Showing posts with label new indie horror. Show all posts
Showing posts with label new indie horror. Show all posts

Monday, May 11, 2009

New Horror Out On DVD This Week: The Week Of The Third Installment

Not a banner week in new horror, but it's also not a bad week... you should be able to find something you like. There's a couple of part 3's, there's some micro-cinema, there's some festival films - like I said, a little something for everyone. Anyhow, click on the title and you'll be taken to that films Amazon.com page and you can also check out all the trailers, here, on our Youtube page.

Although I did like the original, I'm not a huge fan of the "Underworld" series. Having said that, it has been a bit of a powerhouse, with the three films grossing over $300Million Worldwide and spawning comics, novels and video games. And, really, that's what Hollywood is looking for in a franchise - something that can be licensed and put everywhere. "Underworld: Rise of the Lycans" is the third installment and it's probably the weakest of the three. The plot revolves around the origins of a few of the characters and the events that lead up to the Vampire vs Lycan war. This is the first of the films to not feature Kate Beckinsale... and I say 'not feature' because she didn't actually shoot any new footage for this, but they did use a scene from the original "Underworld" to bookend the film and she provided a new monologue for the beginning and end of the film. If you're into the big budget Hollywood films, this one should satisfy you.

Speaking of weaker third installments in film series', "The Grudge 3" comes out this week, as well. This was originally slated to come out on March 23rd, but got pushed back, which is never a good thing... especially considering that it didn't even get a theatrical release. Who knows, though? I haven't seen it and, although I wasn't particularly fond of "The Grudge 2", I'll check it out. The events of this film occur a few months after the events of "The Grudge 2", where Jake, the sole survivor, is now institutionalized.

Now, to some good, old-fashioned micro-cinema horror - stuff you need to support! "Doomed To Consume" is from Jason Stephenson, distributed by new indie horror label New Blood Entertainment. If you remember, not too long ago, we talked with Nigel Hartwell, who's the writer/director of "Dead by Dawn" and the brains behind New Blood. You can check out that interview here, if you're interested - if you're looking for a distributor, you'll want to read that and check out their site. We're hoping to have do an interview about "Doomed to Consume" soon, as well. Anyhow, this is definitely one for the Dead Harvey crowd.

"Plague Town", written by John Cregan and David Gregory, directed by Gregory, screened at various horror festivals over the last year or so, including Fangoria's Weekend of Horrors. It's about an American family, visiting their roots in Ireland, that accidentally stumbles onto a hoard of bloodthirsty mutant children. Judging from the reviews and comments that I read, it should be pretty good and have a decent amount of gore. Trailer looks good... I'm always a fan of the strange shit.

"B.T.K." is written and directed by Michael Feifer and is inspired by the real-life serial killer, Dennis L. Rader. Playing Rader is everyones favorite Jason, Kane Hodder. Hodder's actually been in quite a few films inspired by real-life killers lately... he was also in "Bundy: An American Icon" and "Ed Gein: The Butcher of Plainfield". Since we're talking about Hodder, he's in a ton of upcoming projects, including "Hatchet 2", "Black Friday 3D", "Escape of the Living Dead" and around 5 other films.

If there's nothing that toots your horn up there, maybe Bruce Campbell will. I usually don't like to mention rereleases, but I always have a bit of time for Bruce. Available this week is a 2 Pack of "Man with the Screaming Brain" and "Alien Apocalypse". "Man with the Screaming Brain" is, no surprise, a sci-fi/slapstic film and it's co-written and directed by Bruce... and "Alien Apocalypse" is written and directed by Josh Becker. Both films were shot in Bulgaria, presumably back to back to save on production costs... Bruce F'ing Campbell. Bless.

Monday, April 27, 2009

New Horror Out On DVD This Week: The Uninvited, Martyrs and more...

Finally, a week in horror that you can write home about... we get a great mix of films, from big-budget Hollywood fare, to low-budget Hollywood junk and from big-time foreign horror to low-brow domestic film. It's a Festivus miracle! A week for everyone! Anyhow, if you click on the titles, you'll be taken to their page on Amazon, where you can find out more about them and you can always head over to our Youtube page and check out all the trailers.

As far as theatrically released films are concerned, "The Uninvited" is probably the biggest release of the week. It's a big-budget Hollywood film and it hit the theaters January 30, 2009 and it grossed a total of just under $30Million at the box office. It's a remake of the 2003 South Korean film, "A Tale of Two Sisters", but is unrelated to the 1944 film of the same name. It's the first feature film for directors Tom and Charlie Guard, who had big careers as commercial and short film directors for companies like Nokia, Euro Disney, PS2 and Xbox and it was produced by Walter F. Parkes and Laurie MacDonald, who happen to be the two that started the whole Asian remake craze when they redid "The Ring" in 2002. I don't think I have to tell you too much more about it, as you're probably aware of this one and know what you're getting into.

