Lightbox Turns On Frightbox With Hulu’s ‘Clown Panic’ & ‘The Pet Cemetery Murders’ For HBO

With Clown Panic and The Pet Cemetery Murders: A Ghost Story, documentary producer Lightbox is leaning into horror for the first time and switching on Frightbox.

Jonathan Chinn and Simon Chinn’s London and LA-based label counts Apple TV’s Twisted Yoga and Ryan Coogler exec-produced Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time for Nat Geo among recent credits and the pair told Deadline why they are getting into horror.

“It’s not a genre that we’ve worked in before, there are real opportunities there,” Jonathan Chinn said. “It’s about how do documentaries crack the horror genre, which is incredibly popular, especially amongst a younger audience. So, for this Halloween season, Lightbox is actually becoming Frightbox.”

The Lightbox logo morphs into Frightbox at the end of Clown Panic and The Pet Cemetery Murders: A Ghost Story and Frightbox could even become a full-fledged sub-label if the move into horror pays off.

Clowns Cause Panic

Clown Panic was the first Lightbox/Frightbox project to be announced. The Hulu feature doc will play as part of Huluween. It revisits the hysteria caused after a spate of reported clown sightings. Billed as darkly funny and unsettling, it tells the story of the media frenzy and moral panic caused as the story spread.

“It was a story that that was just so weird, but also was very revealing about human psychology and geopolitics,” Jonathan Chinn said. “Basically, it’s the anatomy of a moral panic.

“It happened during the Trump-Clinton election campaign, the North Korea nuclear crisis, during some race riots in the U.S. All these things were happening, and when society starts to freak out, it tends to find a scapegoat. In this case, it was the clowns’ turn.

“It’s quite a delicate needle to thread because there were real-world, and some tragic consequences in the story, but it’s certainly something that wears itself somewhat lightly as a film. It plugs into a kind of comedic horror genre that’s quite popular at the moment.”

Simon Chinn noted that the doc was created from the ground up, rather than being based on pre-existing IP. “There’s no book, there’s no article, it was genuinely built from original research and stitched together,” he said. “It was not an easy film to make in that respect.”

Pet Cemetery

The Pet Cemetery Murders: A Ghost Story starts out as a three-part cold case story about the 1985 murder of Dorothy Lou Thompson, who owned a pet cemetery that was situated on a site that was said to be cursed. Detective John Doran reopens the investigation, following up on old leads and digging into the case files. A witness comes forward with a terrifying tale of Dorothy’s ghost which compels him to come forward with information. Three years later, a second witness claims to be haunted by the murdered woman seeking vengeance.

“Doran becomes increasingly obsessed with the precinct, and starts getting into the history, and discovers that [the cemetery] was the scene of a massacre, and prior to that, of an indigenous burial” Simon Chinn explained. “It becomes, in a way, a story about America’s violent past. The thing starts as this true crime story and becomes something else. It becomes spiritual and paranormal and historical.”

The setting was also fitting for an HBO show. “It all takes place in the bayous of New Orleans, of course it’s got a little True Blood vibe to it,” Jonathan Chinn said.

Documentary Picture

The documentary business is tough and Simon Chinn said Lightbox “definitely felt the market downturn in 2024, and had to slightly regroup and strategize about how we did development.”

With offices in London and LA, Lightbox naturally gravitates towards UK-U.S. coproduction. “We’re always looking for those opportunities because of our position as a UK-U.S. production company, we’re really well positioned to find the stories that the BBC or Sky might want to co-produce with an HBO or a Hulu.”

Having refocused and with moves into new genres such as horror, Lightbox said it has eight projects in various stages of production and new projects for Nat Geo and Netflix among others, including a big-ticket sports series for the streamer.

“We do our best not to do the obvious version of something, and hopefully that’s appealing to buyers and distributors,” Jonathan Chinn said.

“We also work with talent outside of the documentary business, whether it be Guy Ritchie (The Diamond Heist), Sam Mendes (What They Found) or Ryan Coogler (Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time), people who are at the top of their game who inspire us, and I think that that maybe separates us a little bit.”