At Comic-Con today, I had the chance to sit down with two very new and promising filmmakers. The Vicious Brothers, aka Colin Minihan and Stuart Ortiz, started dreaming of making movies at the young age of 13. After writing scripts together and working on some ideas online, they finally got the ball rolling once they hit 18 and met in the flesh.

With any found footage film, the comparisions to BLAIR WITCH were rampant. But they actually drew mostly from the original Spanish film [REC]. It was a stripped-down and more realistic film that used their small budget to their advantage. Small budgets work well with horror because it’s all about what you don’t see and what could be in the darkness out there.

They decided to keep it kind of rooted in reality by having the camera’s the actors were holding running during the scenes. Some scenes had as many as 3 or 4 cameras running at once, and in editing they would decide which bits to take from each camera to complete the scenes. It worked out where roughly 75% of the film is the professional camera with them shooting, and the rest is from the actor’s cameras when shooting scenes and running through the old hospital.

Read the exclusive interview and catch the official trailer after the break.

How did you get this project started?
We had written 3 other scripts before this script, but every script would get too big to do for a low budget. After a while, we had to write something that could be done for almost nothing. It was our first film so we knew it had to be small in scale. In between writing these scripts, we would watch these ghost hunter style shows and then we wondered, what would happen if they actually found something? We ran with that and wrote the film around an abandoned mental hospital we knew we had shot in before.

Do you believe in the paranormal?
I definitely feel some people are more open to being visited. The location that we shot in, other film crews shoot in their frequently and it’s pretty known that it can get weird in there. Some crews are scared to go on the 4th floor because actual lobotomies use to happen there and you’ll hear weird noises and one guy even got pushed down the stores. We then took some of those stories that happened to other film crews and put them in our movie. If ever there was a place that was haunted, this would be it.

Did you have any scary experiences yourself while filming?
There was a weird thing when we did a location scout. There’s a photo of me in this long hallway and there’s weird shadow figure in the frame that someone noticed when you zoom in it looks like it’s blocking light and interacting with the environment in a weird way.

A lot of time when we’re shooting we have like 20 people around and big lights so it’s not really scary, but on the rare moment when you have to take the trek to the bathroom in the dark, you start to get freaked out when walking around alone.

But, we are definitely open to the idea of it and believe something weird is going on there. I don’t know what it is but it horrifies me.

But that’s really why we started watching these ghost hunter shows, we wanted to see them find something! So we were just like, “why don’t we just make a movie where you actually see something.”

On your site, you talked about how you bonded over hating the idea of film school. Did you guys do any film training or are you mainly self taught?
We’re both pretty much self-taught. We were both shooting little movies from when we were like 5, 6 years old. We both picked up cameras and just started shooting stuff. We both ended up on the film website forum, Like a Story one of the first indie-filmmaking forum, at the same time. We would upload or short little films and pick them apart and then we started talking to each other on IM over 5 years. We finally met each other when we were 18 and then started writing scripts together at 21.

Do you have any plans already set for your next project?
We’ve got those three other scripts we wrote, and we’re always developing more stuff. We’ve got one project that we’re pretty stoked on, that with funding could be only a few months away. It’s called THE CLINIC, which is our own take on the vampire genre that’s set in a drug rehab clinic.

It’s a role reversal where the main character is a drug addict in this clinic, trying to get clean, but meanwhile this other patient is brought in that is a vampire and bites one of the orderlies. Then, from their they kind of take over the clinic and you'll have to see the film to find out what happens. We want to do our take on the vampire genre, which is way darker and basically the exact opposite of TWILIGHT and the mainstream.

The online trailer has over 6 million views, what made you decide to kind of virally market this yourself?
We didn’t even have a distributor yet; we just had a rough cut of the film. Stu used to edit movie trailers for a small production companies so we just started tinkering around with the trailer and it came together really nicely. We decided to put it on YouTube just to see if it takes off because that could only help us. Then word of mouth just took off and all the horror sites picked it up and now we’re here at Comic-Con.

You can watch the trailer here:

The movie will be available on VOD and iTunes on August 25. There will be midnight screenings in NYC and LA starting August 19. It’ll have its theatrical run in NYC and LA in August as well.

Also, following in PARANORMAL ACTIVITY’s footsteps, there's a “Demand It” campaign to bring it to your city. You can demand it on GraveEncountersThriller.com, and they’re pretty serious about the fact that if there’s enough response, it’ll come to your city.