Josh Ruben | |
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 Ruben in 2012 | |
| Born | Joshua Benjamin Ruben June 30, 1983 Washington, D.C., U.S. |
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| Website | www |
Joshua Benjamin Ruben (born June 30, 1983) [1] is an American actor, comedian, director, and producer. He has directed the comedy horror films Scare Me (2020) and Werewolves Within (2021), both of which were filmed near his hometown in the Hudson Valley in New York. He formerly worked for CollegeHumor and continues to appear in Dropout original shows.
Ruben was born in Washington, D.C. [2] He grew up in Woodstock, New York, with two half-siblings, one of whom is the singer-songwriter Rachael Yamagata. [2] [3] He acted in youth theatre and aspired to become a comic actor. [3] He graduated from Onteora High School in 2001. [3] He worked at a gas station before being accepted into the New Actors Workshop in New York City at age 19. [3] [4]
Unable to get an agent in his first years in New York City, Ruben worked as a film extra and at Best Buy. [3] With childhood friend Sam Reich and others, he formed the comedy group Dutch West, which made sketch comedy videos for the internet. [3] [4] Thanks to his work with the group, CollegeHumor hired him as a staffer, and he wrote and directed hundreds of its "Originals" short videos. [3] [4] He has appeared on the Dropout game show Game Changer and its spinoff Make Some Noise , both hosted by Reich, and is credited as an executive producer on the latter series. [5]
Ruben moved to Los Angeles in 2016. [3] He drew from his CollegeHumor 401(k) to write, produce, and direct Scare Me , a comedy horror film shot at Cooper Lake outside of Woodstock. [3] [4] Starring Ruben as an aspiring writer staying in a cabin in the woods, it premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. [4] His next film, Werewolves Within , based on the video game, was also shot in the area in the Hudson Valley. [3] [4] It premiered to critical acclaim at the Tribeca Festival in June 2021. [6] [7] He is set to direct the sci-fi horror film Green Bank. [8] [7]
Thomas Vincent Savini is an American prosthetic makeup artist, actor, stunt performer and film director. He is known for his makeup and special effects work on many films directed by George A. Romero, including Martin, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, Creepshow, and Monkey Shines; he also created the special effects and makeup for many cult classics like Friday the 13th, Maniac, The Burning, The Prowler, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2.
CH Media, doing business as Dropout, is an Internet comedy company based in Los Angeles which produces content for release on its streaming service, Dropout, and on YouTube. It was originally founded as the CollegeHumor website, created by Josh Abramson and Ricky Van Veen in 1999, and was owned by InterActiveCorp (IAC) from 2006 until January 2020, when IAC withdrew funding and the website shut down. The current CEO of CH Media is Sam Reich, a veteran performer and former Chief Creative Officer of CollegeHumor, who purchased the company in 2020 from IAC. In September 2023, the company formally dropped the CollegeHumor branding in favor of its Dropout branding, which originated with its streaming service.
Dark Castle Entertainment is a film, TV, and digital projects production label. It is owned by North American sports and entertainment company, OEG Inc. The firm is led by co-CEOs Hal Sadoff and Norman Golightly.
Laurence T. Fessenden is an American actor, producer, writer, director, film editor, and cinematographer. He is the founder of the New York based independent production outfit Glass Eye Pix. His writer/director credits include No Telling, Habit (1997), Wendigo (2001), and The Last Winter, which is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. He has also directed the television feature Beneath (2013), an episode of the NBC TV series Fear Itself (2008) entitled "Skin and Bones", and a segment of the anthology horror-comedy film The ABCs of Death 2 (2014). He is the writer, with Graham Reznick, of the BAFTA Award-winning Sony PlayStation video game Until Dawn. He has acted in numerous films including Bringing Out the Dead (1999), Broken Flowers (2005), I Sell the Dead (2009), Jug Face (2012), We Are Still Here (2015), In a Valley of Violence (2016), Like Me (2017), and The Dead Don't Die (2019), Brooklyn 45 (2023), and Killers of the Flower Moon (2023)
Blood Monkey is a 2007 American direct-to-video natural horror film produced by RHI Entertainment and directed by Robert Young. It aired on various video on demand channels, before officially premiering in the United States on the Syfy Channel on January 27, 2008. Filmed in Thailand, it is the first film in the Maneater Series produced under an agreement with Syfy.
![<i>The CollegeHumor Show</i> 2009 [[Television in the United States|United States]] TV series or program](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/8/8c/The_Collegehumor_Show.png/320px-The_Collegehumor_Show.png)
The CollegeHumor Show is an American sitcom that premiered on MTV on February 8, 2009 and also aired on MuchMusic. The show was a scripted sitcom with sketch comedy elements written by, and starring, nine CollegeHumor editorial staff members, who play fictionalized versions of themselves. The show was an adaptation of the style of the long-running Hardly Working short film series created for the CollegeHumor site, made more suitable for the longer, televised format.