Now, as far as we're concerned, the big release of the week is "Martyrs", the French film, written and directed by Pascal Laugier. "Martyrs" first screened during the 2008 Cannes Film Festival and was released in France on September 3, 2008. It's a brutal, horrific film that depicts extreme graphic violence and is being categorized as one of the 'new era French horror' films, of which "Inside" is a classic example. Personally, I find these films refreshing... and I'm a huge fan of new era French horror. It's not that I find horrific violence refreshing, but what I DO find refreshing is the fact that they're going the opposite direction of North American film. Where we're toning things down for mass audiences, they're ramping things up for specific audiences. Trust us on this one, go check it out...

"While She Was Out" has a great cast, but had a very limited theatrical release and wasn't really reviewed all that much. Oddly, the few people that did review it, said it was pretty good. The plot is generic, but L.A. Weekly called it a "surprisingly enjoyable female revenge tale". It stars Kim Basinger, Lukas Haas and Craig Sheffer and it's a, uh... well, a female revenge movie. It was written and directed by Susan Montford and I'm not sure what else I can say about it.

First off, it's a horror comedy, so don't let the fact that Ron Jeremy is in a film called "One-Eyed Monster" throw you... In fact, this one looks kinda funny. Adam Fields wrote and directed and it's about a hostile alien that wreaks havoc on the cast and crew of an adult movie. Did we mention that the hostile alien takes the form of Ron Jeremy's detached penis? Yeah, go check out the trailer. Could be a must see.

"The Possessed" is a Sci-Fi original documentary that comes from Christopher Saint Booth. If you're really into demonic possession and go for the real stuff over the Hollywood stuff, you should check this out. Apparently it was one of the better originals that aired on Sci-Fi AND it's chalk filled with extra footage. It surrounds the story of The Watseka Wonder, America's first documented possession in 1870. It's 'the chilling story of a 13-year old girl...who became possessed by spirits of the insane dead.'

If you know about "Satanic Sluts", I probably don't have to tell you that "Satanic Sluts III - Scandalized" comes out this week. However, if you're not aware of "Satanic Sluts", they're a tongue-in-cheek burlesque group from the UK and they've expanded into films, they have a website, they have pin up calenders and on and on. This is the third film in the series and if you check out the trailer, you'll know exactly what you're getting with this one - lots and lots of naked, sadistic chicks.

"Synesthesia" came out in Japan in 2005, as "Gimi hebun" and it comes from Toru Matsuura... if you're into over-the-top Asian gore, you're going to pass on this one, although it is a good flick and has some great surreal imagery. It's about a guy who has a rare condition called synethesia, where one form of stimulus triggers a completely separate response... he keeps it a secret, even from his fiance. Then there's Mari, who also has synethesia and keeps it a secret. Their paths cross and they get caught in a world where they uncover serial murders, mysterious codes and a bizarre stranger, Picasso - 'The Merchant of Death'.

"Exit 38" is from co-directors Dean George and Joel Franco and it's a good looking indie horror about an elite unit of FBI agents who are hunting a conniving vampire in a small Nevada town. It features James Hong, who you'll remember from tons of shit, but mainly as Quan from "Tango & Cash". It also features Martin Kove, who you'll ALSO remember from tons of shit, but mainly as John Kreese from "The Karate Kid" or, maybe as Ericson from "Rambo: First Blood Part II"? You know him... yeah, you know him.

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Interview with Brian Thomson, writer/director of Bachelor Party in the Bungalow of the Damned

"Bachelor Party in the Bungalow of the Damned" is a great indie-horror flick. It knows what it is, what its limitations are and delivers. It gives you all the boobs, blood and laughs you'll need with a great cast, including Monique Dupree, Zoe Hunter and the quintessential cameo from Lloyd Kaufman. For a debut feature, it's unreal. You need to check it out.

I'm not going to say much more about the film because I want to get to the interview that we did with writer/director/editor, Brian Thomson. It's a long interview... but he had a lot to say. I know I say this a lot, but I really mean it this time. If you're setting out to make a film or are in pre-production right now, this is a must read. He really spills his guts on how he got the film made. You'll save yourself a lot of time and effort down the road if you read this now...


Tell us a bit about yourself. What are your influences, where did you get started and what brought you to filmmaking?

I turned to filmmaking because I got sick and tired of being an ‘aspiring writer’. Breaking in can be a bitch, so with Bachelor Party I decided to see if maybe I could make my own luck and hack the system. I’ll let you know if it works!

In college I had the good fortune of rooming with a guy who was in film school and he basically gave me a crash course in world cinema. Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers is probably my favorite movie of all time. Maybe that’s why I originally tried to get my start a few years ago by doing a short comedy about an IRA bank heist. It fell apart during production because the gardai in Dublin didn’t seem to like actors in balaclavas running around the Irish Financial Services Centre with bulging duffle bags…

So I guess you could say that I finally got my start with Bachelor Party, since it was the first time I truly tried to make a movie. I’d certainly watched a hell of a lot of them, but there wasn’t much horror in the mix until I finally caught Night of the Living Dead in Dublin. My background is Brit-lit so I was probably a bit of a snob, but NOTLD knocked me on my ass and showed me that you could do really smart things in the genre. Since I’m basically a comedy guy, I got a kick out of Evil Dead, Dead-Alive, and Shaun of the Dead once I started paying attention. BPITBOTD’s debt to all of these is huge.

