I’ve only been writing for Bloody Disgusting for a little over a year, so I’m still relatively new to this whole festival coverage thing. I’m lucky enough to live in Austin, TX, which is the location of both Fantastic Fest (which centers solely on genre films) and SXSW. The first festival I ever went to (and covered) was Fantastic Fest last September, where I shared coverage with our own Kalyn Corrigan. SXSW was all me this year, and I hope you’ve enjoyed reading my coverage for Bloody Disgusting as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it.

For those of you who have never been to SXSW, it is a huge festival that takes over most of downtown Austin and some other areas to the south of the Colorado River that borders the south side of downtown Austin. This can make it particularly difficult if you have screenings that are close together but on opposite ends of the festival. For example, a movie may let out at the Paramount Theater but you need to make it down to the Alamo Drafthouse Lamar in 30 minutes for your next screening (see map below). Road closures and crowds can make this difficult.

What I’ve decided to do is detail my adventures of SXSW day by day, linking to all of the reviews and interviews I posted (think of it as a diary entry). I actually liked or loved most of the films that I watched, which I have been informed is a symptom of being “festival drunk,” but I’ll take it. Anyway, here is a summary of my coverage!

Day 1 – Friday March 11th

The first day of the festival was relatively light. I wanted to make a screening of The Greasy Strangler (read Fred Topel’s Sundance review), but it was at the aforementioned South Lamar Alamo Drafthouse and would get out at 10:33. I had to be up at the Stateside Theater by 10:45 to get into the screening of the new Fede Alvarez movie, which was listed as “UNTITLED FEDE ALVAREZ / GHOST HOUSE THRILLER” until that day when it was officially renamed as Don’t Breathe. Rather than risk missing the Fede Alvarez movie, I skipped The Greasy Strangler and went to a bar after I left my day job and hung out for a bit before making my way to the premiere.

The premiere of Don’t Breathe received an extremely positive response, and turned out to be my favorite film of the festival (it was the only film I gave a perfect score). I may have had two or three drinks before the screening, but I swear my inebriation did not impact my opinion of the film at all. It’s really just that good.

Day 2 – Saturday March 12th

Saturday saw my day start with some interviews. First, I was fortunate enough to interview Fede Alvarez about Don’t Breathe. He also got to briefly talk with me about Evil Dead 2, which unfortunately won’t be happening. He was a great interview and I wish I had had more than 10 minutes with him, but such is life.

After speaking with Alvarez, I was able to interview Dylan Minnette and Daniel Zovatto, who are two of the male leads in the film. Like Alvarez, Minnette and Zovatto were especially chatty and overall just a pair of really nice guys.

My first film of the day was Ti West’s new western In a Valley of Violence. People seemed to be pretty split on the film (it all depends on your tolerance for humor in a western), but I thought it was a blast.

Unfortunately a migraine (which had nothing to do with me drinking the night before) hit me after the screening, so I went and napped in my car for a hour or two before the late-night screening of Mike Flanagan’s (Oculus, Absentia) newest film Hush, which he co-wrote with his wife Kate Siegel (who also stars in the film). My review will be up when the film is released on Netflix on April 8, but you can read Kalyn’s review now.

Day 3 – Sunday March 13th

Interviews took up the majority of my Sunday. First, I rushed to the Four Seasons to meet up with Ti West and Jason Blum to discuss In a Valley of Violence. We did the interview on the outside patio of Trio, the restaurant that is housed inside the Four Seasons. It was sunny and hot and it looked like West and Blum had just finished brunch, but they were still a good conversation.

An hour later was my interview with director Mike Flanagan, actress Kate Siegel and producers Trevor Macy and Jason Blum (again) about Hush. That interview will be posted the week of the film’s release on Netflix (just like my review), but suffice it to say that they were all a bunch of talkers, making for one of the best and most entertaining interviews I’ve ever done. Flanagan really seems to care about his craft and Siegel was just a bubble delight. The interview concluded with Blum showing me a clip from Ouija 2, which Flanagan is directing. While I can’t detail any specifics about the clip, I can say that it looks better than pretty much everything that was in Ouija. Fingers crossed for that one.

My final interview of the day was a roundtable interview with the cast and crew of the new Cinemax TV series Outcast, based on Robert Kirkman’s graphic novel of the same name. Basically, me and a few other members of the press sat at a table with Kirkman and executive producer Chris Black and we all took turns asking questions. After about 20 minutes we were all herded to another table to do the same song and dance with the pilot’s director Adam Wingard and lead actor Patrick Fugit.

At this point I went home to let my dog Coach McGuirk out. Don’t worry, I’m not a neglectful pet owner. Any day neither me nor my partner could run home to let him out, we arranged for one of our friends to do so.

The only film I caught on Sunday was the James Caan-starrer The Waiting later that night. It’s more a psychological drama than it is a genre film, but it has plenty of genre elements. It’s a bit tedious, but the emotional payoff in the film’s climax almost makes it all worth it, which I mentioned in my review.

I closed out the night by heading to Trace (I fully realize the coincidence of me being in a restaurant named Trace), a restaurant in the W Hotel, to attend a private party with the cast and crew of The Waiting. While there, I was able to discuss the film with director Kasra Farahani, but I had to hold back since I had an interview scheduled with him the following day, which leads me to….

Day 4 – Monday March 14th

My first task of the day was to do a roundtable interview with Farahani and actors James Caan (yes, the James Caan) & Logan Miller. This interview (which was also done with several other members of the press) took place in the back of a bar called TenOak, which I thought was odd since we were, you know, interviewing James Caan and all, but whatever. The interview was illuminating but was cut short due to the fact that we were interviewing them on a stage where a band needed to set up. Again, it was very odd.

Not only did I get to interview James Caan, but I was also able to interview Christopher Lloyd (along with the rest of the cast and crew of I Am Not a Serial Killer). This interview took place at the Stephen F. Austin Intercontinental Hotel, just a few blocks away from TenOak. At 25 minutes, it was my longest interview but was a lot of fun. I didn’t catch a screening of the film because I was sent a screener before the festival started, but you can catch my review of that film here.

I didn’t have to catch a screening until later that night, so I headed to the Retail Innovation Lounge for the “Carnage Park + Darling Listening Party” where writer/director Mickey Keating compared and discussed the soundtracks for his two latest films (read my Fantastic Fest review of Darling here) with composer Giona Ostinelli. It was a fun diversion from the rest of the festival, and the banter between Keating and Ostinelli was highly entertaining.

At this point I went home to let my dog out (See? I told you I wasn’t a neglectful pet owner), then headed back downtown to catch a screening of Beware the Slenderman, which I thought was a pretty scary documentary.  Beware the Slenderman will premiere on HBO later this year.

Day 5 – Tuesday March 15th

I had to go back and work my day job on Tuesday morning. I took a half day and used the rest of the day to go home and catch up on reviews & transcribing interviews which, in case you didn’t know, is the absolute worst. This was the one day I stayed far away from downtown and did not do any SXSW-related activities.

Day 6 – Wednesday March 16th 

I spent Wednesday morning transcribing more interviews (I told you it was the worst) and caring for my dog before heading down to my first screening at the Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar: Thomas Dekker’s Jack Goes Home. I wasn’t a huge fan, but it proved to be one of the more polarizing films of the festival. Check it out whenever it gets a release. Maybe you’ll like it!

After a short break, I walked into a screening of the Iranian horror film Under the Shadow, which is getting compared to The Babadook and for good reason. It also centers around a mother learning to cope with her somewhat bratty child while they are both haunted by a malevolent spirit. As similar as the films are, I think Under the Shadow is the better film.

Day 7 – Thursday March 17th

Back to the day job, as I spent my morning there before heading home in the early afternoon to let my dog out. Then I went downtown to catch Doug Benson’s and Master Pancake’s Interruption of Leprechaun 4: In Space. This wasn’t something I was covering, just something I really wanted to see. For those of you who don’t know: Master Pancake is a comedy troupe that basically makes screenings at the Alamo Drafthouse a live version of Mystery Science Theater 3000. The members of the troupe (and in this screening’s case, Doug Benson) sit at the front of the theater with microphones and make jokes about the screening. Needless to say, there were plenty of jokes to be made about Leprechaun 4: In Space. They’re doing Leprechaun In the Hood next year and I’m pretty stoked about it (though I’m pissed I missed last year’s screening of Leprechaun 3, my favorite in the franchise).

After that I was able to catch a screening of Pet, which I had been hearing rather lukewarm things about all week (hence me saving it for the latter half of the festival). Much to my surprise, I ended up really liking it! It’s not a perfect film, but it’s got a good sense of humor around itself and has a pretty nifty twist that occurs halfway through its runtime.

Day 8 – Friday March 18th

My day job overtook my morning again, but mid-afternoon saw me at a screening for Anne Hamiton’s debut feature American Fable. I liked it well enough, but it didn’t leave much of an impression. It clearly drew a lot of inspiration from Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth, as it tells the tale of an 11-year-old girl named Gitty who discovers that her father is hiding a wealthy man in her family’s silo in order to save their struggling farm, she is forced to choose between saving the man’s life or protecting her family from the consequences of their actions. It’s a 3/5 for me (beautifully shot with some strong performances, but the script leaves a lot to be desired), but it didn’t really have any horror elements so I opted not to review it.

What I did enjoy on Friday night was Mickey Keating’s Carnage Park, which is a fun throwback to 70s exploitation films. Since Fred Topel had already reviewed the film at Sundance, I didn’t prioritize it for a review, but I liked it a bit more than he did so I wrote one anyway. It’s no secret that I like Keating’s films (see my aforementioned review of Darling and my inclusion of Pod on my Top 5 Horror Films list from last year), and Carnage Park is no different. It’s a lot of fun and features a fantastic performance from The Last Exorcism’s Ashley Bell

Day 9 – Saturday March 19th

I saved the worst film for last, and that film is Johnny Frank Garrett’s Last Stand. I have liked pretty much every film I’ve seen at SXSW, save for Jack Goes Home and Another Evil (which I also saw as a screener before the festival), so it figures that the last film I was able to see is the one I would like the least. You can read my review of it. Or don’t. Just don’t watch the movie.

Conclusion

9 days and 13 films later, my coverage was done. My biggest regret is that I wasn’t able to catch the Japanese zombie film I Am a Hero, which won the Audience Award for the Midnighters (a group of films described as “Scary, funny, sexy, controversial – provocative after-dark features for night owls and the terminally curious.”), but c’est la vie. Overall I’d say it was a pretty successful festival, and I’m excited for all of you to see many of the films that I was able to see. Hopefully this post gave you an idea of what it’s like to attend a festival and you got some entertainment out of it. I know I did!

The post Bloody Disgusting’s SXSW 2016 Recap! appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

“At the edge of an expansive barren valley, all that remains of The Wallace Farm for Wayward Youth is a few hollowed-out husks of buildings. Seventeen-year-old Kendal (Haley Lu Richardson) can barely recall when the Oregon valley was still lush. It’s been a decade since the last rainfall, and society at large has dried up and blown away. Kendal and the few others that remain barely scrape by, while dreaming of escape. When a greedy water baron lays claim to what little of the precious resource remains underground, Kendal must decide whether to run and hide or bravely fight for the few cherished people and things she has left.”

The Well stars Haley Lu Richardson in a breakout role as a young woman with grit, smarts, and an incredible will to survive.

Additional cast includes: Booboo Stewart (Twilight), Jon Gries (Taken), Nicole Fox (America’s Next Top Model winner), Michael McCartney (The Amazing Spider-Man), Michael Welch (Twilight), Rena Owen, Max Charles (The Amazing Spider-Man), Jacqueline Emerson (The Hunger Games), Barbara Crampton (Re-Animator), and Michael Massee (Seven).

The Well will have its World Premiere in The Beyond Category at the 2014 Los Angeles Film Festival.

The post [LAFF ’14] Clip From Post-Apocalyptic Thriller ‘The Well’ appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Riot Fest TICKETS

Friday, Sep 13:

Fall Out Boy
Sublime with Rome
Joan Jett & the Blackhearts
Bad Religion
Atmosphere
Yellowcard
Screeching Weasel
Andrew W.K.
GWAR
Hatebreed
Smoking Popes
Dessa
Saul Williams
The Flatliners
Masked Intruder
Flatfoot 56
Environmental Encroachment

Saturday, Sep 14:

Blink-182
Violent Femmes
Rancid
Blondie
Public Enemy
Flag
Guided By Voices
Taking Back Sunday
Dinosaur Jr.
X
DeVotchka
Pennywise
Best Coast
The Lawrence Arms
Glassjaw
The Devil Wears Prada
The Selecter
T.S.O.L.
Stars
Say Anything
The Dear Hunter
Surfer Blood
The Interrupters
Empires
New Beat Fund
Radkey
Mephiskapheles
Kitten
Environmental Encroachment

Sunday, Sep 15:

The Replacements
Pixies
AFI
Brand New
All Time Low
Pierce the Veil
Rocket From The Crypt
The Dismemberment Plan
The Broadways
Against Me!
Bob Mould
The Lillingtons
Suicidal Tendencies
Quicksand
Bad Books
Mission of Burma
Saves The Day
Bayside
Peter Hook & The Light (Joy Division Set)
Reggie And The Full Effect
The Wonder Years
Maps & Atlases
Chuck Ragan
Memphis May Fire
Peelander-Z
Touché Amoré
Off With Their Heads
Deal’s Gone Bad
Twin Peaks
White Mystery
Direct Hit!
Pet Symmetry
Hostage Calm
Environmental Encroachment

Feel free to harass SuperRadMike via Twitter, Tumblr and of course Bloody-Disgusting!

The post Riot Fest (Chicago) Reveals Daily Schedule appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

TICKETS

2013 PITCHFORK MUSIC FESTIVAL SCHEDULE:

FRIDAY, JULY 19 – gates at 3pm

8:30pm – (Green) Björk
7:20pm – (Red) Joanna Newsom
6:25pm – (Green) Wire
6:15pm – (Blue) Mikal Cronin
5:30pm – (Red) Woods
5:15pm – (Blue) Angel Olsen
4:35pm – (Green) Mac DeMarco
4:15pm – (Blue) Trash Talk
3:30pm – (Red) Daughn Gibson
3:20pm – (Blue) Frankie Rose

SATURDAY, JULY 20 – gates at 12pm

8:45pm – (Blue) Rustie
8:30pm – (Green) Belle & Sebastian
7:45pm – (Blue) Andy Stott
7:25pm – (Red) Solange
6:45pm – (Blue) Low
6:15pm – (Green) The Breeders play Last Splash
5:45pm – (Blue) Ryan Hemsworth
5:15pm – (Red) Swans
4:45pm – (Blue) Metz
4:15pm – (Green) Savages
3:45pm – (Blue) Merchandise
3:20pm – (Red) …And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead
2:50pm – (Blue) Parquet Courts
2:30pm – (Green) Phosphorescent
1:55pm – (Blue) Julia Holter
1:45pm – (Red) Pissed Jeans
1:00pm – (Blue) KEN Mode
1:00pm – (Green) White Lung

SUNDAY, JULY 21 – gates at 12pm

8:45pm – (Blue) TNGHT
8:30pm – (Green) R. Kelly
7:45pm – (Blue) Glass Candy
7:25pm – (Red) MIA
6:45pm – (Blue) Evian Christ
6:15pm – (Green) Toro Y Moi
5:45pm – (Blue) Chairlift
5:15pm – (Red) Lil B
4:45pm – (Blue) Sky Ferreira
4:15pm – (Green) Yo La Tengo
3:45pm – (Blue) Waxahatchee
3:20pm – (Red) El-P
2:50pm – (Blue) Blood Orange
2:30pm – (Green) Killer Mike
1:55pm – (Blue) Autre Ne Veut
1:45pm – (Red) Foxygen
1:00pm – (Blue) DJ Rashad
1:00pm – (Green) Tree

For all those going I hope you have a safe weekend. Feel free to reach out via twitter @SuperRadMike I will be there all weekend.

Feel free to harass SuperRadMike via Twitter, Tumblr and of course Bloody-Disgusting!

The post Pitchfork Music Festival 2013 Starts Tomorrow appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

First up is the world premiere of the Duplass Brothers’ Milo, directed by Jacob Vaughan. In the comedy starring Ken Marino, Gillian Jacobs, Peter Stormare, Stephen Root and Mary Kay Place, “A man discovers that his chronic stomach problems are due to the fact that he has a demon baby living in his colon.” Check out the EFM sales poster inside.

We’ve also added your first ever look at Youssef Delara and Victor Teran’s Snap, starring Jake Hoffman, Nikki Reed, Thomas Dekker (A Nightmare on Elm Street), Scott Bakula, and Jason Priestley. The film is “A stylish psychological thriller set against the underground dub step DJ scene that takes the audience on a dark and terrifying journey into the depths of the psychopathic mind as it threatens to explode into horrific violence.”

