Night of the Slasher

Physically, she can’t talk because of her throat. If she can, it’s only a little bit. In the feature script, before she gets cut, I made her talk a lot. It’s also metaphorical — when someone is dealing with abuse or being taken advantage of, they have trouble speaking about the event or reporting it — telling someone about it. It’s metaphorical where she can’t tell anyone what happened. Even if she could, no one would believe her.

Basically, this is kind of a war that she’s stuck fighting alone and she’s imploding, falling apart.

Now, we’re living in a culture where we’re having a bully backlash, where people are speaking out against those who harass them, but most people are still having trouble coming out and accusing them. They feel stuck. That translates to a horror movie where a woman has a cutthroat and she literally can’t tell anyone what happened.

Speaking of the killer, in this movie he’s wearing a Leonard Nemoy mask. What led to that decision?

Did you know that in Halloween, Michael Myers wears a William Shatner [Captain Kirk] mask? We’re nodding to Halloween, but [this villain is] a different animal — [he’s] more calculated, more logical even though hilariously [he’s] not logical because [he] can’t die.

On Halloween, that choice was random. It was supposed to be a one-off movie: John Carpenter wanted to make a really good slasher film and they had such a low budget they just grabbed whatever mask they could find and adjusted it by spray painting it. It was spontaneous – no real reason or story behind it. We wanted to layer our story and give reasons for everything. We wanted to have logic and reason for why we made the choices we did. The difference between this character and Michael Myers is that he’s definitely more agile, faster more like an imp. A dark creature that can come after you. Michael Myers to me is like a tank, [while] this killer can run, swing, and be fast.

Red is the color of passion — in a lot of cultures, red is a universally [emotive] color. Most people see red in a similar vein and this is all about sexuality and passion. So Jenelle’s underwear is red and the scarf that covers her neck is red. Love and hate are sort of woven together sometimes.

I didn’t watch a lot of John Carpenter films in order to prepare for this one — I wanted to do something unique. You can’t make something that is just an homage to one director, you have to have your own voice.

I was definitely inspired by Steven Spielberg because of his one shot-take. You guys have actually Staff Picked a lot of videos by Tony Zhou —I watch a ton of his films. Actually, if it wasn’t for Vimeo promoting Tony Zhou I wouldn’t have seen his videos and analyses of directors and what their thinking is. [The film  Zhou made about Spielberg] is about one-takes, which was really helpful for me in my thinking. The scene where Jenelle is drinking all of those beers — is actually a straight rip from Raiders of the Lost Ark where Marion is doing the drinking contest with a guy in the bar in Nepal.

The fun fact mentioned by Shant later: The scene where Lily is drinking the beers – she actually drank 22 bottles of water in a row. She was chugging down water like crazy. She would have to go to the bathroom in between cuts but because we kept doing more and more takes. [At a certain point] it wasn’t going to go through her system fast enough so she had to go to the bathroom and throw it up. And then she had to make out with our actor right after that.

I wanted to bring a level of sophistication and taste to the genre so it didn’t feel like a schlocky horror film. I didn’t want anyone to call this movie a parody. Satire — that’s fine, but the parody is not what we’re going for. Thankfully, no one has said that it’s campy or schlocky.

In reference to the one-shot take, the entire short occurs in one room whereas most horror chases go through entire houses, neighborhoods, or forests. Can you talk about the choreography of this short and why you chose to limit the space to just a kitchen?

Originally, I was going to shoot this in the traditional conventional sense — which is cutting. Shooting our scenes with wide-medium and close. We went through three different cinematographers. One of them had a Ronin [so] I started thinking: what can I do with that device? I realized that I can connect a lot of my shots together and we can get a lot of smooth takes without using a dolly.  I hate dollies! They’re heavy! And when you’ve got a tiny crew everyone has to pitch in and move the dolly and it takes forever to set up the tracks and stuff. We made this for less than $5,000, [so that wouldn’t work].

I started thinking — ‘Wow, this story is just one scene, so what if we tried to do this in one take?’ Eventually, the cinematographer with the Ronin dropped out — he thought we were too ambitious to do this in one take, he didn’t believe we could do it. When it came time to shoot we rehearsed it three times with a 5D before shooting with a Red. I would post the private link on Vimeo to make sure that our actors were hitting their marks — Lily Berlina [the actress who played Jenelle] had a very difficult job to do.

The kitchen scene took 16 one-shot takes. Even though this movie is entirely one fluid shot – like the movie Birdman or Hitchcock’s Rope, there are very small hidden cuts. We wanted to segment in areas where it made sense to do a longer take or a short take and stitch them together in editing. There are no special effects. It’s all clever editing, basically.

I feel flattered that you asked that because that means it seems very organic but no — it was acting. It was written dialogue. The only thing that he did add in rehearsal was: “I guess I’m just gonna put these beers away” [after Jenelle chugs all four of them].

The song that plays during Night of the Slasher’s ending credits is perfect – was it written before or after the film was made?

The movie came first — originally we had Lily dance to AC/DC’s “Touch Too Much” and I knew there was no way that AC/DC was going to let us use that song for a background in a short film so it was kind of a placeholder. I asked the music supervisor for advice and said ‘What if we just got a band to do a cover of it — wouldn’t that be OK?” The answer was: ‘Nope. AC/DC is very tight on their songs and they have to approve the covers as well.’ Gaining right to use an AC/DC song is this whole horrible process. By the way — hats off to Jim Cummings for getting “Thunder Road” (Note: Check out Vimeo’s blog post on this film here!) — he had to take a chance and write an open letter to Bruce Springsteen before eventually, they said yes.

Eventually, my producer said: why don’t we hire our friend Jeff Phillips to do the song? He and his writing partner Matt Cheadle knocked writing this song in the style of cheesy 80s metal out of the park on the first try. My only note was asking to combine AC/DC’s “Touch Too Much” and [‘80s pop-rock duo] Heart with synthesizers. What do you get when you combine AC/DC with Heart? You get “Dying For Love.”