Film School: Yes or No?

That would have to be a big, fat NO. As somebody who spent eight years at NYU studying English and working in the bookstore’s shipping department, I have to say that film school seems like one of the worst things that can happen to a budding filmmaker. It’s right up there with psychoanalysis. I wish that I’d had the technical skills you can pick up from film school when I started BP, but if I’d gone to film school I probably would have ended up as an insurance salesman or something. Nobody I know who went to Tisch for film ever made any movies, for one of two reasons. Either they got themselves into so much debt making their thesis films that they couldn’t afford to slog it out in the industry trenches, or else they became so infatuated with their own (often imaginary) talent and ‘vision’ that they produced projects whose pretensions stood in the way of finance.

I actually interviewed to become a secretary for the Tisch film school at NYU. All went well until I asked if many of the students were choosing to shoot their projects on DV. ‘Students come to Tisch to make films,’ the interview hissed. Served me right! That attitude is why film school has always struck me as being a system of indoctrination, convincing kids that only certain types of movies are really worth making, and that they must be made in a certain way, with certain production values—or else they aren’t worth making. The most frightening thing of all is that some of these kids are today’s so-called ‘Independent Filmmakers’! Is there a single genre that is more tired, boring and clichéd than the indie drama? Seriously: when I see a quirky family, I reach for my gun…

Spend your tuition on your movie. And try to make something that people want to see.

Where did the idea for “Bachelor Party in the Bungalow of the Damned” come
from and what made you actually get off your ass and go out and make it?


The location preceded any inspiration. I was really inclined to do something about a wedding, but even an inexperienced producer like myself could figure out that it would require a big cast—as well as a big crew to wrangle all those extras. A bachelor party seemed more manageable. I don’t know what I was thinking!

I decided early on to do a horror movie because the genre has a loyal fan base even at the no-budget end of the spectrum. That might sound mercenary, but when you’re dead broke and asking other people for money you’re kind of obliged to try and make some of it back for them. I knew that I wanted man-eating boobies, a face-melting snowball, and intestines getting sucked into a hot tub. Working out how to get from sequence to sequence gave me the structure of the second act—which I always find the most difficult. The central story of the best man, Sammy, owes a big debt to the Korean revenge movie, Oldboy. I loved the idea of a guy who is unexpectedly confronted with the ramifications of a seemingly insignificant event in the distant past. Once again, the locations I had access to really determined the way that I set up that central storyline in the first act.

I got off my ass and made it because I really despise teaching. When I finished my PhD in English I had a negative revelation: I just couldn’t imagine spending the rest of my life trying to give a bunch of snotty kids a collective hard-on for Chaucer. So I took a step back, mulled over my options (or lack thereof), and decided that I’d make a movie if it killed me.

How did you go about securing financing and what was the approx budget?

I originally budgeted BP for $150,000 but quickly discovered that this is a terrible budget. It’s far too cheap for a major financier to take an interest in (because you’re still going to be working with no-name actors and relatively low production values) and it’s far too expensive for friends and family. Unless your last name is Gates, in which case go out and do a remake of Heaven’s Gate. Maybe if I hadn’t spent so many years in Ireland I could have torn a page out of Sam Raimi’s playbook and raised the money from local dentists and lawyers, but it’s not that much of a stretch to say that I was a stranger in my own hometown when I started trying to raise money.

I thought about increasing the budget, but even I could read the writing on that wall. Assuming I could have found some name-brand actor willing to peg his fortunes to what is ultimately a vampire stripper flick, there’s no way in hell I would have been allowed to direct it. So I did the only thing I could and cut the budget to an absolute minimum. $10k: the whole she-bang earmarked for production, and not a red cent for post. The IMDb says $20k, but I have no idea where they found this figure. Brain Damage, maybe. Certainly not from me.

The first thing I did to get it was to send the script out to a few ladies with cult followings, trying to get a genre star to appear in the movie. I received a few favorable responses, so I grabbed their publicity stills, got some photos of the location, worked with a friend to produce some storyboards, and put together a prospectus. I took a job at Borders for three months to raise the money to a) buy hosting for a production company site and b) cover the fees for starting an LLC—about $500 in NY—and then I ended up raising all the money from friends and family and friends of friends and family anyway.

What did you shoot on and how long was the shoot? …and did I notice some ‘day
for night’ shooting in there?


We shot with a DVX100A and dual system sound (on DAT) for a total of twelve days and three hours. We spent about nine of those days at the titular bungalow, each one a soul-destroying exercise in sleep-deprivation. We broke up the shooting into three weeks: two three-day weekends, and one six-day slog during which I lost 16 lbs. from pacing. This wasn’t some improvised romantic comedy: as I repeatedly told the troops, this was a goddamn special effects extravaganza and we were doing it in twelve days!

The day for night was really unfortunate. The location didn’t have lights and the production didn’t have the cash for a generator. As a first-time filmmaker, I was foolish enough to think that we didn’t need a production monitor and could get away with a cheapo car seat screen. This was fine for framing shots, but was not at all up to the task of calibrating color on a D4N shoot. Things got really ugly when one of the guys kicked the DVX’s LCD off the camera during a stunt sequence: I really tied both of my fantastically talented DP’s hands behind his back.

I did everything I could on those D4N shots, including a month spent rotoscoping 3,000 frames of sky. (It didn’t work.) Eventually, I just tried to make the picture during those sequences as stylized as possible. The screen goes almost completely black at times, but most of the people who’ve seen the movie at various stages agree that it’s less distracting than the original footage. Which isn’t to say that I’m happy with it, but…

Personally, I'm a horror-comedy fan. However, I find that making something funny is almost harder than making it gory or scary. Talk about making sure the humor came through.

When I sent out screeners to all of the actors at the end of post, I received one reply that literally made me shit. This was from one of Bachelor Party’s stars. ‘I just finished watching the movie—LOVED IT—but I never realized that it was supposed to be a comedy.’ Fuck me!

In retrospect I think it’s a good thing that he/she didn’t realize that a movie called Bachelor Party in the Bungalow of the Damned was supposed to be a comedy. If you want the humor to come through, you’ve really got to play it straight: no mugging to the camera for the sake of mugging, and no winking to the audience. You might get a laugh, but it takes the audience right out of the story. They may appreciate the actor, but they’re no longer going to buy the character. BP’s got a lot of broad humor, but it comes from the awful situations these ludicrous characters get themselves into. If you’re going to get an honest laugh from the audience, it’s going to come from these characters being true to their inner assholes and digging their personal holes deeper and deeper.

There were actually a whole bunch of great effects, great monsters and some damn good gore. Talk about making the effects. What was your favorite and how was it done?

I was very lucky to hook up with Jay Alvino of WickedFX early on in preproduction. I’d talked to a few effects houses, and they’d all laughed when I told them what I wanted to do on the budget I needed to do it at. Jay didn’t laugh. I think his exact words were, ‘We gotta make this fucking movie, bro!’

Monique Dupree’s demonic boobies are the highlight, of course. When she walked into the casting call, I sort of had a hunch that we’d eventually get a distributor. Well, within a week of signing up she was in Jay’s basement with Vaseline slathered all over her chest, getting a lifecast so Wicked could get work to work on modeling the prosthetic. What they produced was just so far beyond my expectations of what was possible that I’m thinking of calling my first kid Mandible.

But for practical reasons I think that my favorite effect in the movie was the splinter. It was supposed to be a short scene, the whole point of which was to show a little blood on Chuck’s [Joe Riker’s] finger. On the day of the shoot—and bear in mind that this was the first day of shooting—I had a brain fart and asked Wicked if they thought they could do a gi-normous splinter. ‘Sure,’ they said, and half an hour later Joe was in the bathroom with the monstrosity you see in the movie stuck in his index digit. I tell him to do it slowly, and we end up rolling for a minute and a half in extreme close-up as he’s squeezing out all the blood. Then I called ‘Cut’ and the last thing you hear on the DAT is Jay’s voice: ‘Dude, that gave me a boner’ and everybody on the set explodes in laughter. When everybody on the set saw the effect work as well as it did, they started to trust their totally inexperienced first-time director. I deserve maybe 1% of the credit for the effect, but I reaped a huge reward because of it.

I’m also very proud of the skull on the fireplace, simply because I should never have been able to do it. I personally ended up shooting backplates, doing motion tracks to solve the camera moves, importing that data into a 3D program, modeling 3D shadowcatchers for the room’s architecture, rigging a dynamcs simulation on the skull so it would bounce on the mantle, rigging a particle simulation so the brains would push the eye out through the socket, and compositing the whole thing so that the final render would match the colors in the background plate. I’d never touched a 3D program before doing it. I figured out how to do it by watching the awesome documentary on Pete Jackson’s The Frighteners, and got the technical prowess by lurking around various chatrooms. Total cost for the shot was about $10 for the skull model, which I picked up from DAZ3D.

I noticed that you did the score… It was simple, yet very effective. It definitely kept the flow of the film and set the tone. Talk about the process of scoring the film.

My only prior experience as a musician was as the bassist of an awful punk band called The Snot Cowboys whose only vaguely listenable opus was a little ditty called ‘I’d Kill the Pope for a Pack of Smokes’. The big problem in terms of scoring was (and is) that I can’t play keyboard to save my life. I ended up composing the entire score with a MIDI controller that had 25 keys—out of which I used one. I would fire up my sequencer (Reason 3), then tap out the melody I had in my head along with the metronome. When I was done, I’d shift around the notes until it sounded like I wanted it to. Then I’d copy and paste for the other notes on the chord, and move on to writing another part. I chose Reason because a) it behaves like analog equipment and b) there’s a $20 plug-in that lets you synch your composition to picture.

I’m actually going to release the soundtrack through CreateSpace. Even I’m not naïve enough to think that people will put the whole thing on their iPods and relive their fond Bachelor Party memories. But since I kept the copyright to all the music, I thought it might be nice to release it as a dirt-cheap royalty-free collection. I had to use canned music for the sex scenes (which naturally won’t be on the soundtrack) and I was shocked and awed by how much this stuff costs. If anybody can use the bits I wrote for BPITBOTD on their own projects, more power to them.

You also edited it yourself… and there were some interesting transitions. What did you edit on and what was that process like?

I cut BP on an ancient G4 running Final Cut Pro. By the end, I’d filled up my hard drives and spun them down so badly that I ended up picking up a dual G5 on eBay instead of replacing them. But Apple’s customer support is so snarky and incompetent that I recently pulled up the stakes and built my own workstation. It’s faster than a quadcore Mac Pro and when it breaks at least I know how to fix it without breaking the bank.

Editing BP wasn’t a huge challenge. I’d slashed and burned about a quarter of the script during the shoot because of time constraints and since we shot the movie with one camera there wasn’t exactly a bulging bin of coverage to choose from. (We still managed a near-suicidal seven hundred set-ups in twelve days!) I finished the camera audio rough cut in about two weeks, then synchronized our DAT audio using a consumer-grade, nontimecode deck—a nightmare of tedium that sucked up more time than the cut itself. After that, I probably spent about six more weeks refining the cut.

The problem with this cut was that whole sequences were inadequate, unusable or just plain missing. Monique’s death scene consisted of her leaning against the fireplace. Useless stuff, really. That’s why I had to learn a thing about CG: without it, there wouldn’t have been a movie. It wasn’t clear that the intestine was spooling out of Zoe Hunter’s ass, so I had to animate an ass and figure out how to get intestines to spool out of it. You couldn’t see the jizz on the snowball shot—time to bone up on fluid dynamics! I had a shot with Lloyd Kaufman and the Fish [Dan Rusu] but where the hell were they and what the fuck was going on? Answer: a crane shot using stills from iStockphoto ($6) and a bit of AfterEffects pixel dust. A credit sequence? Shit—hadn’t thought of that… I’d love to say all of this went smoothly, but I had no idea what the hell I was doing when I started. Post ultimately took a year and change. On the positive side, I now know how to do every job listed in the end credits of any movie ever made!

I only made one drastic change during post-production. There was a trippy flashback shot in which Sammy [Gregg Aaron Greenberg] actually ate the heart of his nemesis, Gordon [Joe Testa]. I wanted to suggest that Sammy had turned Gordon into the vindictive little shit he is in the story. But when I previewed the movie, people didn’t get it. The shot confused them because they took it literally. I cut it half a dozen different ways and it didn’t matter. It bugged them. I was pulling my hair out, and then I had another brain fart and completely cut it out of the movie. After I did that, people not only liked the movie better: they understood the point I was trying to make. I guess it just goes to show that you don’t always have to beat people over the head!

You managed to get Lloyd Kaufman to do a cameo. How’d you get him?

He got me, actually.

I ran into a snag in the early days of pre-production. I’d gotten a genre starlet to sign on to BP only to discover that her rate card was out of date and that she’d relocated. I was going to have to fly her in from Phoenix. As a producer, I needed to decide whether the added expense would be offset by better distribution potential. I had devoured all of Lloyd’s books and figured that he might be willing to give some advice to a schmuck like me, and so I wrote to him and explained my situation. Much to my surprise I received an honest and comprehensive reply the next day. At the end of his letter he said that he’d be in the movie if I had a part for him. I finished writing his scene about four minutes later!

Tell us about some of the hurdles you overcame to get the film done. Any advice you can pass on to other indie filmmakers who might be just setting out to make a film.

I think that filmmakers—and particularly indie filmmakers—are very creative people. Which is lovely and honorable and all, but absolutely useless as preparation for making a movie. Filmmaking is a business from start to finish, and the sooner you start thinking like a producer, the better your movie will be. Work out the logistics of your shoot beforehand, and you’ll compromise fewer of your shots during principal photography. Think about everything in practical terms. It’s a hell of a lot easier to move from INT to EXT on paper than it is on a set, where it entails heavy lifting, resetting lights, laying dolly track—not to mention wagering that an act of God isn’t going to change the weather and screw up your continuity.

Unfortunately, the best piece of advice that I can offer is one that doesn’t sit well with my Trotskyite soul: don’t trust anyone you aren’t paying. I’ve read dozens of books about low-budget filmmaking, and 99% of them contain a fallacy along the lines of ‘Everybody gets very excited when you tell them that you’re making a movie’. Well, yeah...except that they also tend to get very resentful of the fact that while they’re out busting their asses doing some crap job that they despise, you—the artist—are off being artsy-fartsy with a bunch of melon-breasted actresses in various stages of undress. (Can’t say I blame them, either.) I don’t think it’s a conscious thing, really, but most people would probably prefer to see you fail because it would make them feel better about the disappointments in their own lives. It’s natural, I suppose, but when the meal somebody promised to bring never materializes, or when the van a friend was going to lend you suddenly has a flat…you’re the one who’s fucked.