Take a look at Jake Hoffman and Thomas Dekker in the film below.

Photo credit: Courtesy of Cima Productions

The post [SXSW ’13] First Look At ‘Snap’; Demon Comedy ‘Milo’ To Premiere appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

It is my duty to bring you the most horror and/or horror-related film reviews possible. With less than 20 feature films considered to be true horror, I will occasionally spotlight other non-horror films that will, hopefully, appeal to our readers here at Bloody Disgusting.

Be sure to be on the lookout in Austin, Texas from October 25-27, 2013, for my very own Housecore Horror Film Festival. I will be joined by my partner, former Pantera lead singer and heavy metal legend Philip H. Anselmo. We will be bringing 100% horror and heavy metal to the Lone Star state!

Check out Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, and Day 5 for more Fantastic Fest reviews!

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THE KING OF PIGS

THE KING OF PIGS is an emotionally punishing animated indie film about a group of friends whose brutal childhoods continue to haunt them as adults.

Not the way to kick the morning off. A dark, dismal tale (which I usually would welcome with open arms) about the worst middle school on the planet. Homosexual assault, brutal violence, child abuse, treachery, deceit, suicide – it’s all here. But it just comes across like one huge, sloppy mess. Adding to the disorganized chaos are some of the most indecipherable subtitles I have ever witnessed. The audience was actually laughing out loud at how bad they were.

There is some decent animation on display here, but not much more that I can recommend.

1.5/5 Skulls

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BRING ME THE HEAD OF MACHINE GUN WOMAN

Timid, video game-loving DJ Santiago seemingly digs his own grave when he agrees to bring a violent criminal kingpin the head of Machine Gun Woman.

Latin exploitation at its finest! Funny, bloody, and sexy all rolled into one. Additional bonus of being patterned after the greatest video game series ever created, Grand Theft Auto.

Machine Gun Woman actress Fernanda Urrejola is incredible and is sure to grace theater and computer screens for years to come. She is the epitome of every video gaming dude’s fantasy – tough as nails, beautiful as can be, and sexy as hell.

BMTHOMGW is a fun romp that you will not want to miss.

4/5 Skulls

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BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO

Strange things occur after a British audio technician is summoned to Italy to work on a gory giallo film.

What a bizarre little film. If you are a fan of early ’70s giallo, you will thoroughly enjoy the first hour of this film. Toby Jones (the superior Truman Capote) plays a Foley expert hired by a seemingly shady film production company to work on the sound effects for a horror film. I loved the behind the scenes look at foley work, especially with the use of a horror film, without even showing a single frame of the film in question.

Unfortunately, it’s far too repetitive. Jones’s character works a bit on the film, gets bitched at by a sleazebag producer, asks for his money only to be told to shut up, and finally is coddled by the allegedly famous director, repeat ad nauseum.

I could have hung with that pattern if only it weren’t for the final third of the film which devolves into an hallucinogenic ridiculous nightmare of Jones becoming one with the film.

Had BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO stuck with the making of the film-within-the-film structure and added in a modern giallo mystery, I would probably have enjoyed it so much more. Instead, it’s just a bizarre collection of interesting imagery, great sound effects, silly characters, and really no point to it at all.

2.5/5 Skulls

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AFTERSHOCK

In the middle of a night of wild partying, a hapless American tourist (Hostel director Eli Roth) and his friends are suddenly plunged into a living hell when a powerful earthquake rips through the coastal town of Valparaíso, Chile.

I’m old enough to have seen (and loved) most of the great disaster flicks of the ’70s such as EARTHQUAKE, THE TOWERING INFERNO, and THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE. It’s a genre that has been sorely underrepresented since that heyday, so I was stoked to hear about AFTERSHOCK, especially when there was talk about something horrible attacking the earthquake survivors.

Much like its predecessors, AFTERSHOCK spends its opening 45 minutes developing its characters. Gotta give a shit about someone before you topple the earth upon them, right? The three male protagonists, led by Eli Roth, are entertaining yet douchey. They meet up with three impossibly gorgeous women. They crack jokes, do drugs, and entertain us rather successfully.

Then, the earthquake strikes. So far, so good. The special effects are passable, if you can accept a lot of shakey-cam action in lieu of an ultra-mega expensive special effects extravaganza. The twist herein is that the earthquake allegedly demolishes a prison freeing all of the prisoners. This demolition takes place off screen and there appears to have only been six prisoners locked up in prison.

At this point, it all goes downhill. Leave out that third act, replace it with the more realistic perils caused by the earthquake and they would have had a successful film.

Side note – a quick scan of Twitter finds many moviegoers complaining about two rape scenes in the film. Now I have raised money for rape crisis centers via my true crime books and several book tours. I am fully aware of the horrors of rape and don’t find it funny in any way. But this is a horror film. How can you possibly call an entire movie crap because of the inclusion of two rapes, but overlook death by impalement, decapitation, gutshot, crushing, conflagration by the bad guys, etc? It’s a fucking horror film. No one is safe. Period.

3/5 Skulls

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-CM

Corey Mitchell is a best-selling author of several true crime books and is currently helping Philip H. Anselmo write his autobiography, MOUTH FOR WAR (Simon & Schuster, 2014).

Join Corey at Facebook and Twitter.

Also, be sure to check out Philip Anselmo and Corey Mitchell’s Housecore Horror Film Festival on Facebook and Twitter coming to Austin, TX in October 25-27, 2013.

The post [Fantastic Fest ’12] Corey Mitchell’s Mini-Reviews: Day 6 – ‘The King Of Pigs,’ ‘Bring Me The Head Of Machine Gun Woman,’ ‘Berberian Sound Studio,’ & ‘Aftershock’ appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

And now Brad (Mr. Disgusting) writes in with his review. In short, he found a lot to like. “The film builds tremendous amounts of suspense as they go from a safe place of laughing at a “wacko” to the sudden haunting realization that all of this “may be true.” And, if so, are they in danger? The tension builds to an incredible third act that can best be described as Eyes Wide Shut with more scares, but less boobage.”

Click here for the full review!

The post [Fantastic Fest ’12 Review] Brad Thinks ‘The Conspiracy’ Is A Rabbit Hole Worth Going Down appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Tickets will go on sale Wednesday, Aug. 29th here.

Got any thoughts/questions/concerns for Jonathan Barkan? Shoot him a message on Twitter or on Bloody-Disgusting!

The post Skrillex And Pretty Lights Announce “With Your Friends” Festival appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Although horror is slim pickings (for now), the one premiere that stands out is Neil Jordan’s Byzantium, starring Gemma Arterton, Sam Riley and Saoirse Ronan

In the film, “Two mysterious women seek refuge in a run-down coastal resort. Clara meets lonely Noel, who provides shelter in his deserted guesthouse, Byzantium. Schoolgirl Eleanor befriends Frank and tells him their lethal secret. They were born 200 years ago and survive on human blood. As knowledge of their secret spreads, their past catches up on them with deathly consequence.”

We’ve also landed a handful of new stills from the hotly anticipated vampire thriller.

The Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 6 to 16, 2012.

The post [TIFF ’12] ‘Byzantium’ To Premiere, Bloody New Imagery! appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Leading up to the SXSW Film Festival we brought you these two crazy awesome teaser trailers for the Indonesian horror flick Modus Anomali, an English-language thriller from The Forbidden Door filmmaker Joko Anwar.

“During a vacation in the woods, a man tries to find his family who mysteriously disappear, while being hunted by a sadistic killer. His only clues are several alarm clocks which seem to tell him about a deadline to something he doesn’t know.” Rio Dewanto, Hannah Al Rashid, Izziati Amara Isman, Aridh Tritama, Surya Saputra, Marsha Timothy, Sadha Triyudha and Jose Gamo all star in the World Preimere.

I was able to catch the film (yet to review it) and it was pretty fantastic, featuring a plot twist that’ll blow your friggin’ mind all over the wall. Sorry to tease, since there’s still no U.S. distribution, but at least you can enjoy the above new still, alongside the following poster and first clip that sets the fiery tone of the flick.

The post [SXSW ’12] Fiery Clip, New Still and Poster For ‘Modus Anomali’! appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Announced as part of this coming March’s SXSW Film Festival is the Indonesian horror flick Modus Anomali, which comes from The Forbidden Door filmmaker Joko Anwar.

“During a vacation in the woods, a man tries to find his family who mysteriously disappear, while being hunted by a sadistic killer. His only clues are several alarm clocks which seem to tell him about a deadline to something he doesn’t know.”

We’ve just added the trailer below that’s an instant success. In a short preview we’re immediately drawn in with some intense footage and a shocking turn of events that catapulted my interest from “non-existent” to “must-see.” We’ve also added some art and an early teaser video.

Rio Dewanto, Hannah Al Rashid, Izziati Amara Isman, Aridh Tritama, Surya Saputra, Marsha Timothy, Sadha Triyudha and Jose Gamo all star in the World Preimere.

The post [SXSW ’12] Be Immediately Captivated By The Shocking ‘Modus Anomali’ Trailer! appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

The Sundance Film Festival midnight movie Grabbers can claim at least one thing we’ve never seen before. There has never before been a movie where the secret to beating the monsters was to get totally drunk. Sure, Shaun of the Dead had heroes defeat zombies despite being drunk, but this is the first time it’s actually a strategy.

Irish writer Kevin Lehane and director Jon Wright made a film about bloodsucking aliens invading Ireland, and the local cops figure out if they’re drunk, the monsters won’t touch their blood. Partied out by the end of the week, Lehane and Wright chatted with me Wednesday afternoon over waters and Diet Cokes, but still a lively discussion about drinking, movie monsters and good CG. BD: Why didn’t anyone think of this sooner?

KL: Well, the way it came about is I was backpacking. I was backpacking in 2006 and I was traveling around the world and everywhere that I was heading to, I would get bitten by mosquitoes. It was getting a bit out of hand because I was just tearing myself alive with all these bites and bleeding. People were giving me advice to eat lots of marmite. I don’t know if you have that here, do you? Marmite or vegemite? It’s quite an acrid sort of spread that you have on toast. Apparently if you eat it, the vitamin B in your blood makes you inedible to mosquitoes. It’s an old wives’ tale, it’s an urban legend but I believed it. Then one night when I was having a drink in Aitutaki in the Cook Islands, I spotted a mosquito on my knuckle. I made a joke that I hope it would get drunk off my blood and die. It was that. The next morning I woke up with a hangover and mosquito bites and wrote in my travel journal “Get drunk to survive.” That’s where the idea came from.

BD: Why hasn’t anyone thought of that to fight vampires?

KL: Well, that was the thing. When I had that thought, I thought it would be quite good to do that with vampires, but I wanted to do a whole new monster. Yeah, the minute you come up with an idea like that you think somebody must’ve done that before and you start googling and trying to make sure that it hasn’t been done. I was shocked, and then I spent the whole time anticipating that a film would sneak up and just steal the idea.

BD: When you thought of calling them Grabbers, were you thinking of Graboids?

KL: No actually. Maybe it was in my subconscious but it didn’t come to me. I had forgotten that they actually called them that. Because they don’t really settle on calling them that. I think maybe the sequels do but there’s a conversation. No, Graboids didn’t reference for me. I wanted to sort of get around it by having one of the characters name the creatures. Therefore if it wasn’t cool, then just blame Paddy. He’s the one that came up with it. So they’ve got tentacles and a tongue that shoots out. You have to call these movies after the monster because that’s what they are.

BD: Do you just embrace the stereotype of drunken Irishmen?

JW: Well, its’ a stereotype for a reason in that Irish people do have a culture of drinking.

KL So do the Norwegians and the French and the Spaniards.

JW: Any culture.

KL: Especially the Americans. Americans drink more than Irish do.

JW: No, I don’t think that’s true.

KL: Of course they do. All their Bud Lites. Maybe there’s not as much alcohol in it, but.

JW: Yeah, there’s not [as much] alcohol in it. And it’s not so much the mad drunk. I think all cold countries have a drinking culture because it’s cold but the Irish have a different attitude to it. Like for example, on the film, there’d be crew members going out and getting really very, very drunk in the evening, like massively drunk and they’d turn up to set, they’d do a very good job, excellent job but they were hung over. The difference in the attitude was that’s not considered to be too big a deal amongst the Irish. They’re more permissive like that and I just think if you’re being honest, that’s part of Ireland. It can be a fun part as well as a negative.

KL: That’s why it’s based in Ireland because who else would think up that sort of scenario but the Irish, but it’s just having too much of a good thing. It just so happens that that’s how they come up with that solution. They’re not drunken characters. There’s only one drunk in the film. It’s just that they have to get drunk to survive and have too much of a good thing. It’s just being kind of ironic about it all.

JW: I mean, we tried to show both sides of it so you’ve got the alcoholic character who’s pretty miserable. So alcohol is bringing him nothing except sadness. On the other hand you’ve got the kind of, I’d like to see it as when they’re rolling about in the kitchen fighting the [monster], there’s a kind of joyful craziness to that stuff that is kind of saying this is a great life, isn’t it, really?

BD: How did you come up with the design of the Grabbers?

PW: Well, they kind of evolved. It started off Kevin had a notion, he described things within the script. I think the descriptions are fantastically evocative. They’re very unspecific. Medusa on a bad hair day and all this kind of stuff.

KL: Slimy black spidery mess.

PW: So we started with that which is fairly nonspecific. A ball of tentacles. That just evolved and we worked out the ecology of the Grabbers so that was quite a big thing for me. We wanted to know exactly how they lived on their home planet so that all of this has a kind of rigorous logic underpinning it. If you’re aware of that or not, I think maybe that just kind of percolates that you have a sense that this is being thought out and there’s a kind of logic to how they’re behaving. They’ve come to earth and they’re trying to work out what’s going on. What is a police chief? What should they eat, what shouldn’t they eat? Where should they lay their eggs? That’s all very considered and thought through. I suppose the design of the Grabbers partly came out of the fact that I knew we weren’t going to get a certificate PG, or a certificate where anyone could go. Because of the drinking and the swearing, it’s going to be a certain age and upwards. So I thought well, let’s put everything into the monsters that you don’t typically see in monsters. So they’ve got all these scatological references to the human body. They’re kind of reminiscent of assholes and cocks and vaginas. You kind of look at them and think that’s just revolting on so many levels, I don’t want that anywhere near me. Then of course we shove it into the actors’ face and we get right in their face. It’s just trying to be transgressive and sort of weird and have the monsters feel, whenever they ruck up, that you feel that they’re really just peculiar and strange and not something you want to be around.

KL: And yet very defined as well, like the fact that they’re aquatic. They only come up when it’s raining. They need water and they feed off blood and they lay their eggs on the beach. It just felt like if we could pin it all down almost like nature where turtles lay their eggs, they’re chasing the female and they present bait to lure the females out, then it all feels specific to Grabbers.

JW: Like it’s evolved. I suppose the other thing is I wanted a sense of intelligence. I wanted the alien to feel like it had a mind. Quite often in films they can feel a little bit mindless and that they’re doing things because it serves the plot. It’s more that they do. It’s trying to work out what it’s doing. It’s a very sneaky creature by nature, so part of the ecology was on the home planet there’s a creature that was 200 foot high that you could describe as vaguely looking like a stork. And it plunges down and plucks the Grabbers and eats them. It’s way, way bigger than the big grabber.

KL: That was not in the script.

JW: So they’re always sneaking about thinking about they don’t want to put themselves out and expose themselves too much because that’s not their nature. You look at the size of a grabber and what it can do to the police chief, it can just take the roof off the pub and just pluck everybody out and eat them like hors d’oeuvres but it doesn’t because that’s not how it operates. It wants to reach in through the backdoor and pluck somebody out without them knowing that it was doing that. So we’ve overthought it.

BD: How did you pull off CGI when most American CGI looks like crap?

KL: Paddy Eason and Nvizible.

JW: Yeah, Paddy Eason who’s our visual effects supervisor is a genius.

KL: We had no money as well, really small budget.

JW: Basically, there’s two reasons I think. Well, there’s lots of reasons but the company’s called Nvizible. They came on board and really bought into the film and it became a labor of love. Also, I insisted that Nvizible took the sole credit for the visual effects because I feel with a lot of modern movies, you go down and you get to the visual effects credits, there’s 10 companies, maybe more. 1000s of people. You’ve got no sense of who did what effect so you watch a film like Clash of the Titans and you think the Pegasus is amazing and that other thing is absolute horseh*t. But you don’t know, did D-neg do the Pegasus? You don’t know.

KL But this is an Nvizible movie.

