal Crossing-centric horror short Don't Peek will be adapted into a full-length feature film by director Timur Bekmambetov, according to Deadline. At this point, there are no details regarding who the director's collaborators on the film will be or who might star, but Bekmambetov’s production company Bazelevs will handle the project. In the meantime, watch Julian Terry's short Don't Peek below:
Terry's shorts seem to have a tendency to be adapted into feature films, as two of his other shorts are also currently being expanded into full-length horror flicks. One of them is They Hear It, which was picked up by Legendary and is being adapted by It Follows writer/director David Robert Mitchell, though Terry will direct. The other short being adapted is Whisper, which presents a narrative in which an Amazon Echo goes rogue. The Bekmambetov-produced Hardcore Henry also had its origins in YouTube shorts, so he and Terry seem like the perfect fit to create a unique horror movie in Don't Peek.
Nintendo is unlikely to lend its name to be used by a horror movie, but this should not pose much of a problem for the production of the full-length Don't Peek movie since almost any video game or console would work as a stand-in. Its high-concept premise of a terrifying creature escaping from the video game world into the real world could easily translate to a number of different existing titles, or even one made up for the movie. Regardless of what video game is used, Bekmambetov's involvement in Don't Peek should produce something interesting for the horror genre.
Source: Deadline/Julian Terry