Thomas Steven Middleditch is a Canadian-American actor. He is known for his role as Richard Hendricks in the HBO series Silicon Valley (2014–2019), earning a nomination for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series. He has voiced Penn Zero in the Disney XD animated series Penn Zero: Part-Time Hero (2014–2017), Harold Hutchins in Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie (2017), Sam Coleman in Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) and Terry in the Hulu adult animated sci-fi series Solar Opposites. Middleditch also appears in ads for Verizon Wireless.
A jump scare is a scaring technique used in media, particularly in films such as horror films and video games such as horror games, intended to scare the viewer by surprising them with an abrupt change in image or event, usually co-occurring with a loud, jarring sound. The jump scare has been described as "one of the most basic building blocks of horror movies". Jump scares can startle the viewer by appearing at a point in the film where the soundtrack is quiet and the viewer is not expecting anything alarming to happen, or can be the sudden payoff to a long period of suspense.
Finn Wolfhard is a Canadian actor and musician. He is known for playing Mike Wheeler on the Netflix series Stranger Things (2016–present). He also played the roles of Richie Tozier in the horror film It (2017) and its sequel It Chapter Two (2019), and has starred in the supernatural comedy Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021) and its sequel Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (2024).
Werewolves Within is a multiplayer social-deduction VR game for Oculus Rift, Windows, and PlayStation VR, developed by Red Storm Entertainment, published by Ubisoft, and released on 6 December 2016.
Samuel Dalton Reich is an American media executive, writer, producer, comedian, and actor. He is best known for his work with Dropout, of which he is now the CEO, including hosting the series Game Changer and its spin-off Make Some Noise, as well as his work on TruTV's Adam Ruins Everything.
Dropout is an American subscription streaming service run by the production company of the same name, founded in September 2018. Dropout streams original programming, and does not run advertisements. Its content is mainly composed of live play, such as Dimension 20 hosted by Brennan Lee Mulligan, and improv comedy and panel shows like Game Changer and Make Some Noise, both hosted by Dropout owner Sam Reich. Dropout's series often feature a rotating cast of regular comedians and performers.
Freaky is a 2020 American slasher comedy film directed by Christopher Landon, from a screenplay by Michael Kennedy and Landon, and starring Vince Vaughn, Kathryn Newton, Katie Finneran, Celeste O'Connor, and Alan Ruck. A twist on Freaky Friday, the film centers on a teenage girl who unintentionally switches bodies with a middle-aged male serial killer. Jason Blum serves as a producer under his Blumhouse Productions banner.
Werewolves Within is a 2021 American mystery comedy horror film directed by Josh Ruben from a screenplay by Mishna Wolff, based on the video game of the same name from Red Storm Entertainment. It stars Sam Richardson, Milana Vayntrub, George Basil, Sarah Burns, Michael Chernus, Catherine Curtin, Wayne Duvall, Harvey Guillén, Rebecca Henderson, Cheyenne Jackson, Michaela Watkins, and Glenn Fleshler, and follows a group of people in a small Vermont town who get trapped in a snowstorm only to suspect one of them is a werewolf.
Scare Me is a 2020 American comedy horror film written, directed, and produced by Josh Ruben. It stars Aya Cash, Josh Ruben, Rebecca Drysdale and Chris Redd.
A horror game is a video game genre centered on horror fiction and typically designed to scare the player. The term may also be used to describe tabletop games with horror fiction elements.
Dimension 20 is a tabletop role-playing game show produced by and broadcast on Dropout, and created and generally hosted by Brennan Lee Mulligan as the show's regular Dungeon Master. Most of the games use Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition. Long seasons, featuring a core cast of players in seventeen or more episodes, are interspersed with shorter side quests, featuring a rotating cast in ten or fewer episodes.
Brennan Lee Mulligan is an American comedian, actor, writer, and gamemaster. He often works with Dropout as a writer, performer, and producer, and he is the creator and regular gamemaster for its Dungeons & Dragons-based actual play web series Dimension 20. He also wrote the superhero webcomic Strong Female Protagonist alongside artist Molly Ostertag.
Game Changer is an American comedy panel game show on Dropout created and hosted by Sam Reich. The show follows players, typically three comedians, who participate in a new game every episode, with the players usually kept unaware of the premise and rules of the game beforehand. According to Polygon, the show "combines improv comedy, puzzle solving, fierce competition, and a prankster ethos." Game Changer episodes have led to three spinoff shows on Dropout: Dirty Laundry, Make Some Noise, and Play It By Ear. The show has been renewed for a seventh season.
Make Some Noise is an American improvisational comedy television show hosted by Sam Reich and released fortnightly on SVOD service Dropout. The show is a spin-off of the Dropout game show Game Changer, which featured the same format in the episode of the same name and multiple sequel episodes, each starring Brennan Lee Mulligan, Zac Oyama, and Josh Ruben. Mulligan, Oyama, and Ruben all serve as executive producers in addition to each appearing in the first and last episode of every season, with the other episodes often featuring one of them and a rotation of Dropout regulars and the occasional special guest, like Wayne Brady.