JW: So Nvizible takes the sole credit so if someone watches Grabbers and they like the monsters, they like Nvizible and they like Paddy Eason. I felt that was one of the things that made the effects look good in District 9, I don’t know if this is true or not, but that Image Engine got the entire job. So it takes on a pride thing for them that they want to show what they can do. The other reason the effects are so good is we’re just at a different point in time with digital effects. They’re just hitting a point where you can do them differently and they are extremely photorealistic. What clicked for me was watching the making of Moon. I thought GERTY was a model, a built thing. When I saw the shots where GERTY was CG, I just did not know. It never occurred to me. And also in District 9, some of the close-ups of the aliens I really did not know whether they made a rubber physical alien that was very realistic or if they’d done that via CG. It turned out to be CG. So you just think okay, we’re at a different sort of point, and I could get very technical about it. There’s reasons.

BD: Does keeping it dark and rainy help? But District 9 was all daylight.

JW: It’s all single point light. So District 9 is all sunlit from one point. It’s a very bright sun and that helps.

KL: Get those hard shadows.

JW: You get hard shadows so that’s a reason why it’s very effective and Grabbers, when the grabber leaps on his face, we use 50% prosthetics so he has an actual rubber thing on his head that’s flailing about of its own accord.

KL: And they’re pulling at real tentacles.

JW: And then we add the CG tentacles to tracking markers and they flail about in a complementary way with the tentacles that are already flailing about but they look more alive. So you’re just trying to pull the trick off like in Jurassic Park.

KL: Which still holds up fantastically and that was CG.

JW: Well, it was a mix. Look at the tyrannosaur through the window and it’s a model, then you pan around and in the same shot it’s been changed to a CG. If you’re constantly flipping the technique, your mind stops being able to break it down, to deconstruct it.

BD: Another reason CG sucks is they show it full frontal. They never showed a model head on, they obscured it with camera angles and such. You should present CGI the same way.

JW: I met with John Landis before we shot Grabbers. I wrote him a letter and said, “Will you be an executive producer on the film?” because he was in the UK for some reason. He met with me and that was one bit of advice he gave me was never show all of your monster and try and keep it as shadowed as possible. I thought that was actually pretty good advice but then he’s very clever about monster movies I think.

JW: One thing we did which I don’t know if many films do is they presented the CG back to us and then we recut the film. Quite often the shots were a lot longer and what we were doing, and what I hope we’ve achieved, I don’t think we’ve fully achieved it. I think we’ve 98% or 95% achieved it, is showing it for long enough that you’re still believing it, it’s still real and then we’re away. So we’ve given you long enough to see it so it doesn’t feel choppy or too fast but not long enough for you to go, “Oh hold on, I can see how it was done.” For me there’s four shots that you can see how it was done. It does fall apart but the majority of it you can’t.

KL: At some point you have to stop teasing the audience. You do have to deliver so I think that we do that.

JW: It’s interesting because a lot of people think there’s a lot of the monster in the second half. There’s actually not. There’s actually compared to most films very, very few shots. It’s sort of a sleight of hand thing. We make you feel like you’re seeing the monster a lot when you’re actually not hardly seeing it at all. I’d like to take that forward when I do a big budget film to still do that. I say if, when.

JW: I think we’ve been a bit stupid as well because we’ve talked about our references too much. So people are going, “Oh, it’s Tremors” but it’s not really. It’s just influenced by those films.

KL: And the reason for drawing comparison to Tremors is because you can’t really call Tremors a horror film. It’s a monster movie and Grabbers is the same thing. That’s where we’re getting it from.

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Black Rock (review) sold to LD Entertainment immediately following its first midnight screening in the Sundance Film Festival’s Park City at Midnight Category.

Directed by Katie Aselton, the film stars Aselton, Lake Bell and Kate Bosworth as three friends on a camping trip who run afoul of three hunters who turn violent. It becomes a gritty fight to survive in the woods.

By Thursday of Sundance, Aselton was as exhausted as we were. She even offered to have a snuggle session instead of an interview, but I wasn’t smooth enough to take her up on it so I just went with a normal interview. Some spoilers follow in our talk, but they’re good spoilers about violence and nudity! Q: For a long time, man has been the most dangerous game. Is woman taking over as the most dangerous game?

KA: I think women secretly have always been the most dangerous, the most dangerous beasts. We’re fierce. Men have it all on the outside. We’ve got some fierceness on the inside. When push comes to shove, I think we can take someone down pretty quickly.

Q: Were you a fan of that story in all its incarnations?

KA: I loved The Most Dangerous Game. I remember I read it my freshman year in high school and was obsessed with it. It was I think our very first assignment in English the very first day of school freshman year. I love that story. It’s amazing. I love survival stories. I love when humans are sort of forced to go primal. It’s exciting.

Q: Kate Bosworth’s character jokes that she has cancer but then she’s just messing with her friends. Did you ever consider really giving her cancer so she’d have nothing to lose when it really went down?

KA: No, that just felt a little melodramatic for me. I liked the idea, because that’s what friends do. You f*** with each other. She knew how to get her friends on board and she knew, as ultimately happened in the movie, when push comes to shove, the petty stuff falls away which is what she was sort of initially doing. I didn’t want anybody to have nothing to lose. I wanted everyone to have everything to lose.

Q: In a movie like this these days, do you have to explain there’s no cell phone reception?

KA: I think you do. I really do. It’s really frustrating. Cell phones have killed our sense of isolation, but in the state of Maine it’s very possible that you have no cell reception. Although I will say ironically, when we were shooting on the mainland, we had horrible cell reception and we would take a 30 minute boat ride out to the island where we were shooting, and I had 3G. Isn’t that weird? I could watch movies on my phone.

Q: It’s an easy enough thing in one line, because everyone is thinking it now.

KA: And Lake handled it so effortlessly. It was such an easy throwaway.

Q: In old movies they still had to have someone cut the phone lines.

KA: Yeah, exactly. For us it was did the phone get water on it in the boat? What exactly happens? Where are the other cell phones? It’s a stupid thing to have to overcome but you do because then you’re like, “Why didn’t you just call someone?”

Q: Thank you for the body warmth scene with you and Lake Bell. Is a little nudity a must in horror movies?

KA: Yeah, that’s the thing we were sort of playing with. There are certain thriller genre rules that we followed but I made sure to do them on my terms. So yes, I show boobs but I do it in my way and a way that I feel comfortable with.

Q: And you don’t expect it in a movie with A-list cast because they all have contracts.

KA: No, Lake was totally down for it which was great. She’s like, “I’ll go as far you will. You’re with me. Let’s just do it together.”

Q: Did you have any mixed feelings about making soldiers with PTSD the villains?

KA: I did. I was actually really concerned that we did it right and for me it wasn’t that they all had PTSD. It was that I think that one guy really was damaged emotionally, but the loyalty, the fierce loyalty between those guys bonds them together and gels them so tightly that Alex, played by Anslem Richardson, goes along with it because, you know, you follow your seniors. That’s what you do. So for me, I was really inspired by Restrepo and the guys in Restrepo. There was one in particular who had the little wool beanie cap and he looked a lot like Jay Paulson. He was like this wirey thin boy who leaves a boy, a video game playing boy who’s shy and sweet and comes back from that experience a changed human being. He’s not a boy anymore and he’s not a man and he’s just sort of vacant in the face and he’s not okay. That really affected me a lot because it was important for me that these guys were not just random psychopaths, that there was a reason why they were doing what they were doing. And the fact that they were this so tightly knit tribe of boys, when something happens to one of them it really sets the other one off. That is how he knows how to handle things now.

Q: I would even imagine the motivation for the guy who attacks you first is some form of PTSD.

KA: Yeah, you know, I mean these guys were back for 18 days. The fact of the matter is, not to get super political or opinionated about the whole thing, but we bring our boys home and we dump ‘em. We don’t do anything for them so the fact that their backstory for these guys is their way of assimilating back into social culture was to get a weekend away just the three of us and be alone. It’s too much to be back in society right now, elt’s all go on a weekend. But yeah, it’s not surprising that their triggers are really quick.

Q: Was shooting on the island like a real camping trip?

KA: Well, we didn’t shoot the whole movie on an island. We used a lot of the mainland which that coast is so beautiful.

Q: But out in the woods.

KA: Out in the woods, yeah, Lake and Kate and I peed in the woods. That’s just what you do.

Q: And the night shoots?

KA: Those were tricky. It was physically and emotionally a very demanding film. The nights were cold and dark and wet and you’re in the woods. The scene where we’re crawling through the woods when we’re looking for our boat, Kate was in the lead and we’re in the woods. She had no idea where she was putting her hand down. It was dark and creepy and disgusting, so they were pretty brave.

Q: How cold was it?

KA: The night we shot the water scene, the water temperature was 45 degrees. The air temperature was 43. It was cold.

Q: When you’re shivering after that, was that more acting or was it real?

KA: Oh no, it was freezing. It was freezing cold. That month of June, I have no idea what happened. The whole spring last year in Maine was so cold. We went to go location scout in April and there was a blizzard. In April. It was like April 4 and we got a foot of snow. So all of our pictures of location scouting, everything was covered with snow. I was like, “I’m pretty sure I remember this being a beach but I don’t know if there’s rocks under it. I think it’s a beach.” So then we got there in May and it rained the entire time while we were in preproduction. June 1 our first day of shooting the sun came out, thank God, but it didn’t get any warmer. We were freezing. What we’d set aside for wardrobe didn’t work for us at all. We were frigidly cold. It was crazy. June was freezing and then July, as soon as we left, it was like 80 degrees every day.

Q: The guys still are physically muscle-wise stronger so you have to work really hard to win. Is that another frustrating cliché? It’s a good thing to empower women that they can beat up guys, but sometimes unrealistic when these skinny girls take out musclemen.

KA: Yeah, and I think what we showed is you really kind of couldn’t kick a guy’s ass. The first death was by chance. The second one was against an injured guy and the third one was two against one and barely, barely, barely we pulled that one out. For me it was really playing with the idea of who wants to live more. I think that was the girls in this case.

Q: Congratulations on the sale.

KA: Thank you. We’re taking over the world.

Q: What kind of release are they giving you?

KA: You know, I haven’t sat down with them and really hashed out all the details but I know they love the film and are really behind it and are excited for a lot of people to see it.

Q: Have you gotten to see anything else here?

KA: I just saw California Solo last night. I saw Safety Not Guaranteed. Now that things are starting to slow down is when I get to see some movies which is great. What’s really fun is that there are a lot of people that were here in 2010 when I was here with Freebie back with their next film. It’s like we’re in the same class.

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The long awaited new Don Coscarelli movie John Dies at the End (review) premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in the Park City at Midnight category.

In the adaptation from the director of Phantasm and Bubba Ho-Tep, “It’s a drug that promises an out-of-body experience with each hit. On the street they call it Soy Sauce, and users drift across time and dimensions. But some who come back are no longer human. Suddenly a silent otherworldly invasion is underway, and mankind needs a hero. What it gets instead is John and David, a pair of college dropouts who can barely hold down jobs. Can these two stop the oncoming horror in time to save humanity? No. No, they can’t.”

This film had a little help from Hollywood A-lister Paul Giamatti, who produced and plays a role in the film. He wanted to work with Coscarelli on Bubba Nosferatu, the aborted Bubba Ho-Tep sequel, so offered his services when Coscarelli read the David Wong book John Dies at the End. “Yeah, he wisely just said, ‘Let’s forget it. It’s too difficult. There’s too many tricky things.’” Giamatti said of ‘Nosferatu’. “He said, ‘I think I have another idea. I read this book and I’m working on a script on it and I’ll get it to you when I’m done’ and it was this movie. He sent me that and I thought it was fantastic and he seemed to think it would be easier to do than ‘Bubba Nosferatu.’”

Giamatti and Coscarelli laughed at the foolish thought that ‘John Dies’ could be an easier film. The complex story includes monsters, time travel, alternate dimensions and a drug called Soy Sauce. It is also a horror comedy, always a tricky tone.

“It’s got a lot of really strange stuff going on,” Coscarelli said. “Wwe were talking earlier about finding the right tone was probably the most absolutely difficult and frightening part of making the movie because we wanted to maintain the humor that’s in the book, but at the same time we never really wanted to go too camp so you wanted to have there be genuine threat from the characters, that they were terrified or whatever. Watching the movie last night, I think some of the most satisfying scenes to me were the way that Chase Williamson who played Dave, his bafflement as the story unfolds, he’s trying to figure out what’s going on as things just get weirder and weirder and weirder. He reacts very seriously to a lot but he does have some deadpan moments that I find really funny. He’s a really nice guy and good actors. You need to find actors like I was noticing last night that Glynn Turman who played the detective in the movie, he played it really dead ahead and he was very serious. Yet he’s got some of the funniest moments. It’s a very challenging part of making the thing.”

David Wong is the hero of the story. It is a pseudonym he uses to make himself harder to find. Williamson read the book as soon as he got the script. “I read the script and I was just like, ‘This is real?’” Williamson remembered. “It was everything I ever wanted in my life to be able to play pretend in the confines of. It was awesome because I’ve done theater my whole life and I’ve been a huge horror fan and I’ve never been able to merge acting and genre stuff because there aren’t a whole lot of horror theater pieces. Being able to do it was like oh God, super fun.”

Rob Mayes plays the title character, John, who may or may not die in the end as promised. He also became a fan of the Wong novel. “I literally got it on my iPad the day that I heard that it was a book and it has become one of my favorites,” Mayes said.

Wong’s book is filled with many outlandish monsters that Coscarelli got to put on screen. Even though they are original creations, they recall old school monsters because Coscarelli filmed them the old fashioned way.

“Coming from old school, there’s nothing like a good rubber monster,” Coscarelli said. “There’s nothing more exciting than watching a quality actor battling with a rubber prosthetic either. I’ll tell you that Johnny Depp/Tim Burton movie ‘Ed Wood’, it may be the greatest scene in movie history with Martin Landau battling that fake octopus. That’s where I come from. When I started making movies there was no digital. You had to do it with tape and paperclips. It’s always the natural way. I know too the more you can do it practically, the actors have something they can really relate to. Yeah, the power in digital is fantastic. The trick is to not overuse it. So we did a lot of a mixed collage of effects. Like the meat moving across the floor, we decided to do it all practical just with fishing line and pull the stuff and go in with digital and take out the fishing line.”

One of the film’s most memorable creatures is a meat monster who Dave and John bust early in the film. That was a guy in a suit. “It was awesome,” Williamson said. “They had to lube him up all the time. I had sausage wrapped around my neck for a while. I like the moustache bat a lot.”

The moment that brings down the house is when the meat monster takes a cell phone call. “The fellow who played the meat monster, he’s never been in a movie before,” Coscarelli said. “I don’t know if that was direction or if he did that on his own. You know, whenever anybody takes a cell phone call, they kind of turn away from the other people. It’s funny the audience response to that. It wasn’t meant to be a joke but they just love it.”

Mayes had a hard time choosing a favorite ‘John Dies’ monster. “My favorite monster in the film, can we consider perhaps Largeman a monster?” Mayes asked. “I do. Daniel Roebuck’s character who’s like, ‘We’re so happy you are here.’ He’s terrifying. Meat Monster’s super, super cool. You know actually, one of my favorite parts now that I’m thinking back to it is Angus Scrimm, when he’s like, ‘Your mother writes on a wall with her own sh**.’ That was terrifying for me.”

One of our favorite monster actors, Doug Jones, actually appears in the movie without makeup or prosthetics on. “The thing was, he was such a strange character from the book,” Coscarelli said. “In the book they had described him as wearing all kinds of funny clothes and women’s clothes. I just couldn’t see that working and I thought, ‘I need to get a really unique actor.’ One of the guys who was working on the movie, we’d talked to a couple of different people. We even talked to Jeffrey Combs but he was unavailable, because I always like his work. Then somebody said, ‘What about the guy who played Abe Sapien?’ We were just like, ‘Oh, yes!’ I met Doug and he is the absolute nicest gentleman in the world. There’s big love as he likes to say. He’s a mime and if you see him, watch how he acts, when he’s talking about that thread.”

When Dave gets injected with Soy Sauce, the supernatural world to which he’s already accustomed spirals totally out of control. Coscarelli found Wong a kindred spirit in the kind of material he wrote.

“In senses of unreality, really having it be strange and getting to stranger places,” Coscarelli said. “Yeah, absolutely but you can also see that there are similarities. I think one of the most interesting comments I got was from the book’s author, David Wong, actually it was from his wife telling me how he had grown up with ‘Phantasm’ and he actually sees ‘John Dies’ as being a parallel story. I don’t exactly get it myself but he really sees them being parallel stories. Maybe that’s why I was reading his book and going, ‘Oh, this reminds me of ‘Phantasm’ a little.’ But stranger and cooler and better in some respect.”

