Interviews
Set Report: A Lengthy Trip Down Yet Another ‘Wrong Turn’
Just when you thought it was safe to wander off the beaten path once again, the murderous Hilliiker Brothers are back for another go-round with Wrong Turn 4: Bloody Beginnings (coming out on DVD October 25th), a prequel to the first film that sees “WT3” director Declan O’Brien returning to the director’s chair. Back in March B-D reporter Chris Eggertsen was given the opportunity to visit the set, located at an abandoned asylum formerly known as the Brandon Mental Health Centre about two hours outside of Winnipeg. While there he got the chance to check out some of the filming (a bloody scene involving both a severed head and a barbed wire noose), as well as interview O’Brien and several of the cast members. Get the full report inside.
Being a native of Southern California, I hadn’t enjoyed the dubious privilege of experiencing -20 degree weather until this past March, when courtesy of Fox Travel I was flown up to Winnipeg, Canada to visit the set of “Wrong Turn 4“, the latest installment in the studio’s long-running killer-hillbilly franchise.
Ha, but I said Winnipeg, didn’t I? The set was actually located outside Winnipeg – like, way outside – at an abandoned mental asylum near Brandon, a town of less than 50,000 people that still retains the distinction of being the second most-populated metropolitan area in the Manitoba province.
The asylum – formerly the Brandon Mental Health Centre – wasn’t bad, actually, as abandoned hospitals go. Fully vacated only back in 1999, it wasn’t the crumbling, eerie monstrosity I would’ve expected given my previous experiences on film sets located in deserted structures, many left unoccupied for several decades. Peeling paint and decaying stairwells were in short supply here, as it if all the doctors, patients, and nurses had picked up and left the premises mere months ago instead of years.
The day’s set was located in an old auditorium on one of the upper floors, where I imagine the staff once hosted screenings of classic Hollywood movies: Singin’ in the Rain, The African Queen, Sunset Blvd. (that last one, perhaps, being the product of some rebellious orderly’s sick joke).
We watched from a balcony above the auditorium as the current scene played out below us. The bit in question involved about six of the film’s young cast members, and I imagined each of their characters as I spotted them – the voluptuous, dark-haired Slut; the porcelain Ingénue; the hunky Boyfriend. It went a little something like this:
The Ingénue speaks in a tone that is hushed and breathless; she’s afraid something terrible has happened to a friend of theirs who’s gone missing. The Boyfriend radiates unconcern as he regards her with skepticism, his pressed lavender v-neck blending nicely with the pastel tones of his female companions’ winter-wear. The Slut stands idly by, her long hair cascading in waves of L’Oreal perfection.
Suddenly, something is catapulted from the darkness of the stage at the other end of the room. It’s a small jacket-wrapped bundle, twirling through the air and then tumbling across the wooden floor in a hollow roll. The group spins around all at once as it registers at the edge of their vision (the Slut; the Ingénue; the Boyfriend; the long-limbed Model-type with the conspicuous afro), instantly unified in their sudden state of alarm.
The bundle comes to rest a dozen feet away. They stare at it, uncomprehending. The jacket belongs to their missing friend, the Ingénue asserts gravely. She hesitates for just a moment before slowly stepping forward, her demeanor suggesting she knows of the horror the bundle contains but can’t keep herself from advancing the plot.
The Ingénue kneels before the bundle as the others slowly follow behind her, gathering around in a tight half-circle as she unwraps it with trembling fingers. As the edges fall away, her sudden screams echo against the walls of the high-ceilinged room, drawing all eyes to their friend’s severed head lying vacantly in the center of the garment – the ragged borders of his cleaved flesh encircling a dark, gaping expanse of blood and sinew that spills from where his neck used to be like a thick clump of raspberry jelly.