After it was all said and done, what would you have done differently?

I would have hired an Assistant Director. Every moment that I spent making sure people were where they needed to be was a moment not spent making a better movie: working with an actor, choosing a better angle, tweaking the lighting, etc. If you’re not making the best movie possible, then you’re letting down not only yourself (which is almost irrelevant) but also the people who are working their asses off for you (probably for nothing) as well as the folks (probably friends and family) who trusted you with their money.

I also would have sold a kidney in order to rent a generator and not shoot day for night.

Did you enter it into any festivals? If so, how’d that go and what can you pass on to other indie filmmakers who are thinking of entering their film into festivals?

If you’re going to hit the festival circuit, you better have a strong stomach. BP premiered at the I-Con sci-fi convention in New York. Watching an audience respond to your movie is amazing—when they respond. I got lucky this time and the applause gave me a better buzz than a barrel of Murphy’s. But some of the other indies at the convention didn’t get lucky, and had to watch as row after row emptied out.

Festivals are expensive to enter (except for Tromadance, of course), expensive to attend, and of questionable benefit to your bottom line unless they’re attended by folks higher up on the industry food chain. Now that BP has a distributor, it makes a bit more sense to go to festivals because there’s at least a chance that I’ll be able to pay for the trip through DVD sales. But until you’ve got copies to sell (or an honest-to-god shot at being picked up by Lionsgate) you’re probably better off hitting cheap festivals within driving distance. BP is scheduled for the Atlanta Horrorfest on October 25th and I’m still trying to figure out if I can afford to go!

What about distribution? How’s that going? Are there any lessons that you would pass on to other indie filmmakers who’ve just finished a film?

The best time to worry about distribution is during pre-production. DO your homework and figure out the sort of deliverables you’re going to have provide. Start thinking about your Music & Effects mix before you get to the set. Even small distribution outfits license films for international sales, and most of them are going to ask you for an M&E mix (and time-coded dialogue cue sheets) for dubbing. This means that you can’t rely on sound recorded while your actors are doing their thing. When they’ve done the ‘magic take’, get your shotgun (or even a Zoom H4, which I’ve found to be very handy for impromptu foley) and have them walk it through again, miming their dialogue and performing all their actions. I didn’t do it this way, and it cost me nearly two weeks of foot-stepping, sheet-rustling, and zipper-pulling once we had a distributor.

Just remember that distributors aren’t magical. If you don’t expect anything from them, then you probably won’t be disappointed with what you get: cheap producer copies and a release notice in Fangoria (if you’re lucky).

Where can people find out more about “Bachelor Party…” or, better yet, buy a copy?

You can buy the DVD on Amazon. Just shoot over to meaculpapictures.com, click on the DVD pic and it’ll take you there. On the site you’ll also find ridiculously extensive production notes that dig deep into the technical challenges of making Bachelor Party. (Along with trailers, some music, and other fun stuff.) People can watch the big fight scene between Gregg and Monique over at my other site, Red2Media.com-- although I had to censor Monique’s (non-demonic) boobies to make the clip ‘SFW’. Just click on the link to Video Services.

What’s next? Do you have any projects in the works?

The next feature I hope to direct is a fabulously blasphemous, pitch-black splatter comedy called ‘Bible-Belt Vixens of the Apocalypse.’ The script’s finished and it’s a lot more ambitious than BP, but the “Second Coming Christian-Zombie Sex Comedy” angle isn’t exactly a soft sell. I’ve recently finished two mainstream scripts and am about two-thirds of the way through a guide to no-budget filmmaking based on my experiences making BP, so if I can sell and/or option at least one of them, I’ll kick-start preproduction. Believe me: it’s going to make Dogma look like The Song of Bernadette!

Wednesday, October 8, 2008

Exclusive Interview with Geno McGahee, writer/director of Evil Awakening

I don't know about you, but when I'm watching a big budget Hollywood horror film, I find that they all look and feel the same. Especially if it's a Platinum Dunes film. So, what differentiates them tends to be a character (maybe), a unique story (hopefully), stuff like that... Long and short, it's never about production values and they tend to be formulaic. One of the things that draws me to indie horror is that fact that I could be holding a few films in my hand, knowing nothing about them, and they could be so different from each other in all aspects, yet I'm going to dig all of them. One could be from a veteran that's done 40 films on low-budgets, one could be from a recent film grad who had a bit of funding or one could be from someone who's just getting started... Hell, I like them all. And there's something about the micro-budget directorial debuts that I really like. It's like watching the minor leagues, where people are honing their talent. For example, I recently had the opportunity to watch "Evil Awakening" from Geno McGahee and it was his first film, even though he's now gone on to make another, plus he's in production on a third.