For the actors it was like making a different movie every day. “The funniest thing is I’d come home from work, and my roommates would be like, ‘So, how was work today? What did you shoot?’” Mayes said. “I was like, ‘Yeah, the flying moustache. Then we had to beat up Korrok. Then this girl is blown up into snakes.’ He’s like, ‘I cannot wait to see this movie because it sounds like a different movie every single day. It was crazy because it was like we’d do this scene, now we’re going to do this scene, oh my God, I totally forgot about that scene. And this scene, where does this scene fit? So making the movie you feel completely discombobulated, I did at least. I wouldn’t have been able to get through it without Don’s help but I think part of that kind of lends itself to the film. As an audience member you kind of feel as though you’re under the soy sauce effects. You’ve kind of ingested this whether you want to or not. You’re going for the trip. That’s how I felt when I was filming.”

Aside from his role as producer, Giamatti really wanted to be in a Don Coscarelli movie too. He played the role of Arnie, a man who comes to Dave for some supernatural help. It’s a small role but the only one Giamatti felt he could play. The role of magician Marconi was already taken by Clancy Brown.

“I don’t really think I would’ve been right for Marconi and I really didn’t care,” Giamatti said. “I was like this is great and I just want to be in it. I thought this’ll be fun, sure. I think he got a far better guy, the right guy for Marconi.”

Finding the leads took a lot of auditions to land on the right combination of young actors. “We both had to come in and read a bunch of times and had to kind of work for it and hope for the best,” Williamson said. “I was in 3 or 4 times I think, not counting when [Mayes] was there because I got cast before they started casting John. So I came back for the callbacks and read with some people. Before that I’d been in three or four times.”

If day to day filming was confusing, imagine auditioning with a single scene out of context. “The way that the whole process evolved was so cool because I didn’t have a script,” Mayes said. “I had one scene that didn’t make any sense to me, the scene where I was in the truck and I get electrocuted by the dog and I come back to life. I was like, ‘I don’t know what’s going on. Let’s just go for it.’ I go in the room and they’re like, ‘Do you have any questions?’ I’m like, ‘Yeah! What the f*** is going on, man? I don’t know what’s going on.’ Just do it. So we did it and it was like whatever. Then I get the script and I read the script and I’m like oh my God. Then I meet this kid and then Don. Then I hear that Paul Giamatti’s producing it and in the movie and Clancy Brown. I was stoked from day one. When I read the script I was like, ‘Whatever this is it’s going to be great.’ Then finding out these little surprises along the way.”

Coscarelli and Giamatti still hope to do a ‘Bubba’ movie together. Giamatti wants to play Col. Parker but they have to find a new Elvis.

“‘Bubba Nosferatu’ has challenges in that you need Elvis to play both young and old,” Coscarelli said. “It’s a tricky actor to play that. You’d need to find a guy in his late 30s who could play Elvis at 42 and also at like 75 which is a real challenge. When Bruce Campbell declined to participate it really threw us into disarray and we just couldn’t solve that.”

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Bloody Disgusting stringer Fred Topel caught up with Lotz, along with the film’s director, Nicholas McCarthy, to talk about the supernatural haunter that was acquired by IFC Films. Like many horror films, ‘The Pact’ gave Lotz a juicy role to play where she gets to kick ass and fight back, but also show the layers of Annie’s past troubles. “I love it,” Lotz said at Sundance. “It’s really fun. The “Death Valley” character’s the total opposite. She’s much more bubbly and happy but she’s still a ferocious ass kicker. Annie is so dark and complicated and brooding. It was something different than I’ve ever had a chance to play. She’s so complicated and dark. It’s like she always has to be balancing on this tightrope of vulnerability and strength. She goes through so much in the movie. She’s just a badass so that’s why I was like I want to play this girl. I always end up a little bit more like my characters when I’m doing the filming. Annie’s a no bullsh*t, and some people might call her a bitch, but she just doesn’t take any sh*t. She’s really tough. Even though she’s very emotionally guarded, I had to kind of shake that off a couple weeks after. It took me a little bit.”

Writer/director Nicholas McCarthy has been a Sundance veteran with short films. ‘The Pact’ is his first feature. His timing is good, as the paranormal entities that manipulate Annie in the house are en vogue these days. McCarthy traces the paranormal movement back further than the ‘Paranormal Activity’ franchise.

“I think something happened with horror in the ‘90s,” McCarthy said. “The genre kind of split in two. I think the split was between this kind of legacy of the slasher film which ‘Silence of the Lambs’ was kind of like the up market slasher movie. Slashers became two kinds of films that became either upmarket or television or they became the really rough kind of, I guess a lot of these filmmakers are saying retro ‘70s movies. ‘Hostel’ is a perfect example and that’s kind of horror at the hands of another, slasher film. The other kind of movie is the ghost story. I think it was the popularity of ‘The Sixth Sense’ but also for the genre it was the Asian horror films, ‘The Ring’ and ‘Ju-On’. This kind of idea of ghosts becoming actually legitimately frightening for an audience, they hadn’t really found a cinematic language that was new until those films in the ‘90s, until ‘The Sixth Sense’, until ‘Ju-On’ and ‘The Ring’. Those ides of portraying these spirits I think started in the ‘90s with the Asian films, which I think kind of reinvented a certain language for these ghost story movies. It just keeps moving forward and people want to play with that.”

Annie becomes a sort of spiritual MacGyver, making her own Ouija board on the floor at one point. That’s all it takes to make the spirits communicate with her. “We used magnets and we had it on the actual floor and then we had another matching floorboard to put over it that they could have magnets to slide underneath it,” Lotz said. “That’s tricky. Working with those magnets was tricky, getting it to slide to the right areas. That was a fun scene though. That first moment when it moves, I remember doing it and I was so scared. I would never do Ouija boards as a kid. I refused to because I was like I’m not trying to knock on Satan’s door, all right? Those ghosts, I don’t want to talk to them. I don’t need to do that. I didn’t want to open any doors, so the movie kind of explored that fear for me.”

For McCarthy, he wasn’t trying to be part of any movement. ‘The Pact’ represents what he finds scary. “I’m a huge horror fan. I was not ever consciously trying to tell a ghost story,” McCarthy said. “I just wanted to tell a story and I’ve always found ghosts scary, as anybody has found ghosts scary. When it came to actually writing it, there were a couple movies I did go back and look at. One is ‘Shutter’, the Thai film which I’m a big fan of and I shamelessly rip off one scene in my movie from. Not the American remake but the original Thai film. The other movie that I looked at was ‘The Haunting’ which is the classic 1963 Robert Wise film that is all about not showing things. Why they’re popular again, the answer is because they’re scary. That sort of idea of a person that is in the room that is invisible is a frightening idea that is written in childhood, that something may touch you at any time. It’s that thing that happens when you wake up in the middle of the night and you think someone’s in your apartment, you think someone’s in your house.”

‘The Pact’ becomes a different sort of horror film in the third act. Without spoiling the twist, Lotz revealed how intense the filming got for her. “It was as intense as it looked,” she said. “That kicked my ass. The closet scene killed me. The wires that they were wrapped around my wrists and ankles were real wires. You’re really struggling and the hair thing was real. We shot it from the front of the closet, behind the closet, above the closet and on multiple days I had to be in that ‘I’m about to die’ terrified state. It was really exhausting.”

Actually, the moment most likely to creep audiences out is a simple scene where a picture frame shatters, and Annie gets a shard of glass stuck in her bare foot. “You know what, that was one of my managers’ too,” Lotz said. “He was like, ‘Oh my God, I can’t watch that.’ I was like it’s just glass. It’s play pretend.”

Being a low budget film, McCarthy and Lotz had to shoot that old school. “Yeah, that was a real piece of glass by the way,” McCarthy said. “That was Caity’s foot. We were so low budget, what we actually did was just had the makeup girl paint a little cut. The props people, I was like, ‘Okay, so we’re going to shatter this sugar glass on the floor right?’ They were like, ‘We don’t have any sugar glass.’ So that was real glass so we were very careful that Caity wouldn’t sit on it. Then she took a little piece and stuck it to her foot.”

Lotz didn’t draw real blood, but she poked the point of the glass in far enough to make it look real. “I had to jam it in my foot, put the fake blood and push it in so it looked like it was in there good and pull it out,” she said. “I didn’t have to bust out the knife and cut open my foot. I could fake it enough.”

‘The Pact’ began as a short film that played the Sundance Film Festival last year. McCarthy has been making films since he was 10 using a super 8 camera. His comedy shorts have played the festival too. ‘The Pact’ short is essentially the first 6-7 minutes of the feature film.

“The short is kind of like a moody character piece that is more about this idea of this woman believing in ghosts rather than the straight genre movie that this is,” McCarthy said. “I didn’t make that short as a trailer for a feature. It was only when I left Sundance and I met with this company that were like, ‘We love your movie. We want to make a feature out of it’ that I started to think about what would this movie be if this was the first scene?”

That short then impacts Lotz’s performance, because it becomes the backstory to Annie’s relationship with her sister. “I did [watch it] which was interesting because it’s very different,” Lotz said. “With the short I loved the maturity of it. Everything is very classic and it’s respectful. It’s not like run and jump to the scary part. It’s a slow burning terror. You have to just watch it and then release it completely because you don’t want to recreate anything. You want it to be original and do your thing. So I just kind of would let that go.”

Reviews from Sundance were divided, and McCarthy avoided Googling reviews of his own movie. He expects horror fans to be picky though.

“Horror fans are the ones that care the most about movies because they know how films are made,” he said. “They know how they’re constructed. They know special effects. They know how tension is built and they take the genre very, very personally. I’m happy to be in that space. In a way, I’m happy to piss people off as much as delight people who loved the movie.”

McCarthy relates, because he knows the stakes are higher when evaluating a horror film. “I kind of identify with it because as a horror fan versus any other genre, you’re looking for Jesus every time you watch a f***ing horror movie. Seriously, horror movies and any kind of movies that matter are the ones that last in some way. I can’t say whether mine will or not but the fact that there seems to be this divided opinion about it is this weird comfort for me, because of course I want to be loved and I want people to like the film, but the fact that the enthusiasm of people walking up to me and talking about the film and the enthusiasm of the screams inside the theater versus the people that are like, ‘I hate this movie,’ it means that there’s something there. There are so many horror films that are right there in the middle, that are like yeah, it’s this thing that we’ve seen before a hundred million times. So I’m in a way weirdly proud to be there. Seriously, I do the same thing with horror films.”

The Sundance premiere was a good experience for McCarthy though. “When we premiered it was such a weird thing because half the f***ing place was filled with buyers. We kept them in their seats which is more than a lot of the movies. That’s why in a way I’m looking forward to seeing the film here this week. I think it’ll be a fairer assessment in a way of the strengths and weaknesses of the movie, versus that first not. It’s so loaded with anticipation, so loaded with people who are there to form an opinion, and they have every right to, whether from a sales perspective, as a journalist or from just a cast and crew. So I’m looking forward to seeing it with an audience because they’ll actually be like, ‘Let’s go see this horror movie.’”

For Lotz, horror makes her look away. Even on her own show, she gets squeamish. “I just get so grossed out,” she said. “I get so grossed out with the gore. On my MTV show we were so gory but it was a comedy so it kind of made it a little bit easier. But I get scared. I get so scared and I hate being scared.”

As for “Death Valley” season two, Lotz needs your help to get MTV on board. “If you want to see it back, let MTV know. Hit up Twitter, hit up Facebook, hit up MTV, do shoutouts. MTV knows it’s a good show. I think they’re just trying to figure out. I mean, it’s so different. It’s a horror comedy on MTV. It’s nothing like anything that they have so I think they don’t know what to do with it.”

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One of the Sundance films I was personally most excited to see was Black Rock, Katie Aselton’s survival horror tale that followed three childhood friends as they set aside their personal issues and reunite for a girls’ weekend on a remote island off the coast of Maine. One wrong move turns their weekend getaway into a deadly fight for survival.

Written and produced by the Mumblecore kings known as the Duplass brothers, who burst onto the scene with their Sundance entry Baghead, I expected a bit more. Here’s what Ryan Daley had to say:

“There’s plenty of nail-biting tension in ‘Black Rock’, but that tension fades with every stupid decision the characters make, and audience frustration eventually builds to the bursting point. It‘s one of those movies that makes you want to yell at the screen.”

Click the title above for the entire review. Keep up with all of our Sundance coverage here. Watch for interviews this coming week!

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One of the Park City at Midnight titles Ryan Daley missed out on was Don Coscarelli’s (Phantasm, Bubba Ho-Tep) incredibly bizarre and entertaining John Dies at the End, which we now have reviewed courtesy of Fred Topel.

“‘John Dies at the End’ is a wonderful irreverent horror movie. The great thing about irreverence is I think you have to have reverence before you can remove it. Don Coscarelli celebrates his and our love of monsters and cataclysm by reframing their cinematic power.”

You’ll find his full review by clicking the title above. We’ll bring you distro news as soon as it’s announced.

“It’s a drug that promises an out-of-body experience with each hit. On the street they call it Soy Sauce, and users drift across time and dimensions. But some who come back are no longer human. Suddenly a silent otherworldly invasion is underway, and mankind needs a hero. What it gets instead is John and David, a pair of college dropouts who can barely hold down jobs. Can these two stop the oncoming horror in time to save humanity? No. No, they can’t.”

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Nicolas McCarthy’s The Pact, which debuted at Sundance as a short some time ago, had its feature length premiere at Sundance last week and was just acquired by IFC Midnight.

According to IFC’s Press Release, “IFC Midnight announced today from the 2012 SundanceFilm Festival that the company is acquiring North American rights, to writer-director Nicholas McCarthy’s THE PACT. The film, which premiered in the festival’s Midnight section on January 20, stars Caity Lotz, Casper Van Dien, Haley Hudson, Kathleen Rose Perkins, Sam Ball, and Agnes Bruckner. The film was produced by Preferred Content’s Ross M. Dinerstein, and executive produced by Jamie Carmichael at Content, as part of a new multi-film financing deal between Preferred Content and Content Film.”

Hit the jump for a clip!

Agnes Bruckner (Venom, Vacancy 2, The Woods, Kill Theory), Sam Ball (“The Event”), Haley Hudson (“Ghost Whisperer”, Killer Pad) and Kathleen Rose Perkins (“Lie to Me,” “Trust Me”) and Casper Van Dien also star in the ghost story said to be in the tradition of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, Dario Argento’s Suspiria and Hideo Nakata’s Ringu, “as a woman struggles to come to grips with her past in the wake of her mother’s death, an unsettling presence emerges in her childhood home.”

Keep up with all Sundance news!

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Let this be a lesson. One that encourages you to pursue your dreams, but to avoid Dick Clark’s in the Salt Lake City Airport while doing so.

I’m sure you Bloody-Disgusting readers are as caught up as you need to be on what V/H/S is. My interviews with seven of the filmmakers were all published last week, leading many of you to wonder aloud, “how many people directed this d*mn thing?” And, “Does Joe Swanberg play Dexter?” If you’re not familiar with the film, feel free to click on that red title and learn all about it.

And then hit the jump for the epic story that unfolded because of it. So while many of you have probably heard that V/H/S premiered at the Sundance Film Festival over the weekend. The first midnight screening was packed and the reception – from my point of view as a twitter voyeur in Los Angeles – was overwhelmingly enthusiastic. Subsequent screenings went equally well. Yes, someone did pass out at one of them. Some people have questioned the veracity of the event, but I know many of the parties involved and can tell you that it wasn’t staged. And, as Simon Barrett put it, the intensity of the film itself was a “quaternary” factor. The dude was tired, hungry and at a high altitude. The film being intense was just the cherry on top.

Zak Zeman, Roxanne Benjamin, Brad Miska and Simon Barrett in more innocent times.

News broke in the middle of the night that Magnolia Films had acquired V/H/S, the winners of a bidding war with several other suitors. Per The Hollywood Reporter, “Magnolia Pictures is acquiring North American rights to the horror film V/H/S for slightly more than $1 million after coming out on top in a late-night bidding war that involved three prospective buyers, according to sources. The film, which had its premiere in Sundance’s Park City at Midnight section on Sunday, will be given a pre-theatrical video-on-demand release as part of Magnolia’s Ultra VOD program and it will also receive a significant release in theaters after the 30-day VOD window. Sources said that rights to the film in several foreign territories are in play, with offers on the table from potential buyers. V/H/S is the first horror title to be acquired at the 2012 festival. Several distributors had expressed interest in the found-footage-within-found-footage creeper.”

But did you know that the deal was closed while two of the producers were in the hospital? Throwing up buckets full of bile? Rocking high temperatures and hallucinating? But on their cell phones anyway? Yep! That’s kind of where Dick Clark’s figures into all of this.

Earlier in the day producers Brad Miska, Roxanne Benjamin and Zak Zeman (along with Mr. Miska’s better half, Andrea) were unwinding in the airport eatery, likely exhausted from (and elated by) the fest. It was around this time this fateful tweet caught my eyes.

@BradMiska “Dick Clark’s with @roxanne73 lots of drinks on this table !! pic.twitter.com/at9Kf7ig”

Several hours later, upon their arrival in LA, this hit my feed.

@Roxanne73 “Landed. Got bags. Got to car. Puked next to car. Ahhhh, that LA air. I blame @bradmiska and @zakzeezy for their restaurant choices”

Shortly afterwards – @BradMiska “Joining @roxanne73 in hospital. Thanks dick Clark’s cafe”.

I kind of thought this was a joke. I even thought it was a joke that Roxanne was in the hospital. I thought that, perhaps in this case, “hospital” was a euphemism for “indigestion”. That is until Brad texted me that he was actually on the way to the hospital. For all the complaining he does online about food trucks, he doesn’t strike me as being a hypochondriac or overly dramatic, so I figured it was legit serious bad business. Then Andrea informed me that he was literally writhing on the floor of the hospital in pain. Sh*t!

Once I knew he was feeling at least a little better, I went to sleep. I woke up at 6AM to the wonderful news that V/H/S had indeed been sold. I figured the ink was already dry on this thing by the time they had even left for the airport and that it was simply a delayed announcement. How could any back and forth happen on the deal with so many parties out of commission?*

Here’s how.

Roxanne Benjamin as photographed by Simon Barrett.

After electrolytes were restored, admissions were discharged and (reasonably lucid) consciousness was achieved here’s how the rest of the morning played out.

@BradMiska “A night of celebration was ruined by the worst food poisoning ever, it was insane. Filled buckets”

@BradMiska “I still haven’t even seen the press release. I barely remember last night. I was in so much pain they pumped me full of morphine”

@BradMiska “I apparently was mumbling insane sh*t and was unresponsive to the doctors and @andreatumino”.

After some well earned ranting about the hospital system, Miska’s twitter feed concluded** with perhaps the most damning piece of evidence of all –

@BradMiska”Dick Clark’s at the airport in Utah poisoned @roxanne73 @zakzeezy and myself. All got chicken fingers, ‘cept @andreatumino who was fine.”

But the happy (and real) news is that a great horror anthology (my opinion after seeing a rough cut – and we are allowed to disagree around here) will be coming your way this fall. Courtesy of Magnolia, one of the only distributors around who doesn’t have their head in the sand.

Simon Barrett, Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Brad Miska, Zak Zeman and Glenn McQuaid

*Zak Zeman also had food poisoning but opted out of the hospital. Now I know never to f*ck with Zak.

**For dramatic purposes only. Everyone knows Brad’s twitter feed never really “concludes”.

The post [Sundance ’12]: ‘V/H/S’ Sells To Magnolia, Three Of The Film’s Producers Poisoned! appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Rodrigo Cortes’ Red Lights, the supernatural thriller starring Sigourney Weaver, Robert De Niro, and Cillian Murphy, had its world premiere last week at the still ongoing Sundance Film Festival. The film also sold to Millenium entertainment last night.

While some reviews are negative, including Ryan Daley’s take here, there’s still quite a bit of buzz for the project.

Now we have a Spanish language trailer for the film, which actually looks pretty cool but doesn’t clear much up. Even though I took Spanish in both high school and college, I apparently can’t speak a word.

In the film, “ De Niro stars as Simon Silver, a legendary psychic, perhaps the most famously gifted of all time, who returns after thirty years of mysterious absence to become the world’s greatest challenge to orthodox science and professional skeptics. Meanwhile, paranormal fraud investigator Tom (Cillian Murphy) begins to develop a dense obsession Silver, whose magnetism is enhanced dangerously with each new manifestation of inexplicable phenomena.”

Hit the jump for the Spanish Trailer!

The post [Sundance ’12]: Spanish Language Trailer For ‘Red Lights’ Is More Confusing Than ‘Inception’! At Least If You Don’t Speak Spanish! appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Rodrigo Cortes’ Red Lights, the supernatural thriller starring Sigourney Weaver, Robert De Niro, and Cillian Murphy, had its world premiere last week at the still ongoing Sundance Film Festival.

While word of mouth on the film was mixed, it seemed to have no problem selling to Millenium Entertainment.

Per Variety, “Millennium Entertainment has “Red Lights” in its sights, as CEO Bill Lee’s distribution company has closed a deal to acquire U.S. rights to Rodrigo Cortes’ paranormal thriller. Terms of the deal were not immediately disclosed.

‘We are thrilled with ‘Red Lights’ and excited to distribute the film,’ said Lee. ‘This definitely has theatrical potential and we plan to give it a standard theatrical platform release, with ancillaries coming 90-100 days later. We came to Sundance with the intention of buying ‘Red Lights’ if it was good, and we thought Rodrigo did a fabulous job with the film. UTA was teriffic to deal with, and we’re both thrilled and proud to distribute the film.’ ”

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Pegged as Waking Dead meets Tremors, with tentacles, Jon Wright directs the Irish horror comedy Grabbers. Richard Coyle, Ruth Bradley and Russell Tovey in the film that takes to “a sleepy Irish fishing village forced to fend off a blood-sucking sea creature.”

The film premiered at the ongoing Sundance Film Festival and now BD’s Ryan Daley writes in with his review. I’ve been hearing good things about the movie and while Daley liked it well enough, I hope I like it just a little bit more.

“I realize it sounds like I’m beefing with a completely enjoyable monster flick, and what’s my problem, right? Why not just leave it alone, let it be what it is? Because a monster movie can be both fun and scary. Don‘t get me wrong, I liked the hell out ‘Grabbers’, but if it had revealed its monster just a little less often, and been just a little more menacing in its approach, it could have transcended mere likeability on the way to horror greatness.”

Click here for the review.

The post [Sundance ’12] Review: ‘Grabbers’ Is A Fun Diversion That Ends Up Showing Too Much appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Playing the Sundance Film Festival this week is Red Lights, Rodrigo Cortes’ followup to Buried.

BD’s Ryan Daley writes in from the festival with his review and to say he didn’t care for the film would be putting it mildly.

“What’s most frustrating about Red Lights is that it’s one of those movies that seems like it’s going to get better at any given second. The performances are great; you can tell the entire cast believes in this thing. But ultimately, the movie serves as the perfect example of an excellent idea, poorly executed. Even the final twist is poorly conceived, packing far less of a punch than Cortes probably intended––sort of an “anti-payoff”, in the words of one colleague.”

In the film, “ De Niro stars as Simon Silver, a legendary psychic, perhaps the most famously gifted of all time, who returns after thirty years of mysterious absence to become the world’s greatest challenge to orthodox science and professional skeptics. Meanwhile, paranormal fraud investigator Tom (Cillian Murphy) begins to develop a dense obsession Silver, whose magnetism is enhanced dangerously with each new manifestation of inexplicable phenomena.”

Click here for the review.

The post [Sundance ’12] Review: ‘Red Lights’ Is A Misguided And Boring Waste Of Potential appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Rodrigo Cortes’ Red Lights, the supernatural thriller starring Sigourney Weaver, Robert De Niro, and Cillian Murphy, had its world premiere last week at the still ongoing Sundance Film Festival.

Word of mouth on the film is mixed, with Mr. Disgusting coming down on the side of not being a fan. A new clip from the film emerged today so you can now watch Elizabeth Olsen and Sigourney Weaver in a car scoping people, if that’s how you want to spend the next 90 seconds of your day.

“In the film, De Niro stars as Simon Silver, a legendary psychic, perhaps the most famously gifted of all time, who returns after thirty years of mysterious absence to become the world’s greatest challenge to orthodox science and professional skeptics.

Meanwhile, paranormal fraud investigator Tom (Murphy) begins to develop a dense obsession Silver, whose magnetism is enhanced dangerously with each new manifestation of inexplicable phenomena.”

Hit the jump for the clip!

The post [Sundance ’12]: Go On A Stakeout In This New ‘Red Lights’ Clip! appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Writer/Director Glenn McQuaid has been a part of the horror community for a long time but made his first big splash in 2008 with his Dominic Monaghan, Ron Perlman starring I Sell The Dead.

Now, as one of the directors of V/H/S – a film that breathes new life into the stagnant found footage genre – he stretches his wings outside of period horror comedy and into the more brutal slasher world.

In the film, “When a group of misfits is hired by an unknown third party to burglarize a desolate house and acquire a rare VHS tape, they discover more found footage than they bargained for.”

Hit the jump to check out the interview! I Sell The Dead was a horror comedy. Is that the tone you normally go for or was that an exception for you?

“I don’t know if I have a particular tone that I want to chisel out for myself. Truthfully I think each project dictates its own sense of style. I’m probably not the biggest slasher fan in the world.”.

Did that grow organically out of your work in shorts? How did you put it together?

“I made a short film called The Resurrection Apprentice that was about two or three years before I Sell The Dead. It was about a young grave robber’s first night on the job of excavating corpses. That territory and that world, I did a lot of reading on “Burke And Hare” while doing that film and it kind of sparked my interest. I decided to create a feature script based on the characters of Willie Grimes and Arthur Blake. The short was more of a somber drama, and I turned it around a little bit with I Sell The Dead I wanted to get a few more laughs and a few more jumps in there instead. It wound up being a much broader project. Definitely inspired by the likes of Young Frankenstein’ more than anything else.”

You mention Burke And Hare, I know John Landis’ film was held up before release. Were you aware that he was doing the film before you started I Sell The Dead?

“No, I wasn’t aware at all until I saw the trailer. I haven’t seen the movie at all. I’m a big fan of John Landis though so I need to get around to it. But no, when we were making ‘I Sell The Dead’ it seemed like no one had really tapped into the grave robber genre for quite some time. It seemed ripe for pillaging.”

And you beat him to it!

“There’s that!”

V/H/S. How did you get involved?

“Roxanne Benjamin sent me an email inviting me to submit a treatment. I was kind of vague on what the project was, I just knew it had to be some kind of found-footage idea. They were looking for a slasher segment and had a rough one-page treatment and I took that and ran with it”.

Yours is one of the few shorts that takes place primarily outdoors. How was shooting on location?

“We shot it up at Woodstock, on Larry Fessenden’s farm actually. I’m a good friend of Larry’s so when it came to shooting I knew we could get up there and get into the woods and the river and so on. I think it was originally a two and a half, three day shoot. I went up and filmed a bunch of stuff and brought it back. But then I felt some of it was a little stiff so we picked some stuff up in a more loose fashion. We had workshopped the characters and the scenes enough, so we gave the actors more room to improv.”

One of the things I like about V/H/S (opposed to other found footage movies) is that sh*t actually happens in it. Was that a mandate you were given?

“I think found footage has been around long enough that we’ve begun to realize that sh*t needs to happen and hit the fan. Also the fact that they’re all short segments it was important to [hit the ground running]. I always keep the audience in mind, and I can only speak for my own piece, I kind of wanted to uproot everything and let things get a bit surreal. I’m probably a bigger fan of found footage now than I was a year or two ago, for instance I think the Paranormal Activity movies are really creative. I think it’s a great way of getting stories out there on a smaller budget.”

What’s “Tales From Beyond The Pale” all about?

“It’s a series of audio dramas that I curate and produce. That’s kept myself and my partner Larry Fessenden busy the past year. It’s half hour audio dramas, so that’s always on the go and we’re figuring out how to get a second season of that rolling.”

Any other projects coming up?

“I’m messing around with Larry and a couple of other actors on a project called Roll Over And Die, which is a very very loose improv based workshop with me, a camera and a couple of actors. No one really knows what that project is yet, whether it’s a webisode or a short. But I just want to get out and keep shooting you know. I also have a bunch of scripts that are getting ready to go out.”

V/H/S premieres at the Sundance Film Festival as part of their Midnight Programming tonight, January 22nd.

The post [Sundance ’12]: ‘V/H/S’ Filmmaker Glenn McQuaid On Found Footage And ‘I Sell The Dead’ Vs. ‘Burke And Hare’ appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Nicolas McCarthy’s The Pact, which debuted at Sundance as a short some time ago, had its feature length premiere at Sundance just the other night.

Agnes Bruckner (Venom, Vacancy 2, The Woods, Kill Theory), Sam Ball (“The Event”), Haley Hudson (“Ghost Whisperer”, Killer Pad) and Kathleen Rose Perkins (“Lie to Me,” “Trust Me”) and Casper Van Dien also star in the ghost story said to be in the tradition of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, Dario Argento’s Suspiria and Hideo Nakata’s Ringu, “as a woman struggles to come to grips with her past in the wake of her mother’s death, an unsettling presence emerges in her childhood home.”

While word of mouth on the film is lukewarm, the clip below actually provides a fairly legit, if obvious scare. Hit the jump to check it out!

Keep up with all Sundance news!

The post [Sundance ’12]: Blink And You’ll Miss This Clip From ‘The Pact!’ appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Radio Silence, formerly known as “Chad, Matt and Rob”, have become YouTube sensations over the past few years with their clever, action (and visual effects) packed shorts. They’re also the writers and directors of one of the segments of V/H/S – a film that breathes new life into the stagnant found footage genre.

I recently sat down with the guys to discuss maintaining the interest of an online audience, how they found their voice as a collective, and what new projects await them after V/H/S.

In the film, “When a group of misfits is hired by an unknown third party to burglarize a desolate house and acquire a rare VHS tape, they discover more found footage than they bargained for.”

Hit the jump to check out the interview! Your shorts, they’re pretty pro-active in terms of narrative for found footage. The ball gets rolling quickly.

Tyler – “We’re really grateful to have our start in shorts, for many reasons. That form of storytelling has to be active all the time to keep people interested”.

Matt – “We talk about that a lot a lot. On the internet, if you lose someone for 10 seconds – you’re done. ‘F*ck this. I’m gonna go look at a cat’.”

Tyler – “So even if there’s a slower pace to a section of your film, you should still be delivering information fairly constantly.”

Matt – “On the internet, what a movie might have 10 minutes to do, you have to do in 5 seconds.”

Chad – “So we try and take that mentality and make something that isn’t totally hyperactive with all this thrashing music and a million cuts per second.”

Is there a common thread that kind of unites your aesthetic?

Justin – “We all love the same kind of movies. ‘The Goonies’ and ‘Indiana Jones’ and ‘Back To The Future’ and that’s something a lot of people making short form stuff don’t always have in common.”

Matt – “A lot of people doing shorts want to focus on sketch comedy. We wanted to do epic adventures and horror and sci-fi. A lot of stuff that doesn’t play on the internet in theory”.

Tyler – “It’s a desire to bring a fun, movie quality, experience to the computer.”

It’s hard enough for one person to find their creative voice, much less four people working together.

Matt – “I’m in my early 30’s and I don’t think I had any clue what that was until a year or two ago. You think it’s such a simple thing when you hear people say it, ‘of course’. But to really feel it or experience it is really different.”

Tyler – “ We all like the same stuff. If you were to project a movie on the wall here you would record the exact same reactions from all four of us at the exact same moments in the film. The intuition of the group is automatic when we’re working on something.”

Tyler – “There’s also enough differences in the little circles that overlap, in the Venn diagram, there’s enough space in those circles that isn’t overlapping as well.”

Matt – “I love that stuff because that’s when we get in the most arguments. ‘I don’t like that.’ ‘I don’t like that.’ Or, ‘I’ve already seen that’.”

Tyler – “There’s definitely a lot of checks and balances within the group itself that keep the creative process going. We’re not ‘yes’ people to each other.”

Tyler – “It’s also there on more of a technical level, Justin can speak more to the visual effects stuff but one of the huge things that has elevated all of these projects and has made them feel really cinematic is what happens in the visual effects. And none of us except for Justin has any f*cking clue how to do that.”

Tyler -“I come from a visual background, Matt comes from a writing background, Chad comes from a producing background. So there’s all this overlap in the actual process as well that allows us to be an efficient team”.

Matt – “With ‘V/H/S’ we didn’t script anything. We had a beat sheet. And then we found the location, walked through it with the beat sheet and kind of wrote the story in real time.”

Speaking of V/H/S did you approach the producers about it? Or did they come to you?

Matt – “We’d known them for a while. Especially Brad, he’s been so supportive. And he brought us in a couple times a while back and asked for ideas. And then nothing happened for a while and then he came to us very shortly before we were supposed to shoot.”

Matt – “We sent them like 5 ideas, they picked the one we liked the best already anyway. And we just worked on it with them a little bit and kind of melded it into something that was workable and just ran with it.

Chad – “We had no idea what was happening story-wise in the other segments.”

Matt – “Their big note was that they wanted something that was fun, active and action-ey. Something that was really upbeat.”

Chad – “And then the second stumbling block was the budget, because the treatment read like some big hollywood action movie and they we concerned we couldn’t pull it off for the price. But we assured them we could.”

And are you guys preparing other feature work after this?

Justin – “That’s the goal, yeah.”

Would that be in a similar aesthetic?

Justin – “Probably not.”

Tyler – “We love the docu-style, there’s something really visceral about it. Even when it’s used in conventional films. It can really suck a viewer in when used appropriately. But it’s kind of exhausting to solve all the problems that the found footage style presents.”

