FORMAT PS5 / ETA OUT NOW / PUB HALF MERMAID PRODUCTIONS DEV HALF MERMAID PRODUCTIONS / PLAYERS 1
Before saying anything about film or game making, before even asking Immortality’s director Sam Barlow how he actually feels about the term ‘interactive movie,’ there’s one question we find more pressing: what’s a Half Mermaid anyway?
Barlow jokes, “Wow, that’s our 45 minutes gone,” before offering what he calls a “comprehensive short answer.”
Barlow self-published 2015’s Her Story on PC, but for his next game, Telling Lies (which debuted on PC in 2019 before coming to PS4 in 2020), he was told he needed to create a business entity to contain things – a production company, essentially. Tasked with creating a list of fairly unique names on a tight deadline, Barlow borrowed one of these from “a theoretical screenplay I have not written but would love to write.”
Called ‘Drowning A Mermaid,’ the pitch sees master of suspense Alfred Hitchcock collaborating with a legendary blonde actress he never worked with in real life.
“Esther Williams is someone I’m obsessed with,” Barlow says.
Both an accomplished actress and a competitive swimmer, Esther Williams was known as MGM’s Million Dollar Mermaid, and starred in numerous aqua-musical roles throughout the ’40s and ’50s. In Barlow’s film history fairy tale, Hitchcock “wants to create the world’s most technologically advanced, clever drowning sequence” with Williams in the starring role. Alas, an influx of pictures about Hitchcock in recent years has led Barlow to put this idea