The Ingénue continues to scream as she recoils and stumbles away from the bundle in a sudden whirlwind of floundering horror, her jagged wails cutting through the musty air of the auditorium as she staggers back against the Boyfriend and clings to him with bone-white fingers. He keeps his eyes fixed numbly on the object of her alarm, the sharp angle of his precisely-styled bangs disturbed only slightly by the sudden force of her body against his…
In screenwriting terminology, the incident just described might accurately be labeled a first act “plot point” – an event near the 30-minute mark of a film that spins the story around in a completely new direction. Of course, when you consider that this is the fourth entry in a slasher franchise not exactly renowned for its narrative daring, the discovery of a severed head doesn’t exactly rate as an unexpected development. Attractive Young Adults find themselves in Creepy Abandoned Location; Alarming Signs are soon picked up on by More Perceptive Members of group; Shit Hits Fan shortly thereafter.
That paradigm is more or less expressed in “WT4“‘s basic plot: A group of twenty-something friends go on a snowmobiling trip as a last hurrah before their college graduation. They soon find themselves stranded in an abandoned mental hospital after getting lost in an unexpected snowstorm. But the hospital isn’t really abandoned; a few of its former patients still reside there. Three guesses who those former patients are, and the first two don’t count (cough, killer mutant hillbillies).
It should also be mentioned that the film is actually a prequel, the category of franchise entry that is apparently no longer the sole domain of big-budget science-fiction movies. Later, we briefly sat down with returning director Declan O’Brien (he also helmed the third installment) to get some specifics.
“I finished ‘Wrong Turn 3’ and it did pretty well. You know, it sold well, I was happy with it“, said O’Brien, a youthful, bright-eyed presence who I pegged as being in his late 30s or early 40s. “And Fox called again and said ‘hey, do you wanna do Wrong Turn 4’? And you know, [they] said ‘well, maybe you can bring Three Finger back’. And I’m like, ‘I killed him six ways from Sunday [in ‘Wrong Turn 3′], there’s no way he’s coming back. Give me a weekend to think about the story and let me get back to you.’ ”
That’s when he decided to go the prequel route, in effect showing how the mutant killers from the previous films became who they became.
In a nutshell, fans will get to see Three Finger (Sean Skene), Sawtooth (Scott Johnson) and One Eye (Sean’s brother Dan Skene, both of whom also acted as stunt performers under the direction of their stunt-coordinator father Rick) – aka the Hilliker Brothers – in all their pre-pubescent glory, before flashing forward several years later as they embark on their first ever (?) massacre of innocent wayward civilians.
“It’s a brother story. It’s like ‘My Three Sons’!” laughed the director. “People just really relate to it. I guess they loved the characters that Stan Winston originally created. I’m really proud of [special effects makeup artist] Doug Morrow on this, because he took us right back to what Stan’s work looked like. These guys I think look better than [in parts] ‘2’ and ‘3’.”
True to the inventive kills featured in the previous three installments, O’Brien will be taking full advantage of the setting here, chock-full as it is of left-over equipment from the hospital’s bygone era as a working mental asylum.
“These guys have the run of the place. If they get locked up, they know they can get out“, said O’Brien of the killers, alluding to the fact that they were once patients of the institution. “So they use the surroundings like, you know, electric shock machines, and stuff like that.”
In addition to the tortuous potential of abandoned implements left inside the hospital, the snowy landscape that surrounds it also holds potential as a killing field, with tools normally used for both fun and survival in the freezing environment milked for their potential as instruments of bodily defilement, including, among other things, a snowmobile and an auger (a drill used for ice-fishing).
Indeed, it sounds as if hardcore slasher fans are in for a treat this time around, with a kill count of nine (a record for the franchise). The nastiest bit described during my visit was a gag in which one of the characters is eaten alive by black flies.
“The hardest thing was pacing back and forth in my living room thinking about how to kill people“, said O’Brien of trying to one-up the murders in the previous installments. “‘No, I can’t do that, that’s been done, can’t do that, that’s been done.’…I killed like seven people the last time, and there’s nine new ones. I had the egg-slicer last time that didn’t quite work practically, so we had to put lousy CGI in it. [Laughs] But [in] this one, all the kills are 99% practical.”
I spoke with several members of the cast later that day, after hours spent milling about the craft services table and wandering through the abandoned hallways of the former BMHC (highlight: the large, eerie white room upstairs with cheerful cartoon murals adorning the walls – Barney Rubble from “The Flintstones” here, a smiling Garfield there, a brilliant butterfly, a jubilant sun).
