With a decline in home video sales, as studios and content providers wrestle with ways to attract and keep wandering eyeballs, given the increased use of mobile devices to watch movies and TV shows, one company – backed by the producer of the Ring movies, as well as David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (Neal Edelstein) – wants to rethink the way stories are told to match the fluidity with which audiences watch those stories unfold on screen.

“The way stories are consumed has changed, so we set out to alter how stories are told,” said Neal Edelstein, founder of Hooked Digital Media, in an interview with Bloomberg. “It’s terrifying to studios the drain that these devices have placed on the industry, so we have to find a new way to harness them.”

And for the company’s first attempt at making this concept a reality, Hooked Digital Media has released a $5 million horror movie, Haunting Melissa, as a free application on Apple iPhones and iPads only (for now anyway), offering users the chance to download the title one segment at a time, for just a few minutes’ viewing, with specific actions required by the viewer that would essentially unlock unknown pieces/episodes of the film, if accomplished.

There’s more, so I’ll hand the mic over to Mr Edelstein to explain it all: