The birth of RAZOR DAYS - a fairy story about survival horror.

Back in 2002, while working at Incredibly Strange Video in Dormont, I happened to have on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. As it ended, I thought to myself, “Marilyn Burns’s character is going to need so much therapy.” Then came the little post-script title about how no evidence was ever found after a massive police search of the area. My wheels started turning. While no scholar of the slasher genre, I’d seen enough of them to wonder about those surviving “final girls”, what their lives would be like from that point on.

In 2002, the endless cycle of remakes hadn’t yet reached the theaters, so there hadn’t been a major Hills Have Eyes or Texas Chain Saw “type” of movie released for a while. The indie scene was filled to the brim then—and will always be—with survival horror, homages and rip-offs of the original films. In fact, later that day I watched Carnage Road, which featured a character named “Quiltface” for his impressive mask made of multiple skinned faces. The idea that there are psychotic cannibals out there, hoping to catch, kill and eat us, was always a fascinating little terror of mine. It had grown stronger in recent months as Amy and I scouted out rural farmland for our new home. Passing one back-woods house with a gaping hole in the side, while the proud owner sat on the porch skinning…something (all I remember are clumps of blood and fur as we increased speed), I turned to Amy, indicating the “For Sale” sign on the trailer next to the lot. “If I’m going to be murdered in my sleep,” I told her, “I definitely don’t want to be raped and murdered.” So we kept looking.

 

Then I rediscovered this Berni Wrightson comic cover and things started to gel in my head. 

  Survival horror always reached an end, either with triumph, rescue, succumbing to madness, or that final surprising resurrection—that dead hand springing back to life and grabbing the final girl just as the credits rolled to the sound of her echoing scream, betraying everything she’d gone through. What these types of horror movies never addressed were the scars left behind.

The first reaction to that consideration is, of course, “Who wants to see a crying victim in therapy for two hours, telling the story to her shrink?” So skip that part too. What happens after? After the survival, after the therapy, after the investigations and allegations and accusations. One person out of four survived a camping trip. Could they be to blame? Isn’t that more plausible than Leatherface and his family? Police find no evidence—how the hell hard were they looking? Or are they in on it too? (Something that was addressed in the inevitable Texas Chain Saw remake.) But most importantly, all that convolution aside, how do you put your life back together after something like that?

Having lived in the world, journeyed out amongst other people, I have met survivors of rape and molestation. I have met people who have survived moments of horrible and random violence. I’m not referring to brutal abductions or even war flashbacks. Comparatively small things like a mugging, a bar fight, or even the prolonged illness of a friend or relative, leaves behind its echo. Even if these folks seem, outwardly, to have completely recovered, the violence is still there in scarred-over memory. And it comes out. Usually rarely, but those wounds open, sometimes with a minutia of prompting. So if its particularly shattering, how do you put yourself back together?

After a couple of turns with this germ of an idea—first as a short story and then a comic book—I found the meat of this story I wanted to tell, and the first thing to go was that image of the head hunter from Wrightson’s painting. As much as I would have loved to tell that story, it wasn’t the story that wanted to be told.

The story that became Razor Days was much more intimate and introspective. But very violent. It’s about a trio of final girls and what they decide to do after the credits have rolled.

So here we are eight years later, and I’m finally getting the chance to turn this script into a movie. There were multiple fits and starts over the years, including a nasty little few weeks where we had the film ripped away from us in pre-production by a dishonest producer who promised the world then took it all away. That was a carpet-yank moment for us because this wasn’t just a movie we could make on weekends in our backyards. It required a realism that our other movies did not. It wasn’t a ____-horror movie, either. It wasn’t a comedy-horror like Severe Injuries or a semi-futuristic zombie fantasy like The Resurrection Game. We couldn’t invent our own worlds here. Razor Days required solid ground beneath our feet. Which requires money. So we put it on the back burner, turned the fire low and let it simmer.

In the meantime, Amy and I worked on the script, refined it and brought it down closer to eye-level, working out how even the most fantastic elements could have a light shone on them and still feel solid. While we’re used to not giving up—the Happy Cloud motto is “The bumblebee doesn’t know that its physically impossible for it to fly”—we had two others in our court who never gave up either: Debbie Rochon and Alan Rowe Kelly. The pair of them mentioned that movie to anyone who would listen. Then, one day, the right listener came along.

Bob Kuiper, my long-time friend and publisher of Sirens of Cinema, who has displayed more faith in me than what is surely rational, was someone I’d worked with for over five years, but had never met. Circumstances kept us from seeing each other in person. Some of this problem was caused by distance—he in Indiana, we in the nowhere-zone of PA—and was compounded by other things, chiefly bad timing. He’d been burned by partnerships before—had a movie or two collapse around him—as had we, so our initial conversations about producing a film together required a lot of circling and dancing, resembling many of the knife fights from West Side Story minus the snapping.

