Following the success set by ‘District 9′, Sam Raimi’s (Spiderman, Evil Dead) production company Ghost House Pictures has won a bidding war between a bunch of major studios to sign a seven figure deal with Federico Alvarez, a young commercial director from Uruguay, who until recently no-one outside of the country had heard of him. That is, until his 4 minutes short titled “Ataque de Panico” or Panic Attack spreading across YouTube like wildfire and attracting a lot of attention in Hollywood. Uruguayan Newspaper El Pais has reported that Alvarez has signed a contract with Ghost House to make his feature film debut with a $30 to $40 million  budget. Clearly they are hoping this will be the next District 9.

Of course i’m one of the people eagerly waiting for what Alvarez can do with that amount of money but based on the Panic Attack short, i totally dig the slow moving retro giant robots (no futuristic Transformer-look-alike is good!), and the Alien’s space ships also kinda reminds me of Shogun Getter’s plane. But what’s really shocked me was the report that Alvarez made this short film for $300!! That’s a damn ridiculous amount for such an impressive result! New technologies are really empowering independent filmmakers nowadays!. Here’s hoping that Alvarez will deliver another “District 9″

Check out the short film!