The young thesps – all of them Canadian – greeted me with amused eyes from a line of tall folding chairs as I shuffled into the room, recorder in one hand and a battered notebook in the other, sweating beneath the layers of cotton I’d armored myself with against the elements outside – only to have those layers turn against me once I spent an hour or so within the super-heated confines of the hospital.
I regarded them in turn as I do all young and beautiful entertainers – in awe of their apparent immunity to looking bad, even when faced with the brutality of intense 12-hour workdays and endless retakes requiring them to run, and scream, and die – often with pints of spilled corn syrup soaking through their clothes.
The only male actor in the room was Dean Armstrong, who plays “Daniel“. You may remember him from his role as Bobby’s friend “Cale” in last year’s “Saw 3-D” (aka the blindfolded guy who was hanged in the room with no floor).
“[Daniel] is a stripper, who was picked up…” he began of his character, and then stopped as the others began to laugh. A joke, obviously, except I wanted it to be true. A male stripper in a slasher movie? Now that would be interesting!
Daniel is actually the med student boyfriend of Kenia, played by Jennifer Pudavick (aka the screaming Ingénue). The long-limbed actress offered up an interesting tidbit on the art of the horror-movie scream.
“You’ve heard of ‘Throat Coat’?” she asked me. I hadn’t. “It really helps soothe your throat when you’re doing screaming scenes. So you drink it in between to make sure you don’t get a raw throat“, she explained. “I know what it’s like to scream for my life now…I know what that feels like and how much you want to puke after.” In other words, being a scream queen isn’t for sissies
Joining Armstrong and Pudavick were Terra Vnessa as “Jenna“, the girlfriend of “Vincent” (Sean Skene, working both sides of the fence here); Ali Tataryn as “Lauren“, who braves the elements outside the hospital to ski for help once things go south; Kaitlyn Wong (aka “the Slut“) as Bridget, a bitchy lesbian; and Tenika Davis as “Sara“, Bridget’s girlfriend (she’s the Model-type with the afro mentioned earlier).
“At the end of the day, [the gore] is the stuff that makes people turn away from the T.V.“, said Davis (a former contestant on “Canada’s Next Top Model“), speaking to a big part of the “Wrong Turn” franchise’s grimy appeal. “That’s the thing that gives you that feeling in your stomach that you almost wanna, you know, hurl or something like that. But at the same time you can’t stop looking at it.”
Speaking of gore, we got a good dose of it during a kill scene filmed later that day, in which unfortunate actress Samantha Kendrick (“Claire“) was dangled from a harness above the floor of the auditorium with a “barbed wire noose” encircling her neck.
In the continuity of the film, this bit directly follows the “severed-head-in-a-jacket” moment, with Claire wandering into the theater and startling her friends from their discovery just as the Hilliker Brothers lower the noose from the balcony above and use it to hoist her off the ground by her neck. Her boyfriend “Kyle” (Victor Zinck Jr.) then rushes forward and attempts to save her as the wire slices mercilessly through her nubile flesh.
As I watched the pretty blonde actress hanging from the harness, her white sweater matted with a chaotic spread of scarlet, spitting out ribbons of fake blood in take after take after take, I found myself feeling both sorry for her (she was up there for a good majority of the day) and ever-so-slightly ashamed at my own rubbernecking. Her barbed-wire lynching might have been fake, but this horror movie business isn’t exactly a cake-walk for those working behind the scenes either.
Of all the places to find a coven of witches, the attic above a Christian youth camp is probably the last place you’d think to look. But that’s just what we find in Camp, a surrealist nightmare of feminist empowerment from Canadian filmmaker Avalon Fast.
Emily (Zola Grimmer) is still reckoning with her involvement in a horrific tragedy when she accidentally contributes to the death of her best friend, Charlie (Giselle Morison). Unable to move on, the traumatized teen takes a job at a rural summer camp, hoping to forget her own sorrows by looking after at-risk kids. She quickly connects with a counselor named Clara (Alice Wordsworth) and finds comfort in her close-knit group of female friends. But a mysterious whisper from deep in the woods warns that they may be leading her down a darker path.