"Evil Awakening" is the type of film that the general public wouldn't understand. However, for an indie-horror fan, it's a kick-ass, micro-budget slasher flick. Obvious budget constraints aside, McGahee puts together a great story with various interweaving plotlines. It's a great debut effort and who knows what he could've done with a bit more budget? We had a chance to discuss the film with him and if you're a micro-budget filmmaker who's setting out to make a film for pocket change, the interview is definitely worth the read.

First off, tell us a bit about yourself. What are your influences and what got you started in indie filmmaking?

My parents bought this 1980’s clunky camcorder and it collected dust for the most part. I was slowly becoming a horror fan and when I was 12 or so, I wanted to make a horror short and got together with my buddy, Mike, and shot a horrible 10 minute skit about aliens, and then we shot one about a monster rising from the ground, which is where Evil Awakening stemmed from. I began filming countless skits and they were all adlibbed…and I still have them all, but they are so bad that I doubt that they will make it beyond my collection.

My influences to go into filmmaking are many but none more than the great Don Dohler and his film “Galaxy Invader.” In Galaxy Invader, I saw a no budget film that had heart and humor and it was really entertaining. Not only that, Dohler went against the grain and got a no budget film out there to the masses. He set the standard and gave me hope that I could follow in his footsteps and get out there and perhaps, get a fan base, even if it would be smaller. It wouldn’t really matter. I appreciate Dohler and I thought that people would appreciate my work one day should I get it out there.

I am a creative person...sort of obsessive when it comes to writing or filming or just about anything. I usually can’t just sit still. I have to be writing or drawing. I currently manage and write for a boxing website called Ringsidereport.com, and have been covering boxing for five years. Boxing and horror are my two loves, outside of my wife (Dani) and my son (Geno, JR., aka: “Munch”). After managing the boxing site, I started Scaredstiffreviews.com and that helped immensely with distribution of my films. I’m a little on the crazy side and my humor can be offensive, but if you see Evil Awakening, you can probably figure that much out.

Film School: Yes or No?

No. I went to college for Marketing, getting my Associate’s from Springfield Technical Community College in Massachusetts in the USA. Had I known then what I know now, I would have gone to film school, I think. I have been improving on the job and I think that the rawness that you see and the technical problems that you might notice in Evil Awakening have been improved in my second film Rise of the Scarecrows and improved greatly in Scary Tales the film that I am nearly done filming.

“Evil Awakening” is your first feature, where did the idea come from and what was your motivation to get this project done?

In 1996, my good friend Jeremy Weiskotten and I were at a Pizza Hut and were deciding just what we were going to do, and I had been filming stupid skits for the longest time, so I proposed filming a skit. Being a big Friday the 13th fan at the time, I thought that we should go in that back from the dead slasher direction. So we got together with several friends and filmed it and it was a blast and it was about as ridiculous…it’s also an extra on the Evil Awakening (2003) DVD. We screened it at my birthday party and everyone was laughing and asked for copies of it. I realized then that we had the skill to entertain. Well, we continued with skits but they got crazier and better and that’s when I began thinking about a full length low budget horror film.

My other buddy, Steven Joseph Adams, came to me in 2002 and said that he wanted to film something because Evil Awakening (1996) was so much fun, so I came up with the idea for Evil Awakening 2…a mere skit, but this one was not going to be adlibbed like the first one. As I wrote it, I elected to not call it a sequel and not make it a skit either. This was the moment and this was the movie that was going to be our introduction to the horror world. I wrote it in about six weeks and we filmed it in 3 months. My motivation for finishing it was basically who I am, I guess. I can’t see starting something and not finishing it and one way or another, it was going to be done. It would bug the hell out of me if I had footage of a movie that was 60% done or whatever and it was never completed.

What was the approximate budget for the film and how did you secure it?

The budget for Evil Awakening was, maybe, 500 bucks. It was basically a no budget horror film that was done with very little money and a lot of ambition. I paid for the fake blood and pizza for the crew and such, but realistically, there wasn’t a lot of money behind it.

What did you shoot on and how long was the shoot?

We used a Sony Digital Video Camera…nothing special for the first time around. Rise of the Scarecrows was the same and Scary Tales is shot on a digital video camera, but a better camera and shot better. Evil Awakening was shot in 3 months, Rise of the Scarecrows took 2 ½ years for various reasons, and now Scary Tales is nearly done and when the dust settles, it will have been 3 months of weekend shooting. I’m organized now and that has made a big difference.

I thought you did a great job of creating little storylines and weaving them all together around the main story of the Cock Monster. (I’ll assume I’m spelling that right?) Talk about keeping continuity. I’m assuming that on a low-budget and shooting out of sequence, with all the stories and characters involved, continuity can be problematic. How’d you handle that?