Matt – “In the horror found footage shorts we’ve done, it’s been an affordable way to work out of our own pockets. Which is a huge draw on the artistic side, but the creative headaches we’ve had, every single person involved has to ask, “why are they still filming?” Among other inherent questions.”

Chad – “We had a great time shooting ‘V/H/S’ though. It’s a found footage movie for people that are over found footage.”

Become a Radio Silence fan on their Facebook page.

V/H/S premieres at the Sundance Film Festival as part of their Midnight Programming tomorrow, January 22nd.

The post [Sundance ’12]: ‘V/H/S’ Filmmakers Radio Silence Talk About Holding The Interest Of An Online Audience And Their Feature Premiere! appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Joe Swanberg has been a busy guy. Immensely busy. Starting with 2005’s Kissing On The Mouth he’s directed over a dozen films including Hannah Takes The Stairs, Nights And Weekends and last year’s werewolf pic Silver Bullets. He’s also found time to act in films such as A Horrible Way To Die and You’re Next (a movie he’s absolutely hilarious in).

As one of the directors (and actors) of V/H/S – Swanberg is once again stretching his horror wings. I spoke to him recently about his dalliances in the genre, his recent acting roles, and his ideal career trajectory.

In the film, “When a group of misfits is hired by an unknown third party to burglarize a desolate house and acquire a rare VHS tape, they discover more found footage than they bargained for.”

Hit the jump to check out the interview! How did Silver Bullets come about?

“I wanted to use werewolves as a way to talk about actors, basically. So for me it was like, with the werewolf mythology the full moon rises and people turn into werewolves and wreak all this havoc. Then they wake up the next morning not knowing what really happened. I thought it was a nice way to talk about actors who are given a part in a movie where they’re allowed to transform into somebody else and do allowed all these things they wouldn’t normally do. Then when the movie ends they’re just people again with real relationships and real issues. And the choices they’ve made in the film I don’t think are completely separate from the people they have to live with in real life. I thought it would be fun to use werewolves in that way.”

You also act in and direct a segment of V/H/S. It seems like you’re making more and more forays into horror.

“My first involvement was acting in Ti’s segment. I’m friends with Adam and Simon and Roxanne and sort of knew that the movie was being made and Ti asked me to act in his segment. I’ve really been trying to do projects that are outside of the typical “mumblecore” type stuff. So I very loosely threw my hat in the ring with Roxanne and told them if they were interested in a director who wasn’t a horror director doing one of the segments then I’d be up for it. Then through Simon’s persuasion and my involvement with You’re Next it finally came back around that they were willing to take a chance on me.”

Contributing to a found footage horror anthology, what was your ultimate goal?

“I didn’t want to do something that was subverting genre, I wanted to actively try and make something fun and scary.”

And you worked with someone else’s material.

“Simon [Barrett] wrote the script. It was actually the first time I had worked with somebody else’s material. I wasn’t involved in the creation of the script, but it instantly appealed to me. I was reading the script for the first time completely blind, sort of following the twists and turns the way an audience would.”

With Ti West’s segment, did you shoot in continuity?

“For the most part I think we did. As an actor its really helpful, you can know what’s going on at all times without having to gauge your performance on what you think might happen tomorrow. Ti was really adamant that we go through all the same things the characters go through and shoot in the same locations and all that. So we flew to Los Angeles and then we drove two days out to the Grand Canyon, shot a few days there and drove two days back.”

After seeing You’re Next in front of a crowd, that might be a breakout performance for you. Is that something you’ve considered or prepared for?

“Yeah. I’ve always really liked acting. I never thought about it in film school, but ever since I’ve been acting in my own stuff I’ve really liked it. And Adam [Wingard] is the director who has taken this chance on me and given me some of the bigger, meatier roles. So I’m hopeful that it’s something I can keep doing.”

You’re starting a new method of distribution for your films. A subscriber based model. Can you talk a bit about that? On your website it says it’s for your more personal films. Are some films earmarked for the subscription model while others will go the more traditional route?

“Yes. If the distribution model works and it’s something I continue to do year after year I think it’s something that I’ll have to decide which films fit in one mode or the other. What I like about making a lot of films, over the past 2 years I’ve made a lot of stuff, is that I have the freedom to put the films out into the world in different ways. For filmmakers who only make a film every 2 years, it’s a big thing to ask of them because they want their work to be seen by as wide of an audience as possible. But if I make seven films in a year, I put a few out through IFC, I can put four out through this distribution model, I can put one on my website for free. There’s a lot of ways I can get the work out there. I think the next few years for me will be a lot of experimentation.”

You do a lot of films. What do you see as your personal trajectory? What are you building towards?

“I would say all of the films I’ve made so far I would consider film school basically. I’m just trying to make a lot of work and get better as a filmmaker. I think my challenge to myself is to try a lot of things. For a long time I’ve been doing this naturalistic handheld documentary realism type of movie that sort of became known as mumblecore or whatever. But I made five movies in almost the exact same way and, while I was refining the process the whole time, it seemed like it was becoming a trap to keep making movies that way. I don’t want to have a career where I just do one thing for 50 years. With Silver Bullets I pushed myself to do things I haven’t done before like using a score and having a tripod. They’re minor things, but for me they’re big changes. And I’m still trying to do that. I want to the films I make to become part of my education until I become a well rounded filmmaker who can do lots of things. Comedy, Horror, Drama etc…”

“I also want to build a big body of work. I admire filmmakers like Robert Altman, Spike Lee, Clint Eastwood and Woody Allen who make a movie a year, or sometimes more. I think it’s cool because each movie seems to be less important in the context of their whole body of work. That’s the kind of career I would like to have.”

So you think working in the Paul Thomas Anderson mode of making a movie every four or five years puts too much pressure on an individual movie?

“That’s not really how I work. There’s a lot of filmmakers who do work that way that I really like. But I’ve never approached filmmaking in that sort of meticulous highly crafted way. For me the movies are very loose and open. They’re a collaborative effort so my directorial voice isn’t as strong as most filmmakers because I’m into opening up the movies to be shaped by the actors.”

V/H/S premieres at the Sundance Film Festival as part of their Midnight Programming On January 22nd.

The post [Sundance ’12]: ‘V/H/S’ Filmmaker Joe Swanberg Talks ‘Silver Bullets’, ‘You’re Next’, And His New Distribution Model appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

UPDATE: A press release from Damien Echols’ legal team, regarding the new case information detailed in the film, is after the jump.

Premiering today at the Sundance Film Festival is a new documentary written and directed by Academy Award nominated filmmaker, Amy Berg (Deliver us From Evil) and produced by first time filmmakers Damien Echols and Lorri Davis, in collaboration with the multiple Academy Award winning team of Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh. West Of Memphis tells the untold story behind an extraordinary and desperate fight to bring the truth to light. This of course is all about the (now proven in court) erroneous incarceration of the “West Memphis Three”.

Now, there are emerging reports that the documentary actually presents new evidence in the murder case. Per Deadline, “I’m hearing rumblings here in Park City that the Sundance documentary West of Memphis will include some new important evidence obtained within the last month that could have direct bearing on the future of the case… Press that screened the film in New York and Los Angeles last Friday were told that a scene was missing from the movie, but weren’t given specifics. I’m hearing the new scene will be included in the print of the film shown for the first time at Sundance this morning at 8:30 AM at a press and industry screening at the Holiday Village. The film has its official premiere today at 4:45 PM at the MARC Theater.”

In the film, “starting with a searing examination of the police investigation into the 1993 murders of three, eight year old boys Christopher Byers, Steven Branch and Michael Moore in the small town of West Memphis, Arkansas, the film reveals the story from the inside. West of Memphis uncovers new evidence surrounding the arrest and conviction of the other three victims of this shocking crime – Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley; all three of whom were teenagers at the time of their arrests and all three of whom were imprisoned for crimes they did not commit.”
“(Mountain Home, Arkansas – January 20, 2012) Terry Hobbs’ nephew, Michael Hobbs Jr., allegedly told his friends “my uncle Terry murdered those three little boys,” according to declarations under penalty of perjury recently given to Damien Echols’ defense team. The three new witnesses were polygraphed about what they stated Michael Hobbs, Jr. told them.

Hearing those words moved the new witnesses to contact the West Memphis 3 Confidential Tip Line just a few weeks ago. The new witnesses were then interviewed by the Echols’ defense team, signed declarations under penalty of perjury and passed polygraph examinations concerning what they say Michael Hobbs Jr. told them.”

The post [Sundance ’12]: UPDATE – Does ‘West Of Memphis’ Have New Evidence In Real Life Murder Case? appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Nicolas McCarthy’s The Pact, which debuted at Sundance as a short some time ago, will have its feature length premiere at this year’s Sundance tonight.

The film, along with movies like The Divide has helped spark a new production deal between Content and Preferred Content. The two companies already have basically the same name, so it should be easy for them to decide upon a shingle banner.

Per Deadline, “Content Film has made a multi-year production deal with Preferred Content partners Ross Dinerstein and Kevin Iwashina. Essentially, Content will finance as many as six elevated genre films over the next two years. The latest collaboration between Content and Preferred Content is ‘The Pact’, the genre film that premieres tonight at midnight… Dinerstein would raise the under $2 million budgets, Content would sell international and Iwashina would sell North American rights. The new deal allows Dinerstein to focus on producing and not have to raise the funds.”

Agnes Bruckner (Venom, Vacancy 2, The Woods, Kill Theory), Sam Ball (“The Event”), Haley Hudson (“Ghost Whisperer”, Killer Pad) and Kathleen Rose Perkins (“Lie to Me,” “Trust Me”) and Casper Van Dien also star in the ghost story said to be in the tradition of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, Dario Argento’s Suspiria and Hideo Nakata’s Ringu, “as a woman struggles to come to grips with her past in the wake of her mother’s death, an unsettling presence emerges in her childhood home.”

Keep up with all Sundance news!

The post [Sundance ’12]: ‘The Pact’ Helps Spark Multi-Year Production Deal appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Adam Wingard has made a name for himself by brining a unique directorial voice to films like Pop Skull, A Horrible Way To Die and this year’s sure-to-be breakout hit You’re Next.

As one of the directors of V/H/S – a film that breathes new life into the stagnant found footage genre – he again teams up with writer Simon Barrett to bring unhinged chaotic lunacy to the film’s wraparound piece.

In the film, “When a group of misfits is hired by an unknown third party to burglarize a desolate house and acquire a rare VHS tape, they discover more found footage than they bargained for.”

Hit the jump to check out the interview! Was You’re Next a reaction against the kind of common home invasion tropes?

“Yeah. Well, first and foremost, we both really like home invasion movies. The genesis of it was the fact that the only movies we were really responding to as being interesting and scary to us were home invasion movies. The Strangers, Them and Inside. We wanted to try and do our version of that. That’s how I approached Simon. At the beginning of each one of our projects Simon and I both agree on what type of movie we want to make and then Simon goes off and does his own thing. So I told him I wanted to do a home invasion movie, thinking he was going to write a story that was going to be a lot easier to do than A Horrible Way To Die. But Simon ended up taking a totally different approach, which was the correct way to go. And that was him deconstructing what we had seen before and going about it in a different way.”

I heard it was a difficult shoot. Simon says he could barely eat for a couple of weeks after getting back to LA.

“For me, I had a really bad toothache. While we were shooting the pain was so consistent that I couldn’t get to sleep and all the good dentists in Columbia were out of town for spring break. Simon’s mom had a terminally ill dog that was taking these dog tranquilizers up until it died so she had like 200 of these low level codeine tablets that I took before bed. While we shot I was eating tons of Tylenol. I would take about seven ibuprofen at a time every few hours. At the start of the production I wondered if it was even going to be possible to keep my head together despite the constant pain. Ultimately I discovered that pain has a way of focussing the mind. It’s not pleasant but I didn’t have any other choice.”

How was the process different from A Horrible Way To Die?

“A lot of the things in the film are things I’ve never seen before. So there really wasn’t a reference point cinematically. And plus I was also stepping out of the bounds of my usual comfort zone as a director. I was doing things in a more conventional cinematic fashion whereas before I would always err on the side of going the experimental route. With this one I wanted to do something that a mainstream audience could really relate to. It was the challenge of taking a relatively low budget film and trying to make it a real film that could play in theaters.”

The styles are radically different.

“On A Horrible Way To Die the style was really influenced by making the film within the budgetary constraints. And at the end of the day I saw there were complaints about some of the camera work in A Horrible Way To Die.”

I liked it.

“Yeah, I don’t know how we would have made the film without it and I think it’s appropriate for the film. But at the end of the day, I couldn’t just do that same thing again. If it’s turning off that amount of people, then you try something else to get everyone onboard with the story. I wanted to take a backseat on You’re Next and just allow the story to play out.”

On V/H/S you did the wraparound segment. If you were going for a more formal cinematic look on You’re Next, then V/H/S is certainly the opposite of that.

“We actually started on V/H/S a few months before we started on You’re Next. With this project, I’m not super into found footage movies, which I think is true of almost everyone on the project. So the main point I felt was interesting in doing one was being able to explore the concept of using consumer video and really glitchy video to the movie’s benefit. I liked the idea of combining a lot of impossible, sometimes supernatural things, with a really lo-fi video aesthetic. We’re used to seeing home video shot on [expensive cameras]. I wanted to see something on straight-up VHS, where the cassette is actually in the camera. And we used Simon’s VHS camera from the mid-90’s, which was the exact same type and brand as the camera I used as a kid. These characters don’t know anything about filmmaking and I wanted to capture the beauty in that. Ultimately it adds to the eeriness of the whole piece.”

Do you have to do any sort of post-production up-rezzing of it to display coherently on a large screen?

“Not really. It had to be kind of cut off, because we shot it in actual 4:3. So I knew we would be zooming in on the image. But it didn’t look too degraded. Because it’s supposed to be lo-fi you really can’t degrade it enough. The worse it looks, the better it looks. Something about the sketchiness of VHS is creepy to me.”

“But if I can back up for a second, the whole thing about found footage movies that I hate is they always end up so you spend the first half of the film waiting for things to happen. And then interesting things only happen after they set up some sort of reality. We wanted to make something very fast paced.”

I want to talk really quickly about your ABC’s Of Death short. I kept seeing a duck in those tweets.

“We had the letter ‘Q’. It’s called “Quack”. Going back to the early 2000’s one of the ways I got into filmmaking was going into these 48 hour film festival competitions where you have like 48 hours to make a film. They all have their own rules and things you have to keep in your short, which increases the challenge. So there aren’t a lot of words that even start with the letter ‘Q” which limited us. We let the letter itself really guide us and we sort of made a movie about making our ABC’s Of Death short.”

How many requests did you get to not kill the duck?

“We got a lot. It will be fun to see how uncomfortable this makes people. With that said the short is pretty much good natured and fun.”

V/H/S premieres at the Sundance Film Festival as part of their Midnight Programming On January 22nd.

The post [Sundance ’12]: ‘V/H/S’ Filmmaker Adam Wingard Talks Directing ‘You’re Next’, Dog Tranquilizers, And The ‘ABC’s Of Death’ appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Writer/Director David Bruckner made a name for himself with 2007’s The Signal. Now, as one of the directors of V/H/S – a film that breathes new life into the stagnant found footage genre – he’s able to explore his fascination with the sociological repercussions of technological immersion in deeper, more horrific, areas.

I spoke with Bruckner recently about his interest in media, V/H/S, his new short, and what’s coming up next for him.

In the film, “When a group of misfits is hired by an unknown third party to burglarize a desolate house and acquire a rare VHS tape, they discover more found footage than they bargained for.”

Hit the jump to check out the interview! How did you get involved with the project?

“I heard through a good friend of mine, Jacob Gentry who worked on The Signal with me, that the producers were looking for filmmakers for a found footage anthology. And that is probably the only kind of anthology right now that I think can work.”

Without giving too much away, what were the visual influences for you short?

“I saw Enter The Void last year. I saw it once and I don’t think I need to see it again. There’s a filing cabinet in the back of my brain that’s got ‘Enter The Void’ in it if I want to go there. And I thought found footage, especially POV, was a really exciting idea. You could role play with a central character and literally be forced to be them no matter what kind of situation they got into. I knew that I wanted to do something like that and I quickly threw them a treatment of what I was thinking.”

Having seen the film, it feels like a lot of the segments are thematically connected. Were there marching orders given going in?

“I knew nothing of the other shorts before I started. I was surprised when I saw it to see so many similar themes.”

What was one of the plusses of doing a brief segment like this?

“If you don’t have to commit to a feature you can loosen the reigns on what’s expected of you. You can try something new. The vibe was, ‘go do something crazy and we’ll be hands off’. “

How is this an evolution from The Signal?

“I seem to be really interested in media and the way media has transformed our worldview and what we think and the insanity that erupts from that.”