Fast burst onto the scene in 2022 with Honeycomb, a psychological horror film that follows a burgeoning matriarchy. Known for their focus on “Girl Horror” stories, the talented young filmmaker tackles similar themes in Camp as Emily leaves the modern world behind to embrace a dark vision of self-discovery through magic.
Ahead of the film’s U.S. release on June 26, Bloody Disgusting sat down with Fast to chat about the nebulous nature of good vs. evil and the intoxicating power of female-driven horror.
Bloody Disgusting: What inspired this unique story? Did you go to religious summer camps when you were young?
Avalon Fast: I did. I went to lots of different summer camps, but all of them were primarily Bible camps. The memory I have of camp is kind of strange. I was very homesick as a kid, and I didn’t necessarily enjoy all my time there. I definitely remember meeting some interesting girls at camp and having that presence of religion hovering around the whole experience.
BD: I really love the film’s gorgeous natural setting. Camp is the kind of surrealist nightmare that you don’t just watch. You feel it too. How did you approach creating this world?
AF: Well, a huge part of it was working with my cinematographer Eily Sprungman, who’s a very close friend. We spent years prepping, shot listing, storyboarding, and mood boarding. She’d had a similar experience to mine. We grew up around the same place, and so we understood each other’s visions from the get-go. But there are so many other pieces that came together. The costuming, the art, and the animated sequences were done by Sofiya Iurkevych. One of our producers, Taylor Nodrick, was obsessed with shooting on Super 8 film. I’ve always wanted to as well, so all the memory sequences were shot on Super 8. It was just a lot of people with an understanding and a vision for what this project was. I’m really happy with the way it turned out.
To the extent that you’re comfortable sharing, what’s your relationship to witchcraft, and what does Camp have to say about modern witches?
Well, that’s the question of Camp. It’s not that I don’t resonate with any of these things, but I specifically wanted Camp to be a little bit ambiguous around what witchcraft looks like. Is this witchcraft? Are these girls witches? Emily explicitly asks if that’s what’s happening here, and the answer isn’t yes. The film isn’t going to answer that question for you. My relationship to magic and witchcraft? It’s tough. I feel like there’s so much magic, connection, and spirituality that comes from these friendships, the closeness of these women, and what’s happening around them. A lot of what Camp is trying to say or show is just that magic can come out of friendship.
I loved watching these female friendships develop. And you’re right. No one ever says the word “coven,” but you can feel that connection, and you can see a change in Emily as those relationships grow. I’m also really fascinated with the way Camp plays with the idea of good and evil. At one point, Clara says, “Maybe God drew us to the devil,” which stopped me in my tracks. How do you view witchcraft or the magic these girls are experiencing in regard to good and evil?
That was such a huge part of the script’s construction. The story is really trying to keep a balance between those two things. I like asking people if they think these girls are good or bad, because I feel like a lot of people come out of the film thinking one or the other. They’ll say things like “thank God Emily found her people” or “God, I really wish she’d gone home.” I just don’t think there’s ever an answer. I wanted to explore the idea of going down the wrong path, especially coming out of grief. What makes you a bad person, and does healing mean you’re looking to become a better person? I don’t have an answer, but I do feel like that’s a huge part of what Camp is asking. What is good? What is bad? Why did God bring me to the devil?
Yes, because this is all happening at “God camp” in Emily’s words. So how can both of those things exist at the same time? Along those lines, I’m also fascinated by the voice Emily hears in the woods. Without spoiling too much, what is this voice asking, and what is required in return?
Emily comes to camp with a shout into the void, asking can anyone hear me? Does anyone want to? And it’s answered so clearly by these girls, specifically responding only with love, care, support, and trust. It’s like her prayers were answered. It doesn’t mean that everything is going to be alright, but Emily is looking for peace. She’s looking for a moment where she feels pure good. And I think, even at its surface level, she does get that experience.
Personally, I don’t really think people are good or bad. I think we all exist somewhere in the middle. Camp centers traditionally villainized characters, but that’s where Emily seems to find her peace, however you choose to define it.
