Full Sail Stories

Full Sail Film grad and Hall of Fame inductee Aaron B. Koontz has loved horror films since he was a kid, when he would secretly watch scary movies after his parents went to bed. Today he’s turned his love for the genre into a career as the CEO and Founder of Paper Street Pictures, an indie production company that focuses on horror movies and TV shows.

Aaron’s earliest experiences with horror happened by chance. He grew up in a strict household and wasn’t allowed to watch a lot of movies, but his grandmother had HBO at her house. Aaron would go there after school and record HBO’s late-night programming on a VHS tape to watch later.

“They always ended up playing horror films at night on HBO and I would wind up with all of these random movies,” Aaron remembers. “[Until I saw horror movies], I had no idea that I could feel that way watching a film. It was just so invigorating and scary and thrilling… I remember watching the taped movies in my closet sometimes, literally moving the TV because I didn't want to wake my parents.”

As his love for horror grew, Aaron started stretching his creative wings by writing short stories and poetry – he even wrote his first feature-length movie script when he was 17. After he graduated from high school, Aaron realized he wouldn’t be happy unless he was working on a film set. That focus on filmmaking brought him to Full Sail’s Film program, where he got to experience the process firsthand.

“The biggest lesson I learned at Full Sail was how much of filmmaking is a team sport. You finally get on set, and you see that it takes a village [to make a movie], as they say. And I got to see that village for the first time with my fellow students and instructors and all that,” Aaron says.

“At Full Sail, I saw that in order to be a good filmmaker, you have to learn how to delegate,” he continues. “You have to learn how to trust, and it's collaborative. This idea of ‘I'm an auteur’ is an old, archaic notion. Filmmaking is something where you find your creative family, you work together, and then they will elevate your ideas and visions. And then you do the same for them.”

Once he’d earned his Full Sail degree, Aaron shifted gears and spent 10 years in the game industry working for companies like EA and Zynga. He worked on more than 50 games and was helping run Zynga’s studio in north Austin, Texas when the company offered to move him to San Francisco with a significant pay bump. However, Aaron had already started Paper Street Pictures with a few friends and made a short film that was doing well in festivals. He realized that if he took the job in San Francisco, he wouldn’t have time to make a feature film, so he took a severance package and devoted himself to Paper Street full time.

“I knew if I didn't go right then and do this, I would never do it. And taking less money and a huge risk and just following my passion ended up being the best decision of my life,” he says.

Soon after leaving Zynga, Aaron wrote his first feature film, Camera Obscura. In the 12 years since then, Paper Street Pictures has produced more than 20 feature films and two television series. Aaron has written movies like the horror-western The Pale Door and worked alongside other directors to create Scare Package, an anthology movie that had one of the most watched premieres in the history of the Shudder streaming service. But Paper Street produces a lot of movies for other people, too.

“[At Paper Street], we are finding, developing, financing, producing, selling, and marketing independent feature films. We find different distribution partners, we find different sales agents, different people to kind of put it all together. We're kind of a one-stop shop to get everything done and get a movie from conception to the market,” Aaron explains.

Finding ways to execute a creative vision while operating under a tight budget has been integral to Paper Street’s success. For The Pale Door, Aaron needed to shoot scenes inside of a church, but the cost of renting one would have put them over budget. Instead, Aaron and his team built their own church for the movie and left it standing for the town to use after they wrapped. For a scene where a character was robbing a steam engine train, Aaron stayed under budget by bartering with a local train museum and making a commercial for them in exchange for letting Aaron’s team use one of their trains.

“I'm just a big believer in finding a way to make something,” he says. “Whenever someone tells me something's impossible, that's when I get the most excited. I'm like, ‘Let's buckle up, let's figure this out.’ Because that's what filmmaking is.”

Pairing creativity with business acumen has led to some exciting developments for Aaron. He was nominated for the 2024 Independent Spirit John Cassavetes Award, which honors the best feature made for under $1 million, for his work as a producer on the sci-fi thriller The Artifice Girl. Aaron is also the showrunner, lead writer, and executive producer for Revival, an upcoming SyFy/Peacock series based on the comic of the same name. But no matter what project Aaron is working on or what accolades he receives, the connection he’s making with audiences is what inspires him the most.

“When I was a kid watching those movies on VHS that I would take from my grandmother’s each night, I had no idea who was making those movies. And now people that I don't know in the world are watching the movies that we made, and they're having those same experiences, and they're getting caught up in that whole world. And knowing that I'm giving them an escape from whatever it is they might be going through is such a fulfilling and beautiful thing. To have your art have an impact like that is just a really special part of the process.”