Then, by chance, the planets aligned and the three of us finally met, face-to-face and over beer, at Horrorhound, Indy. We discuss plans for the future and we hint that we’d love to make Razor Days. There is much nodding and smiling and great plans for the upcoming empire.

And who is one of the first people we introduce Mr. Bob to? Alan Rowe Kelly.

What’s the first thing he says to us? “What’s going on with Razor Days? I love that script!”

It was an unscripted, unpaid for moment. But it was enough proof for me that the universe isn’t constantly out to get me. Because by the end of that weekend, Bob had provided the green-light for this movie to be made. The first project for the partnership of RAK Media and Happy Cloud Pictures will be something completely different from anything we’ve attempted before.

After all the struggling and fighting and the inherent madness of the indie film industry, after all the back-stabbing, the trash-talk, the horrific allegations and the depressing dissolution of long-time friendships, we were reminded that sometimes, this business doesn’t completely suck. There are wonderful people out there. They’re tough to spot through the guarded gauze of cynicism and self-defense, but they’re there, and they’re willing to expose themselves to your dreams and desires. And the only price is: you have to live up to their trust.

Because betrayal is a violent act as well. It can leave scars just as deep and leave damage behind. Now all of a sudden, you’re on the other side. You’re not the survivor or the altruistic hero. You’re standing on the precipice of villainy. You want to be the villain of your own life story—act selfishly, lie, cheat, and fuck your way to the top. It’s actually faster—an express elevator to success.

I’m happy that, after all this time, we took the stairs and had good friends to walk with.

A Look Back at October, part 2

Traveling over the last few weeks I’ve discovered a brand new pet peeve. This is something that has always irritated me, but it’s become an obsessive hatred lately: Automatic restrooms. Toilets that flush automatically, sinks that come on if you wave your hands, paper towels that dispense if you wave your hands. No levers, no handles. And, usually, no results. When was it determined that the average restroom visitor doesn’t possess the same co-ordination as a hamster? Hamsters are frequently rewarded with food pellets if they push a lever. Yet we must rely on the toilet noticing that we’ve left before it will flush. And these toilets rarely pay attention. Once upon a time, there was a tiny black button on the wall you could push to remind the toilet of its function. These, too, have disappeared via some restroom evolution. I’m told it’s more sanitary. That visitors rarely flush or wash anyway. That it’s more economical. Whatever. All I know is I go into any public restroom and I’m waving and swaying and doing everything but what I actually came in to do. (And nothing responds, of course, causing my neuroses to make me feel like I don’t have a soul.) Why do I have to succumb to St. Vitus Dance just to get a bathroom to recognize that I’m there?

…Anyway… While Rock ‘n Shock didn’t put us into a new tax bracket, it did provide us with some brand new and valuable contacts. We came back with new assignments, prospective opportunities, and a couple of new friends. So the magic triangle of shows remains:

______CONTACTS_____

FUN_______________MONEY

As long as you get two out of three, it should be considered a good show. The magic would be all three, but that’s only been Wasteland so far this year (although Fango Chicago ran a close second…)

Returning home was spent in recovery. It was a long trip and I start to feel long trips long before we even take them these days. I spent the following few days whipping up a “clean” version of Splatter Movie for our world premiere screening at the Hundred Acres Manor. I wanted to have a cut minus the sex and profanity, in case we got families in attendance. At this point, early in the week, we still weren’t sure if we were going to have an outdoor screening or not, so I wanted to have bases covered. The resulting cut was only ten minutes shorter, including an alternate cut of Debbie’s big scene in the film which has a completely different tag in the full-length feature (but this “clean” cut will be available on the DVD). This “clean” cut also has beeped-out swearing, including one scene between Jeff Waltrowski and Bill Hahner that was largely improv’d on set to lampoon the sailor’s mouths most grips have on set. With all the beeps, the dialogue sounds like we’re signaling ships at sea via morse code.

As it turned out, I needn’t have bothered. Since we couldn’t get any of the papers or radio stations to even mention this screening—despite the fact that the Manor advertises in the majority of these outlets—the bulk of our audience was made up of cast and crew and a few really cool supporters (thanks to Dave, Tara, Brittney, the McCrae family, Adam D., Mario, his mom, dad and grandma, and the gentleman we didn’t know for all the back-up!). We screened the film in the private house on the Manor’s property using our cobbled-together equipment, and it turned out to be a nice set-up, despite some technical difficulties. First we used a disk that had some compression issues. So we popped that and started over. Then the extension cord got kicked out of the wall midway through, so that caused an abrupt intermission. I had, of course, forgotten our grip kit, so no tape was on hand (nor was there an extension cord—I needed to borrow that from the Manor folks). Hey, I can’t remember everything, can I? Ah, shaddap.

