As the producer behind the V/H/S films, co-producer of The Devil’s Candy, and producer/director behind anthologies Southbound and XX, Roxanne Benjamin has been well versed in genre filmmaking for a while now. And she’s only getting warmed up. Her feature debut, Body at Brighton Rock (read our review), releases in limited theaters and VOD on Friday, April 26, and it proved just how committed Benjamin is to horror; it literally broke her back.
Filmed at Idyllwild in California’s San Jacinto Mountains, Benjamin and crew dealt with gale force winds, falling trees, power outages due to downed power lines, and of course elevation. It was the latter that proved the most problematic for Benjamin.
“I blew out a disc in my back from hauling gear and hiking up and down the mountain. We’re in high elevation and it’s in the middle of winter. I blew out a disc in my back so badly that when I got an MRI for it, they were like, ‘Is the car totaled?’ ‘There was no car, I just woke up like this.’ But yeah, it was from hauling stuff all over the place. I had to have back surgery, and they had to remove a big portion of my disc off my nerve. So yeah, movies are literally back breaking work,” Benjamin told us.
The expansive scope of Idyllwild and its neighboring San Jacinto National Park gives the film a massive feel belying its lower budget, and also makes it easy to grasp how quickly someone could get lost. Benjamin adds, “I love shooting in nature for that reason, because it gives you so much production value and it makes something epic out of something small. Making small movies like this that are set in a house just makes it feel small. It’s claustrophobic to me. This is claustrophobic in a different way, but it’s my kind of claustrophobic.”
Inspiration behind the film’s story came from personal experience. Benjamin explains, “I worked in a museum in a park, and it’s mostly part-time employees, seasonal employees, retirees, students, and stuff. We’re not exactly the crack team of wilderness experts, you know? We weren’t expected to be. We’re literally the people who tell you where the bathroom is or what this statue means. It was mostly, if you took someone like that and they were the one who found a body on a trail, what would happen if you had someone completely in over their head, who maybe has the bravado to say that they’re not, and they’re forced to say, ‘just kidding! No I don’t want to do this!’? Then going through it realize that they do have the power to go through something like that? And then because of that are able to face down real-life challenges, later? It’s a children’s book. I basically wrote a children’s book in the form of a horror movie.”
As for the protocol of being forced to stay with a body until authorities arrive, as the inexperienced Wendy (Karina Fontes) was forced to do in the film, it turns out that’s very real.
“It’s a real thing. There are bodies found in the park way more than you want to believe. It was part of the research. I talked to a lot of rangers, who are the real trained people, who are EMT; they know resuscitation techniques and they know how to survive in the wilderness. The actual people who would be in this situation. And they’re like, ‘yeah, it happens way more than you would think.’ Because it’s weird, when we go out into nature, we’re walking a very thin line that we don’t see. Things go from, ‘I’m having a pleasant afternoon’ to ‘I might die out here’ in a matter of hours. It could happen. We walk around daily and don’t think about that kind of thing. This is very present on my mind all the time working in genre.”
When we spoke with Benjamin at SXSW, she had just come from the set of the upcoming Creepshow series on Shudder, and was headed straight back after the festival. While mum on any details of her particular episode, she was thrilled about getting to work with executive producer and special effects maestro Greg Nicotero, “I can just say that working with Nicotero is awesome and it’s really amazing working with all of these people who were involved in the original movies. They’re so excited to share what they’ve done and how they did it, and how they did it back then. What they did because they didn’t have money to make a certain thing, and here’s how they did it instead. And those stories are so valuable to me as a filmmaker, you know? It’s honestly been like great working with Nicotero and his team, and some of the original Creepshow folks, like John Harrison, who wrote the original score.”
It’s not the only thing in the pipeline, either, as Benjamin revealed she’d completed her script for Orion’s remake of Night of the Comet. She told us, “I love the original, and I love telling stories about girls facing impossible odds, like us against the world kind of stuff. And I think that’s what’s so cool about the first one is that it’s this very real sister relationship where they’re kind of dicks to each other, but really protective of each other at the same time. That’s how siblings go. I love seeing that in a genre setting because I don’t feel like we get those kinds of girl buddy movies that are facing down action and adventure as much. And so that’s the kind of stuff I want to make. That was the core of approach to this.”
Though we have a wait ahead of us for Creepshow and Night of the Comet, Body at Brighton Rock will be available April 26, 2019, on VOD.