You recently completed another short, right?

“I’ve done a short film that’s going to festivals now called “Talk Show” that has a lot to do with the torture debate in mainstream media and what that became on cable news and what not. That has some definite horror elements to it as well. It’s the kind of subject matter I’m drawn to”.

What’s up next for you?

“There’s a couple of things I want to do. Right now I think I’m interested in engineering some straight suspense. We’ve got a mystery that we’re working on, a well structured horrific piece. But there’s definitely a piece that I’m really moving towards that I may not be ready to do that very much revels in how dark and horrific the internet can be. I’m not sure if I’ll tackle that next though, it might be a few projects down the road.”

The internet moves so fast you’ll have to rewrite it a bunch before then.

“Yeah I’ve already run into that. I’ve already had a project be completely outdated within two years. You have to get a real hypothetical. You almost have to get sci-fi to talk about the present sometimes.”

V/H/S premieres at the Sundance Film Festival as part of their Midnight Programming On January 22nd.

The post [Sundance ’12]: ‘V/H/S’ Filmmaker David Bruckner Talks Emerging Media, ‘The Signal, And ‘Enter The Void’ As An Influence appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

“A lot of horror filmmakers think their audiences are complete f*cking idiots. And the one thing I try and do the most is make movies that are fun, that we would like to see – and not assume that the people who want to see them are complete and utter fools. Because they’re not.”

Simon Barrett knows a lot about making horror films that don’t condescend to their audience. As the writer behind films like A Horrible Way To Die, Dead Birds and this year’s sure to be breakout hit You’re Next he’s proven that he’s not susceptible to many of the lazy traps horror writers often find themselves falling into.

As a co-writer and producer on V/H/S – a film that breathes new life into the stagnant found footage genre – he again teams up with director Adam Wingard to simultaneously subvert and embrace genre in new and exciting ways.

In the film, “When a group of misfits is hired by an unknown third party to burglarize a desolate house and acquire a rare VHS tape, they discover more found footage than they bargained for.”

Hit the jump to read a portion of our recent, epic, interview. What Scream did for slasher films, it feels like You’re Next does for home invasion. It reinvents the genre a bit and the decisions the characters make share some truth with the decisions a smart audience member might make.

“It’s interesting because, post Scream you can’t do any of the old slasher stuff but you also can’t call attention to [what you’re doing differently] in any way because that film did that. And so many other films are still doing that and it’s boring and annoying. I see You’re Next and A Horrible Way To Die as being kind of similar in my mind. I wrote A Horrible Way To Die because Adam and I thought we could get a serial killer film financed but I really don’t like 99% of serial killer movies. I think David Fincher, between two feature films, has said all I’m interested in hearing on that subject. The actual psychology is kind of fascinating but I’m just not interested in most of the cinematic portrayals of it.”

“So when we were going to film festivals for AHWTD in 2010, I was just seeing so many home invasion movies. There was this interesting glut of them. I think at fantastic Fest that year I saw Mother’s Day and Kidnapped back to back and they were just all of these brutal exercises. They were trying to be very dark and disturbing. In a lot of home invasion stuff everyone seems so passive, and it’s no fun because it’s just bad things happening to them. And you’re like, “that kind of sucks”. Right around the same time I was hanging out with Roxanne and she and I had kind of an intense intellectual debate about how female protagonists are portrayed in horror films. We were talking about the idea of trying to write a female protagonist who isn’t always just talking about how tough she is. Which is how most horror screenwriters do it, which is deeply annoying. It’s the Jessica Biel, Michelle Rodriguez syndrome where there’s a lot of posturing and you’re just like ‘I hate these people’. I actually think that’s another form as sexism, because they’re not taken seriously as real people. So those two things got me talking to Adam about how the home invasion genre had a lot of potential but nothing interesting had happened in it since The Strangers.”

It’s also a lot of fun though!

“It’s difficult to intellectualize You’re Next because initially I just wanted to do kind of a modern screwball comedy. I just wanted to do something that was really fun and funny and had scary elements with the masked killers and stuff. But mostly I just wanted to to an homage to 1930’s screwball comedies. But no one wants to hear that. But it’s fun to take a genre, a genre that has built-in entertaining elements that people like, and then do something new within the confines of it. You end up entertaining people because you’re still delivering on their expectations on some levels, but you can also do something really subversive and fun if you set out with that goal of ‘okay, what is something that’s never been done in home invasion before?’ If You’re Next has an overall theme, it’s that people aren’t always what they seem to be.”

You deal a lot with characters that would be considered unlikable by a studio exec or whoever is doing their coverage. Joe Swanberg as Drake (in You’re Next) comes to mind. Any thoughts on likability vs. watchability?

“Movie likability is not the same thing as real life likability. In a movie, the audience will relate to whoever is entertaining them. If I walked into a party, threw a drink in someone’s face, kicked over the table and start playing “Because I Got High” on the stereo real loud, everyone would hate me and justifiably so. But in a movie the audience is like ‘that’s my favorite character, because he’s doing something that’s fun to watch.’ We wanted to play with that a lot”.

I hear You’re Next was a difficult shoot.

“Oh, a horrible, horrible horrible shoot. It’s funny because it’s been so great for us, and when you watch it it feels like such a lighthearted film that the shoot must have been a total breeze. It was a nightmare making that movie. All of our personal lives fell apart. We were shooting six day weeks, shooting nights for a month. And we just all basically went crazy and sunk into like deep depressions. There were a lot of complicated set pieces and we did not have unlimited resources, the budget is much lower than anyone would think. It was an awful, awful, awful experience. I came back to LA and basically didn’t eat for 2 weeks.”

“It’s funny because I love making films. I can’t do anything else with my life, I don’t have the disposition. I know nobody reading this would want to hear me complain about having the opportunities to make the movies I want to make. And I’m not complaining about it. It was totally worth it. But it was some awful Apocalypse Now sh*t. It was just very stressful and we all lost our minds. Several relationships were destroyed. The movie was falling apart and we weren’t sure if we were incompetent or not. But now it turns out the movie’s really good and we all feel good about it. And I’ve only been able to cheer up fairly recently.”

So there’s fairly grinding and exhausting work schedule with you guys?

“There are people who really love filmmaking. They have an awesome time with their friends and going to festivals. We are not those people. I’m usually pretty stressed out. It’s not because I’m anxiety prone, it’s because Adam and I work these insane hours. We’re at the point in our career where we feel like we can’t take a break or we’ll miss an opportunity. We kind of feel like, if you do filmmaking right, it is a miserable experience.”

With V/H/S how did you come onboard the project? You wrote two of the segments, right?

“Yeah I wrote both of them about 8 months apart. One of the unique things about working with a whole bunch of indie filmmakers was that it all came together really slowly. Weirdly we did the wraparound segment first, back in February. I came onboard just because I’d worked with Brad Miska and Zak Zeman on A Horrible Way To Die. Adam and I were, I think, the first two people they came to. Also, I’m friends with Roxanne Benjamin who is also a producer on the film. So that was over a year ago and initially I don’t think anyone was quite sure what it was going to be. But when we knew it was going to be a feature film I immediately wanted to do the wraparound segment because wraparounds in anthologies always suck. They’re always the thing that you’re impatiently waiting to get through. It excited me more than doing the standalone shorts and I wanted to do something really new with the concept of a wraparound.”

I don’t typically like found footage movies, but stuff actually happens in this one!

“V/H/S is a found footage horror movie made by people who are every bit as sick of found footage as the average viewer is. I think everyone involved hates found footage and thinks it’s completely played out. And because everyone was sick of it we were all forced to come up with something unique. Most found footage films have an extremely boring first act. I think everyone involved was aware that we wanted to pace it differently.”

What about the look of the wraparound segment? It’s definitely got the warmth of old-school VHS home movies.

“Adam and I talked a lot about how much video has progressed in our lifetime. We shot You’re Next on the Red One M-X and now we have the Arri Alexa and all of these great cameras that look as high quality as film. So now early video has the same kind of natural, early archaic feel as Super 8 film had when we were growing up. Obviously in old movies they always cut to Super 8 or grainy 16MM for flashbacks and stuff to signify that you’re watching something anachronistic. But because video has progressed so much – I mean my phone takes better video than the video camera I bought for 1500 five years ago. And because of that, early video now has this really interesting quality to it. It doesn’t just look sh*tty, because VHS footage as an analog medium is so divorced now from what people consider ‘video’ – the medium is now old enough that it has an interesting quality to it that’s new to a viewer’s eye. The average teenage horror fan has never seen a movie shot on VHS and they don’t recognize the analog video quality.”

It wasn’t all shot on that format though.

“We shot the wraparound on nine different kinds of cameras, so delivering the movie has been kind of challenging.”

Did this kick loose any extra found footage ideas for you?

“I’ve had people ask me to do found footage scripts since and I’ve had to say no because I am so tapped out. I never thought I’d do one of them, much less two [segments]. And now I’m 100% out of ideas for why people would record themselves doing something. Though I’m sure there are other good ideas out there for three or four sequels.”

It’s premiering at Sundance, which seems strange for this kind of movie. How did that happen?

“The Sundance programmers were having total dread towards even watching it, ‘oh God, why did these guys do this? We have to reject them!’ And then they were so grateful that the movie was different, they were really complimentary towards it. And they kindly gave us an opening weekend spot.”

What’s coming up next for you guys?

“It looks like You’re Next is going to give us to do the opportunity to continue to do stuff we really like. And we’re already onto new projects. Adam directed two in the past week that I helped out on. ABC’s Of Death and 60 Seconds Of Solitude In The Year Zero. We work nonstop, it’s okay to be miserable. If you want to make a difference and be successful, you’ve got to be a little stressed out. Adam and I will film until we are forced to stop filming by our AD’s, the sun, the unions or our actors literally collapsing. We will shoot 18 hour days. And we are not happy all the time. But we want to make big action movies and big stuff and you have to kind of kill yourself to do it.”

When it would actually be easier to establish a brand and coast by on making variations of You’re Next?

“Some auteurs are the selling point of their own movies but I want people who have never f*cking heard of me, and who will never hear of me, to see my movies.”

Bonus. My favorite usable quote from our 70 minute interview?

“I hate all films and all filmmakers. Including my films and myself”.

V/H/S premieres at the Sundance Film Festival as part of their Midnight Programming On January 22nd.

The post [Sundance ’12]: ‘V/H/S’ Filmmaker Simon Barrett On ‘You’re Next’ And Found Footage Movies For People Who Hate Found Footage appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

The Sundance Film Festival kicks off this week and one film I’m intensely excited for is Phantasm and Bubb Ho-Tep director Don Coscarelli’s John Dies At the End, which joins the Park City at Midnight program including V/H/S, Excision, The Pact and many more.

Bloody Disgusting has landed a trio of exclusive stills that can be enjoyed inside. Also, watch this spot for an exclusive report from our visit to the set in the coming weeks!

“On the street, they call it “soy sauce.” It’s a paranormal, psychoactive drug that promises an out-of-body experience with each hit. Its users drift across time and dimensions, but some who come back are devoid of all humanity. While most of Earth’s inhabitants remain blissfully oblivious to its threat. Make no mistake, an otherworldly invasion is under way, and mankind needs to be saved. Enter John and David, a pair of college dropouts who can barely hold down jobs. How can these guys possibly be expected to rescue mankind from certain destruction?”

The festival runs January 19 through 29 in Park City, Salt Lake City, Ogden and Sundance, Utah.

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“Starting with a searing examination of the police investigation into the 1993 murders of three, eight year old boys Christopher Byers, Steven Branch and Michael Moore in the small town of West Memphis, Arkansas, the film reveals the story from the inside. West of Memphis uncovers new evidence surrounding the arrest and conviction of the other three victims of this shocking crime – Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley; all three of whom were teenagers at the time of their arrests and all three of whom were imprisoned for crimes they did not commit.”

With the fest just a week away, we got our hands on the film’s official trailer and poster.

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One of my personal most anticipated Sundance Film Festival selection is Phantasm and Bubb Ho-Tep director Don Coscarelli’s John Dies At the End, which joins the Park City at Midnight program including V/H/S, Excision, The Pact and many more.

In addition to the following plot crunch, AICN landed the official festival poster that displays the “Bible Belter.” Awesome.

“On the street, they call it “soy sauce.” It’s a paranormal, psychoactive drug that promises an out-of-body experience with each hit. Its users drift across time and dimensions, but some who come back are devoid of all humanity. While most of Earth’s inhabitants remain blissfully oblivious to its threat. Make no mistake, an otherworldly invasion is under way, and mankind needs to be saved. Enter John and David, a pair of college dropouts who can barely hold down jobs. How can these guys possibly be expected to rescue mankind from certain destruction?”

The festival runs January 19 through 29 in Park City, Salt Lake City, Ogden and Sundance, Utah.

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One of the films I’m most excited for at this month’s Sundance Film Festival is Richard Bates, Jr.’s Excision, which looks insanely bloody. We’ve just now landed the official festival one-sheet that’s a trip. Dig on it below.

Starring AnnaLynne McCord, Traci Lords, Ariel Winter, Roger Bart, and John Waters, the flick will premiere as part of the Park City at Midnight program next January.

“A disturbed and delusional high school student with aspirations of a career in medicine goes to extremes to earn the approval of her controlling mother.”

The post [Sundance 2012] Stylish and Eye-Catching ‘Excision’ One-Sheet appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

On Sunday, January 22, 2012 the Sundance Film Festival will hold the World Premiere of V/H/S, our found footage horror film that features the works of Adam Wingard (You’re Next, A Horrible Way to Die, Pop Skull), Simon Barrett (You’re Next, Dead Birds, Read Sands), Ti West (The House of the Devil, The Roost, The Innkeepers), David Bruckner (The Signal), Joe Swanberg (Silver Bullets), Glenn McQuaid (I Sell the Dead), and Radio Silence. The horror flick will be playing as part of the Park City at Midnight program at 11:45PM.

Here’s the plot: “When a group of misfits is hired by an unknown third party to burglarize a desolate house and acquire a rare VHS tape, they discover more found footage than they bargained for.”

While we’ve already shared two images with you guys, we’ve given the boys over at Radio Silence the green light to sneak out a look at their segment, making this the final look before the screening. Radio Silence, formerly known as “Chad, Matt and Rob”, are YouTube sensations that I’ve been a huge fan of for years. Become a fan too on their newly launched Facebook page.

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It was announced today that Rodrigo Cortes’ Red Lights, the supernatural thriller starring Sigourney Weaver, Robert De Niro, and Cillian Murphy, will have its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival this coming January in Park City, Utah. Check out some new stills inside and watch for a review next month.

“In the film, De Niro stars as Simon Silver, a legendary psychic, perhaps the most famously gifted of all time, who returns after thirty years of mysterious absence to become the world’s greatest challenge to orthodox science and professional skeptics.

Meanwhile, paranormal fraud investigator Tom (Murphy) begins to develop a dense obsession Silver, whose magnetism is enhanced dangerously with each new manifestation of inexplicable phenomena.”

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Nicolas McCarthy’s The Pact, which debuted at Sundance as a short, will have its feature length premiere at the upcoming Sundance Film Festival in January.

Gearing up for the big debut, Bloody Disgusting was provided with the first ever still from the film featuring a tight shot of star Caity Lotz (“Death Valley,” “Mad Men”).

Agnes Bruckner (Venom, Vacancy 2, The Woods, Kill Theory), Sam Ball (“The Event”), Haley Hudson (“Ghost Whisperer”, Killer Pad) and Kathleen Rose Perkins (“Lie to Me,” “Trust Me”) and Casper Van Dien also star.

In the ghost story said to be in the tradition of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, Dario Argento’s Suspiria and Hideo Nakata’s Ringu, “as a woman struggles to come to grips with her past in the wake of her mother’s death, an unsettling presence emerges in her childhood home.”

Keep up with all Sundance news!

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It still hasn’t even sunk in…

Our film V/H/S is going to have its world premiere at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival as part of their Park City at Midnight program on Sunday, January 22nd! It’s insane to be mentioned in the same breath as Saw, High Tension, Open Water, The Signal, The Woman and even The Descent. INSANE.

I’ve always been sort of an oddball when it comes to setting life goals. While most people I know shoot for the stars, I always shoot towards happiness. For example, Bloody Disgusting was never meant to be as successful as it is. When Tom and I started the site back in January 2001 we did it out of the pure love of the genre, and because doing things with your friends is not only cool, but also fun. While the site continues to blossom, everything I do continues to be about personal happiness as opposed to making a dollar.

This bleeds into my side projects. I Associate Produced A Horrible Way to Die, which was a friend “experiment”, a way to see if a group of friends could work together to create a great piece of art. I’m proud of the final product and what my buddies were able to achieve. After that, both Tom and myself were fortunate enough to get two more projects off and running – Under the Bed and V/H/S – both of which we’re Producers on. And with both, the aim wasn’t to reach the stars, it was to have a memorable experience with a group of people I respect and love.