And despite the uncompletedness of the film—misplaced music cues and sound effects—it seemed to go over real well with everyone. Especially with Eric Molinaris and his effects crew, who I’d suspected would be the harshest judges. But they were thrilled with the way their work had been cut, so I will deem this movie to be a success, though I have a lot of work ahead of me. Still need to re-record the off-screen interview dialogue (which will be done with a special guest voice), matte a couple of “movie-in-the-movie” scenes, finish the foley, prod Jeff into finishing the music, write up a contract for the “Special End Credits Song Donated by a Really Cool and High Profile Artist”, pop in the finished effects shots provided by Patrick Desmond and con Rich Conant into cleaning up the audio for me (including all the scenes where people are walking on gravel and it sounds like I have the microphone submerged in a bowl of cereal). Oddly enough, that’s not a lot of work, though. Just time-consuming.

(On top of that, I’m still working on finishing the final sound mix for The Resurrection Game with Scooter McCrae’s new score. I really want to finish this one and have it out by the end of the year. Trying to track down and interview as many people as possible for a new documentary as well, which will be a bear to complete as I’ll have to transfer hours of old VHS and VHS-C to digital… sigh.)

Our screening at the Manor was followed a few days later by “Amy Lynn Best” day at Scarehouse, run by our good friends Scott and Barb Simmons. Dave Cooper accompanied us to take pictures and Tara Frank provided Amy’s make-up. This was also a fun time, and we actually made more money there than in Boston! Amy was set up right at the head of the line so that people waiting to get into the haunt could look at her pics and DVDs, chat with her, etc. More than a few people got all excited to meet the “Movie Lady”.

I do have to say that Scarehouse is a fantastic haunt. We have a lot of friends acting in this maze of a place and it’s doubly unnerving to have the shadows call out your name as you’re wandering around and already creeped out. My good friends Don Bumgarner and Bill Hahner, both of whom can be seen in Splatter Movie, were chief among the willy-givers (although that does sound dirty, doesn’t it?).

Now, at this point, we hadn’t been home for more than a couple of hours to sleep in over a month. The house is starting to crumble like the ruins of Gormenghast, the dogs don’t recognize us, the cats… well, they’re cats, they don’t care one way or another. The horses are fine—they have 50 acres of grass so they don’t even need us.

It hasn’t been all fun and games, though. Or, really, almost at all. Between the traveling, the working, the movies, the magazine, life keeps banging on our door to remind us that there are other things to attend to.

Our oldest cat, Gypsy, has been having trouble walking and I was convinced we’d have to put him down last week. He got a reprieve from the vet who wanted to run more tests, just to make sure he didn’t actually have anything fatal. Spending the whole day at work waiting to get home and take your cat for a quick euthanasia, then discovering no, not now but maybe later, we’ll see… hell on the nerves.

Add to that stress is my grandmother, who has been having multiple heart attacks at her nursing home in Florida. She’s almost 93, suffers from Alzheimer’s… My mother flew down to be with her, also a nervous wreck.

But does any of that keep us down? Hell no! Because who has the time to be depressed or worried? Not when there are so many exciting and new horrors to surmount on a daily basis!

And more on that later…

Quick things

Off to buy my bi-monthly set of tires and still digesting the news that Mike George of the Pittsburgh Comicon might be a murderer. Of course, we'd heard the news for years--a couple of his past employees have speculated that he was involved in his first wife's execution, but I always chalked this up to "stories we talk about when we're drunk and discussing weird con things". If it does turn out to be true, I think about the times I've shopped at his store, attended his shows... the idea is just chilling.

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We wrap this weekend. Splatter Movie: The Director's Cut, barring new tornadoes, should be complete by 5pm Saturday, minus perhaps one small effects shot to be obtained later. It's shaping up, however, to be a very good, very bloody and very fucking weird movie.

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Our friend Jasi Cotton Lanier, the "Stuntbabe" who worked with us on The Resurrection Game, Were-Grrl and Severe Injuries, not to mention Fifth City and was the model for Lara Croft in Joe Jusko's painted Tomb Raider Special, shot a terric commercial for Heinz Ketchup. Go to YouTube, watch the cool-ass video ("Tap the Flavor") and vote for it. It deserves to win the "Heinze 'Top This' TV Challenge." It's easily the best of the bunch.