Thank you! The actual spelling is “The Coch Woods Monster” but it’s pronounced “Cock Woods Monster” so you are basically correct. Continuity and low budget are not friends of each other and it’s very hard to shoot when people are not getting paid and when they change their looks. Hair grows quickly, people gain and lose weight, and people lose clothing that they need for the next film. I think that I’m more in tune now and continuity is now a lot better. Evil Awakening did pretty well because it was shot quickly and most people understood that they needed to keep their look. Rise of the Scarecrows was tougher because it almost didn’t come and took over two years to complete and there are some continuity problems there but they aren’t that obvious unless you really look for them and you see continuity problems in big productions like Rocky IV when Apollo Creed is wearing boxing gloves and then pointing at Ivan Drago without a glove in the same scene. It is very tough and tough for me because I’m not as organized as I want to be, but we’ve done pretty well and I think that we’re on the right track.

What were some of your biggest hurdles in getting the film finished?

I guess just dealing with nonpaid actors that didn’t take it as seriously as I did and would often miss shooting days. Other than that, the rest is easy…time consuming but easy. Weather in New England is also difficult and can throw a wrench in the works.

Did you enter it into any festivals? If so, how did it do and what did you get out of the experience? If not, why?

I did enter both Evil Awakening and Rise of the Scarecrows into film festivals and neither one was ever allowed to compete. I don’t get it and I’m not convinced that they even watched them. I’ll be doing the same thing with Scary Tales with no expectations. I see the movies that win these film festivals and I know that my films belonged there in the running. It’s so frustrating, but it’s part of the business. They expect a certain look and sometimes want that artsy stuff instead of what I provide. So, I’m hoping that they will look at Scary Tales and give it a shot and if not, so be it. There are more than one way to skin a cat.

Talk about distribution. What was the process like for you and how’s that going?

Distribution was the toughest thing in the world. I had sent Evil Awakening everywhere and the few replies I got were either negative ones or they loved it and wanted to run with it, BUT they wanted the rights to the film, the money, and no guarantees on anything! How’s that for a deal. In other words, Evil Awakening 2 could come out without me and I would get nothing for the sales of Evil Awakening. F that. I thought that the best way, perhaps, to get a distributor was to start a horror site and interview them so that they know me when they see my submission and my chances would increase greatly. JR Bookwalter, a great filmmaker and now a distributor, gave me my shot and picked up both Evil Awakening and Rise of the Scarecrows.

I have a tentative deal for Scary Tales, which will probably be released next summer, and Rise of the Scarecrows is supposed to be released in January/February 2009. I have found that most distributors are ruthless and use filmmakers to line their own pockets while not throwing a crumb to the people that have done all of the work. I sat on Evil Awakening for five years before I found the right guy (Bookwalter) to see my work and give me a shot and a very fair deal as well.

After it’s all said and done, what would you have done differently?

I would not have put a deadline on the movie to complete. There were scenes that were cut out so we could finish and make a film festival that they didn’t allow us to compete in. I will never do that again. I would have shot it differently…fix some technical things, but all in all, for what it is, I like Evil Awakening. It’s got some problems, sure, but if you can look beyond the technical flaws, you will find the fun in it.

I would have developed more characters, rather than focus primarily on Sam Adams (Steven Joseph Adams), although I love that obnoxious and crazy guy!

Where can people find out more about “Evil Awakening” and your other projects and, better yet, buy a copy?

Anyone can go to scaredstiffreviews.com or xposse.com for details and can go to Amazon.com to purchase Evil Awakening. They can find my myspace page and become a friend with the Coch Woods Monster. Or anyone that wants to contact me directly can email me at genobambino69@gmail.com. Good or bad, I love to hear from the horror fans and any fans that I may have out there.

What’s next for Geno McGahee and X Posse Productions?

The continued promotion of Evil Awakening and the future promotion of Rise of the Scarecrows and Scary Tales are on the agenda as well as the planning for the fourth movie which will be filmed next summer. I am hoping that we can make a dent in this horror world and that the people give me a chance. You won’t regret it.

Lastly, talk about the indie horror scene. What do you think about where it’s at now and where do you see it going?

The indie film scene is pretty good, although it does get saturated with bad movies because the digital video camera and editing programs have leveled the playing field and has allowed many to make a movie when they probably shouldn’t. The Campbell Brothers are great and when they come back to horror, they could easily make their mark on a huge level, my friend Jim Haggerty is a great filmmaker and has a lot of ambition and knows how to network very well, and another friend of mine, Polly Frost, is not only an exceptional writer but she also excels at filmmaking. She has a great web series called “The Fold” that I really think is fantastic.

The fact of the matter is Indie Horror is where the heart is and where the originality is coming from. There is vision and love there and when you rent or buy a film made on a shoestring budget, you are getting something special. I think that Indie Horror now has an advantage over it in the past because of technology and we are now getting more and more indie films and I LOVE watching them because when you don’t have money, you need a good story and ingenuity. I see Indie horror going into the mainstream more than ever because it has to. How many Asian transfers, remakes, bad sequels, and PG-13 fluff horror movies will the public stand for before they begin looking elsewhere?

I do want to thank you for the time Ted, and I thank everyone that have purchased Evil Awakening and have written me to give me their thoughts. I sincerely appreciate the support and keep an eye out for Rise of the Scarecrows and Scary Tales.