I also wanted to show the experience of having decided that you are a bad person, you’ve made mistakes, and you feel cursed. Then when you meet other people who have done things that you would consider worse, you can actually feel good in their presence. You feel like less of a bad person. I think that’s a huge part of the story as well. Emily’s finding her version of other fucked up people, and she feels less fucked up around them. I’ve found that in my own life. It’s a cool thing. I don’t think it’s bad.
I don’t think it’s bad either. It’s finding your home, your people. We meet Emily in the aftermath of unthinkable trauma. Is this a story about mental health and healing?
Witnessing it myself. witnessing other people experience tragedy and then move through grief, you hear a lot of talk about healing or coming out the other side. There’s so much conversation around what that looks like, with self-care and showing up for yourself. I always felt really averse to it. It annoyed me. I think the beginning of the film speaks to that. The therapeutic version of what getting help looks like is obviously very different from what Camp is showing. And again, I don’t have an answer for what you’re supposed to do. But I think that’s another question I was asking: how do you heal? Do you heal at all? Is that the end goal, or are we just trying to get better? It’s something I experienced in my own grief. And the answer, for me, at least now, is just that I’m not looking to get better. So I felt like I hadn’t. I found it hard to find people to have those conversations with. And I think that’s what I ultimately wanted to make a film about.
I love that unanswered question. In my own experience, I’ve had to reframe what healing actually looks like. There’s not really an endpoint. It’s just finding a way to keep going. There’s also an element of sacrifice in this story, particularly regarding another counselor named Jo (Sophie Bawks-Smith). What role does she play in Emily’s journey?
For me, Jo is this human embodiment of Charlie, Emily’s friend. As Jo, she had a life at this camp before meeting Emily, and then was kind of taken over by Charlie’s spirit. I think a lot of people view Emily’s final choice as horrendous and tragic. In a way it is, but for me, if Jo becomes her angel, it’s almost like a self-sacrifice. Jo knows that by sacrificing herself, she’ll be giving Emily power to move forward. In the original script, the girls were supposed to bring out another counselor, JB (Aidan Laudersmith), and burn his body. But I just thought, there’s no way sacrificing this guy could give the girls enough power. There’s just no way, right? Logically, that just didn’t line up for me.
I’m glad you mentioned JB, because he has his own tragic arc. How do men factor into the world of Camp?
The way men factor into my world is so bizarre. I have such little respect for them in my films, which is something I’ve been called on. I think I have to challenge myself in the future to make a movie about a boy because, these boys … It’s not that the men in my films aren’t redeemable, but there’s no depth to these characters. They’re just treated with such disrespect. I don’t know why I do that, actually. That’s something for me to look into. It was the same with Honeycomb. They’re just such peripheral characters. I’ve had people ask about Kayne (Henri Gillespi), the scary guy at the fire, what happens to him? I just think, I don’t know. I don’t care. That’s not the point of the story.
Well, I can say after a lifetime of watching women on the periphery of the story, the course correction feels nice. In a similar vein, I’m in love with your homepage, avalonfast.com. There’s an image of girls on a film set and then a still from Honeycomb in which a blood-covered girl is screaming at the sky. And in the middle, it just says Girl Horror. It’s a really powerful statement that gives me chills. How do you define Girl Horror, and what draws you to these types of stories?
I was obsessed with the term when I started making my movies. It was something I’d come up with to kind of brand myself and describe what I was doing. Then I went through a period where I felt like it was a bit gender exclusive and didn’t interest me as much. But now I’ve come full circle on the term. I think it’s a bit of a commentary on youth and the horror of growing up female. But I think everybody can relate to that experience. I don’t want it to feel like this exclusive thing, that I make movies exclusively for girls, because I don’t think I do. I’m interested in exploring what Girl Horror means. Originally, it was just a title, something I came up with, and now it’s become something that resonates with people. You said it gave you chills. That’s cool for me to hear because there’s obviously some depth there.
Are you working on anything new?
Yes. I am actually making a movie about a boy. That’s the next thing.
That’s exciting! The more I think about feminism, the more I end up coming back to men and boys, because they have a place in the world of Girl Horror too.
Absolutely. It’s all just part of being human.
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