Haunted
So,
two movies down, two to go. At this point, we finished Tagged, and it
was about mid-November. I remember, because it was freezing when we shot
the alley scene in Tagged and I was still sick from parading around
Halloween night dressed as a ballerina. (in hindsight, not the best
idea.)
We took a little
break over the winter, and then reconvened in January to film... Murder
Party. -But wait- isn't this blog about Haunted? Why yes, yes it is.
But at that point, Haunted was a very different story.
Haunted
was the last thing we filmed, primarily because up until about a month
before we shot it, it was a completely different script and story. The
original story was about a young girl that grew up in a haunted house.
The hauntings weren't malevolent or anything, and the girl almost saw
them as a reassurance, or security blanket that had followed her over
her entire life. As a young adult, she now lives in the house, alone,
but the occasional flickering of lights or creak of the door reminds her
that she's always got this "presence" with her. Eventually, she meets a
guy, and upon bringing him back to her house, the ghostly activity gets
more severe. The guy gets injured in an incident involving breaking
glass, and he storms off. For the first time, she fears the
supernatural presence that she had always came to rely on growing up,
and under the insistence of her new boyfriend, they ask a pastor to
bless the house. The pastor shows up, and we have this increasingly,
out of nowhere-intense sequence where the house freaks out at we go into
some wild poltergeist activity. Eventually, the house is cleansed, and
the pastor leaves, shaken. The girl and boy continue their romance,
but she can't help but feel like she betrayed whatever presence has been
with her her entire life. Things get out of hand when the boyfriend
increases his sexual advances and she has to fight him off, sobbing as
he walks out of her life. She then lies in bed, watching the door,
waiting for the reassuring creak shut that it used to do, but it never
happens.
So,
that was the original idea in a nutshell. I like it, and I feel like it
might make a better short story than a movie, so I'm filing it away for
later. The problem is, this story isn't very cinematic. Not in a
negative way, but this was supposed to be very low-key, without much
spectacle. It was a haunted house story but I didn't want to ever show
any ghosts, or spell out what exactly was causing the haunting. It was
supposed to be a more emotional haunted house flick, and I feel like we
couldn't have pulled it off at the time, so we switched gears
completely, and went with a vampire flick.
However,
I didn't want to just do a straight forward vampire flick either. I had
the idea that a girl would meet this strange gentleman on the town and
he'd essentially turn her into a vampire like himself, then use her to
lure other unsuspecting guys as prey. On the flip side, the guys she
lures, are onto her, believing her to be responsible for their friend's
death, and are setting their own trap. And to make it even more
twisty-turny, we have the timeline broken up so it doesn't play in
chronological order. As I wrote this, I was really excited, because the
story structure was so different, taking a page out of the Christopher
Nolan or Tarantino playbook. The viewer never gets the whole story
until the end, and it's not clear who the protagonists are, or what the
plan was until the last few minutes. I think this movie definitely holds up more on the second viewing. The strange story structure might've turned some people off, but it's intended to make the viewer work a little and question where it is going. Haunted isn't as straightforward as Tagged, and isn't as entertaining as Murder Party, but I feel like it is the perfect "middle movie" of the anthology. It's a little slower, more experimental, and focuses a little more on emotion.
There
are a couple flaws with this one though, and if I could go back and
change anything, the first would be to fix the damn audio in the cafe.
It kills me that the ice-maker was running intermittently as we filmed,
so it drowns out a lot of the audio. Paul did a terrific job with the
cinematography during their coffee date, but the botched audio kill the
mood. We even went back there the night before we were set to premiere
the movie and attempted to redub the lines. After about five minutes we
decided that was absolutely not feasible, and had to settle with what
we had. It's not terrible, but it hurts the opening. And the ghost
story Sarah tells about her family home was a bit of a nod to the
original story idea. It also brings up the title, "Haunted." Why keep
the same title? It's funny; when we switched to the vampire story, I
was going to call it "Hunted," which wasn't a huge change, and made
sense in the context, but I really liked the title "Haunted," and I felt
it still fit the movie, and also gave it a more ambiguous title, much
like the tone of the entire short.
The
cast expanded a little from Tagged. Sarah and Neil were the leads, and
both did great. It gets a little "meta" here, because essentially, Neil
is the same character from the zombie film, but playing an actor,
playing a vampire. Does that make sense? No? Let me spin it another
way. Neil's character in the zombie film, is an actor who plays a
vampire in this. So his character in the zombie film watches his own
movie that he starred in as part of a local film festival. Does that
make sense? No? Then I'm sorry, I don't know how else to describe it.
It's also fitting that in Haunted, he takes Sarah to be his mate (or
whatever), and in the zombie movie, it appears he has had a secret
affinity for her, which he admits to her before finding out she has
become a zombie and he has to lock her in the stairwell. Layers upon
layers, huh?
Also
in the short: Myself, another part that I wasn't originally going to
play, but ended up doing because of convenience. We're also joined by
the two Scotts (Goedert and Reuber). Goedert played the ticket booth
zombie earlier and did a fantastic job, so we brought him back, and
Reuber gave the most intense performance of the movie, as the friend
distraught over the death of his buddy. It was a conscious decision not
to give any characters in this movie an official name, but man, it
makes it tough to write about it afterwards.
This
movie also featured some cool locals, beginning with Paul's family
owned cafe and the ice machine of doom, and ending at Potter farm, home
and breeding ground of the Potter family. Haunted has some really
nicely composed shots; it's just a shame it wasn't more consistent. No
one's fault really, we just had various things working against us on
this one (time, daylight, and that damn ice machine.) Overall, a good
time to shoot, and we were able to expand on some of our film making
techniques.
Join us tomorrow, because you've just been invited to... The MURDER PARTY!
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