This is why I can’t wrap my head around the idea of V/H/S being accepted into Sundance. While the goal is always to make a great movie, personally I just wanted to share an experience with some of the most talented filmmakers I think the world of…

I’ve been a huge supporter of Adam Wingard ever since I saw his brilliant, trippy micro-budgeted Pop Skull. And Simon Barrett has penned an array of solid horror projects from Dead Birds to Red Sands and even Frankenfish. The duo aligned their talents for A Horrible Way to Die, and are also the brains behind the mega-awesome You’re Next!. Neither of them disappoint. Ever.

In June of 2005 I was introduced to Ti West, a young indie director from Delaware, who blew my mind with his incredible micro-horror The Roost. He has since gone on to bring us the ever popular The House of the Devil and the forthcoming supernatural The Innkeepers. His deliberate pacing is something that I’ve always connected with and enjoyed throughout the years.

A fond Sundance memory I have is being introduced to David Bruckner, one of the directors of the 2007 The Signal. We kept running into the trio at the festival and one of my friends would break out into West Side Story with them every single time. They became immediate friends of the site and it’s beyond an honor to have Bruckner as one of V/H/S‘s filmmakers. I have a feeling that after you guys see the movie, he’s going to get awfully sick of having people come up to him and saying “I like you” (a reference to the movie.)

The comedy troop of Radio Silence has been on my radar for years. The team is responsible for not one, but two outstanding YouTube videos that I’ve probably watched more than 1,000 times. This is their first feature project, but I assure that by the time the credits roll you’ll all know the names Chad Villella, Tyler Gillett, Justin Martinez, and Matt Bettinelli-Olpin!

A quite popular and beautifully shot genre film many of you know is I Sell the Dead, which comes from Irish director Glenn McQuaid. McQuaid is also responsible for working on the visual effects in the post-apocalyptic Stake Land. Being that he also comes from the Glass Eye Pix family, he’s someone we knew could deliver an eye-popping splatterfest.

Last but not least comes festival darling Joe Swanberg, who also stars in Ti West’s segment. Swanberg, who has now directed 14 films, gets behind the camera for a Cronenberg-esque vision that was penned by Simon Barrett. Keeping it all in the family, Swanberg also starred in A Horrible Way to Die.

The best way to describe V/H/S without giving anything away is that it’s a new kind of found footage horror film from the perspective of several genre filmmakers we personally know and love. Please join us at the WORLD PREMIERE on January 22 in Park City. We’d love nothing more than to share the experience with a bunch of Bloody Disgusting fans!

The post [OMFG] Our Film ‘V/H/S’ Will Premiere at Sundance 2012, First Look! appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

The most left-field announcement in the upcoming Sundance Film Festival is Richard Bates, Jr.’s Excision, which looks insanely bloody.

Starring AnnaLynne McCord, Traci Lords, Ariel Winter, Roger Bart, and John Waters, the flick will premiere as part of the Park City at Midnight program next January.

“A disturbed and delusional high school student with aspirations of a career in medicine goes to extremes to earn the approval of her controlling mother.”

Check out all of the blood-stained imagery inside.

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Sundance Institute announced today the films selected to screen in the 2012 Sundance Film Festival out-of-competition sections Spotlight, Park City at Midnight, NEXT <=> and New Frontier. The Festival takes place from January 19 through 29 in Park City, Salt Lake City, Ogden and Sundance, Utah.

Trevor Groth, Director of Programming for the Sundance Film Festival, said, “In many ways, the extremes of the Festival’s program are most readily apparent in our out-of-competition sections, which showcase the wildest comedies, the most terrifying horror films and uncompromised visions from singular voices springing up from around the country and the world. We hope audiences experiment with their film selections to an equal degree as these filmmakers have experimented with their storytelling.”

After the break you’ll find the full list of Park City at Midnight genre titles, along with a few other horror-themed movies sneaking around the fest. Editor’s Note: Article updated with all available imagery and information. Click any title for more images and info (if available)

PARK CITY AT MIDNIGHT: From horror flicks to comedies to works that defy any genre, these unruly films will keep you edge-seated and wide awake. Each is a world premiere.

Director: Adam Wingard, Ti West, David Bruckner, Glenn McQuaid, Radio Silence, Joe Swanberg
Cast: Joe Swanberg, Calvin Reeder, Adam Wingard, Sophia Takal, Kate Lyn Sheil, Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Chad Villella, Tyler Gillett

“When a group of misfits is hired by an unknown third party to burglarize a desolate house and acquire a rare VHS tape, they discover more found footage than they bargained for.”

Director: Katie Aselton
Cast: Katie Aselton, Lake Bell, Kate Bosworth

“Three childhood friends set aside their personal issues and reunite for a girls’ weekend on a remote island off the coast of Maine. One wrong move turns their weekend getaway into a deadly fight for survival.”

Director: Richard Bates, Jr.
Cast: AnnaLynne McCord, Traci Lords, Ariel Winter, Roger Bart, John Waters

“A disturbed and delusional high school student with aspirations of a career in medicine goes to extremes to earn the approval of her controlling mother.”

Director: Jon Wright
Cast: Richard Coyle, Ruth Bradley, Russell Tovey, Bronagh Gallagher

“When the residents of an idyllic Irish fishing village are attacked by mysterious, blood-sucking sea creatures, a high blood alcohol content could be the only thing that gets them through the night.”

Director: Nicholas McCarthy
Cast: Caity Lotz, Casper Van Dien

“As a woman struggles to come to grips with her past in the wake of her mother’s death, an unsettling presence emerges in her childhood home. ”

NEW FRONTIER: With media installations, multimedia performances, transmedia experiences, panels, film screenings, and more, New Frontier highlights work that celebrates experimentation and the expansion of cinema culture through the convergence of film, art, and new media technology. These films complement the previously announced installations and performances in the New Frontier venue at the Festival.

NO PHOTO AVAILABLE

Director: Rodney Ascher

“Room 237 is a subjective documentary that explores the numerous theories about the hidden meanings within Stanley Kubrick’s film The Shining. The film may be over 30 years old but it continues to inspire debate, speculation, and mystery. Five very different points of view are illuminated through voice over, film clips, animation and dramatic reenactments. Together they’ll draw the audience into a new maze, one with endless detours and dead ends, many ways in, but no way out.”

PREMIERES: A showcase of some of the most highly anticipated dramatic films of the coming year from new and established directors. Presented by Entertainment Weekly. Each is a world premiere.

Director: Rodrigo Cortés
Cast: Cillian Murphy, Sigourney Weaver, Robert De Niro, Elizabeth Olsen, Toby Jones

“Psychologist Margaret Matheson and her assistant study paranormal activity, which leads them to investigate a world-renowned psychic.”

NEXT <=>: encompasses a selection of pure, bold works by promising filmmakers distinguished by an innovative, forward-thinking approach to storytelling. Presented by Adobe Systems Incorporated. Each is a world premiere.

Director: David Zellner
Cast: Sydney Aguirre, Susan Tyrrell, Nathan Zellner, David Zellner

“A rebellious girl whose existence is devoid of parental guidance, spends her time roaming the land, shoplifting, and vandalizing. Her routine is broken one day while playing in the woods when she hears a woman calling from a mysterious hole in the ground, asking for help.“

The post [Sundance 2012] Park City at Midnight Announced! appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Recently acquired for US release by Cohen Media Group is Nick Murphy’s period supernatural thriller, The Awakening, which stars Rebecca Hall, Dominic West and Imelda Staunton. Finally a official poster and stills have been released. Click above for the entire gallery. Check out clips and a trailer inside.

The film world premiered at TIFF (read my review here) and is opening in UK cinemas on November 11.

“Haunted by the death of her fiancé, Florence Cathcart is on a mission to expose all séances as exploitative shams. However, when she is called to a boys’ boarding school to investigate a case of the uncanny, she is gradually forced to confront her skepticism in the most terrifying way, shaking her scientific convictions and her sense of self to the very core.”

The post Finally a Batch of Images UK Supernatural Thriller ‘The Awakening’ appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Bloody Disgusting ready “Fabien” has a little Halloween treat for you as he discovered the French-language trailer for Inside directors Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo’s nightmarish Livid (review) is now online and brooding after the break.

“‘Livid’s true gift is its creative madness, a film that’s drenched in imagery that will resonate with viewers for decades,” I stated in my review out of TIFF this past July. David Harley was also a huge fan stating that it “demands that its audience watch it through Fulci-tinted glasses as it weaves a fantasy horror tale heavy rooted in nightmare logic and Hammer aesthetics, a style that really hasn’t been replicated to this extent since the Godfather of Gore passed away in the 90’s.”

Arriving in theaters next year from Dimension Films, the pic is a horror fairytale set during Halloween night when three youths decide to burglarize an old lady’s desolate house, but what awaits them is no ordinary house… Do NOT expect another Inside and I believe you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

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Tonight’s screening of The Divide is a sell-out. Audiences were treated to the appearances of such genre favorites, Michael Biehn (Terminator & Aliens) and Milo Ventimiglia (“Heroes”). So far, this was the most enthusiastic crowd response at this year’s Toronto After Dark.

BLIND SPOT

A single take 6-minute short about a guy so caught up with settling an issue with a travel agent, he doesn’t realize some serious shit is going down all around him. While the film lacks a punchy ending, the visual effects are pretty impressive.

3.5/5 Skulls

THE DIVIDE

As of late, audiences have been treated to a seemingly never-ending stream of post-apocalyptic titles such as, I Am Legend, The Road and The Book Of Eli, to name a few. The Divide is yet another entry. I came into this film with minimal expectations. The opening moments of mass destruction soon changed all that. Director, Xavier Gens (Frontier(s) & Hitman) brings us a vision that’s both equally beautiful and horrifying. After enduring a nuclear attack, the barricaded survivors face a more dangerous threat…one another. This is when The Divide begins to set itself apart from the rest of the lot. As their rations continue to get sparser so does their humanity. The depth of unflinching depravity these characters sink into is difficult to witness. Gens masterfully presents a bleak and keenly observant look at mankind’s destructive, animalistic potential once order is removed out of the equation. Gens and his committed ensemble boldly take the film and its characters into some of the darkest, most unsettlingly places ever put to film. Thankfully, elements of the story and characters stay ambiguous. There are sprinkles of info throughout via the writing and subtleties in the acting that adds yet another layer to the film. After two views of this film, I’m still discovering new things about these wonderfully complex characters. The fearless cast is nothing short of astonishing. There is no vanity on display here. Michael Biehn has never been better. Milo Ventimiglia, in particular, delivers a game-changing performance that’ll certainly change people’s perception of him forever. The acting in The Divide is as good as it gets.

This is certainly not an easy film to sit through. It gets more claustrophobic by the minute. The Divide manages to make The Mist look positively upbeat in comparison. Despite all that, The Divide is powerful, undeniably alive experience that’ll take your breath away. It’s a masterpiece I won’t soon forget…even if I wanted to. Easily, one of the best films of 2011.

5/5 Skulls

ETHEREAL CHRYSALIS

An extremely surreal 10-minute short about…beats the hell out of me. The fantastical images, effects-work and epic score is what it’s all about.

3/5 Skulls

MANBORG

Astron-6’s second film at this year’s Toronto After Dark Film Festival (first one being Father’s Day) is an ode to bad 80’s sci-fi/action pictures. The plot dealing with a dead soldier turned cybernetic killing machine reads like every other movie I was renting at my local mom and pop video store. It’s loaded to the brim with low-fi but extremely dense visual effects. The cinematography has the stench of an abused VHS copy. Oh yes, Manborg is completely ridiculous…and I devoured every minute of it.

It’s one fast, violent, ultra-funny ride that revels in its own cheesiness. Like their body of work, Astron-6 doesn’t just nod to its influences; they take it one step further by injecting their own brand of goofy charm. The imagination on display is truly inspiring. If you’re feeling Z-grade movie neglect, Manborg will definitely fill that void…and then some.

4/5 Skulls

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Recently acquired for US release by Cohen Media Group is Nick Murphy’s period supernatural thriller, The Awakening, which stars Rebecca Hall, Dominic West and Imelda Staunton.

The film world premiered at TIFF (read my review here) and is opening in UK cinemas on November 11. We already shared with you one clip that took you to the attic and inside a creepy dollhouse, now watch as Hall talks with West about a haunting series of images that display an added “guest”.

“Haunted by the death of her fiancé, Florence Cathcart is on a mission to expose all séances as exploitative shams. However, when she is called to a boys’ boarding school to investigate a case of the uncanny, she is gradually forced to confront her skepticism in the most terrifying way, shaking her scientific convictions and her sense of self to the very core.”

The post A Guest Adds Himself to Class Photos in Second ‘Awakening’ Clip appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

The Screamfest Horror Film Festival is now completed bringing a whopping 10 days of horror to a close. The festival shared some incredible films with the Hollywood crowd, along with quite a few stinkers. Some of the most talked about films ranged from Rites of Spring to The Innkeepers, Rabies, Madison County and of course Livid. The harsh words came out for flicks like Sector 7, Rosewood Lane, Stormhouse and Vamperifica.

The awards ceremony was held Saturday night and was privvy to a slew of surprise victories that had the room in chatter. Nicholas Humphries’ gorgeous “The Little Mermaid” was the winner of BEST SHORT. The Kickstarter-funded The Tunnel won BEST SFX (Sam Loxton & David Sander). Jeff Grace won BEST MUSICAL SCORE for his work on Ti West’s The Innkeepers. Crawl was the most buzzed-about feature winning BEST DIRECTOR (Paul China), BEST ACTRESS (Georgina Haig) and BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY (Brian J. Breheny). The overrated Urban Explorer rounded out the awards taking home BEST EDITING (Andy Fetcher), BEST MAKEUP (Waldemar Pokromski) BEST ACTOR (Klaus Stiglmeier) and BEST PICTURE.

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Promised chills, is the focus of tonight’s double bill. Hell, we even got official Toronto After Dark diapers with a ratings system attached to it. Both films are rated 5 out of 5 diapers!

NOWHERE ELSEWHERE

Beautiful cinematography is the standout in this haunting 15-minute short about a woman coming to grips about having to face her ailing mother.

3.5/5 Skulls ABSENTIA

Absentia is being touted as one of the scariest things out there. It isn’t. The film does spooky effectively…it just won’t have you shaking in your boots. That’s not a knock against it in the slightest. Expectations should be kept in check. What Absentia can claim to offer is a far richer, more engaging experience than the majority we see coming out of the supernatural horror genre. It focus’ on a woman, her sister and a mysterious tunnel where people seem to be disappearing into…one of the missing just happens to be her husband.

The film has enough depth to appeal to even folks outside of the horror market which is a rare quality indeed. The story plays out realistically and the characters are some of the most appealing and beautifully developed I’ve ever witnessed in genre title. The two siblings’ relationship, exceptionally well-acted by unknowns, Katie Parker and Courtney Bell, contains all the ups and downs we see in everyday life. That level of believability makes Absentia stand out from among the crowd. As a result, the film is much more tension-filled. I’m appreciated and relived that writer/director, Mike Flanagan wisely leaves the supernatural element up to the viewer’s imagination. There are little hints in exposition, a quick, obscured flash of image here and there to help us devise our own mental image of whatever it may be. Way too many supernatural movies blow it in this department by revealing the entity/creature which almost always disappoints. Chock that as one of many pluses that make Absentia one of the most refreshing and emotionally-involving genre titles around.

4/5 Skulls

THE INCIDENT

Not sure what this 7-minute absurdist short is all about. Who cares, it’s laugh-out-loud funny.

4/5 Skulls

A LONELY PLACE TO DIE

A group of mountaineers stumble upon young Serbian girl buried in a small chamber in the middle of the woods. Of course, it isn’t too long before whoever left her there begin an unrelenting mission to get her back. A Lonely Place To Die is a gritty survivalist thriller that lands somewhere between The River Wild and Deliverance. Unfortunately, it’s not nearly as satisfying as either one of them. For the first hour, I was totally with it. The filmmakers wisely stick to keeping it as real as possible. The characters are nicely established and once the threat kicks in, there is some genuine tension. The antagonists are merciless. When people start to get disposed, they do so in brutal, unflinching fashion. Director, Julian Gilbey thankfully relies on good old-fashioned stunt work to realize those moments. The cast is game especially the always good, Melissa George who conveys a completely believable heroine. The character never becomes a superwoman by the end of it which is a relief.

While serviceable enough, I was underwhelmed by the climax. Once A Lonely Place To Die leaves the forest setting, it becomes another movie…a far lesser, more generic one. The film never quite took it to the next level which is disappointing. Don’t get me wrong, A Lonely Place To Die is a perfectly solid action picture and one I would still recommend. It just won’t have me return to it in the foreseeable future.

3/5 Skulls

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