For years, I had been kicking around the world of independent filmmaking trying to get a project made. What I had was a feature length monster movie inspired by the middle section of Mary Shelley’s FRANKENSTEIN, which involved the creature living outside a farmhouse imagining the lives of the humans who lived inside. I often asked myself, “Who were those people and why did the monster want to be a part of their family?”
Drawing on stories from my grandfather’s life in a lower income rural family, I built out the characters that inhabited the story of SLAPFACE. Instead of a re-animated corpse as the monster, I drew from Grimms’ Fairy Tales and legends of witches befriending children and drawing them into their worlds of intimacy and chaos. Frankenstein’s Monster was never far from my mind, though, as the monster in SLAPFACE is seven feet tall, wearing a raggedy cloak and skulking through the forest.
This feature length script was written with a low budget in mind. One of the reasons independent filmmakers make scary movies is the time-honored tradition of not needing big budgets or movie stars to make a project that can sell.
On streaming services you can find all manner of spooky entertainment that was banged out in a couple of weeks or less by enterprising creators.
Seriously, how hard is it to get some young people in the woods, buckets of blood and someone in a mask to dutifully chop them up, or gather a collection of friends to be zombies attacking your rural house?
Once we accept that this can be done, we have to ask ourselves why we want to tell our story. SLAPFACE was personalized by stories from within my family. The cycle of abuse that exists within the two brothers at the center of the story cut very close to the bone for me. In some ways the domestic drama is as scary as the monster, and I was excited by the counterpoint of the human drama versus the supernatural violence that ensued.
The main character is a 12-year-old boy, since I loved how Don Coscarelli’s PHANTASM took a child protagonist and placed him in a bizarre adult story. Once you are dealing with children, you might as well include animals (a dog and a rat figure into the narrative.) So we very quickly had a demanding low budget independent shoot working around the limitations of child labor laws, demanding special effects, animals, and of course limited funds!
I spent years figuring out how to get this movie made, with various producers going about trying to secure funds. There was always confusion over how the Monster is supposed to look. Literally an entire page of the script is devoted to the height, clothes, hair, skin, hands of the creature, and yet producers and investors would ask questions like, “Does it look like Shrek?”
Also, movies like HEREDITARY, THE BABADOOK and THE WITCH hadn’t come out yet, so there wasn’t a framework for character driven stories of dysfunctional families grappling with the supernatural that you could point to in a pitch deck. Which is not to say that they weren’t getting made...Larry Fessenden’s WENDIGO is an essential, inspirational film about a family, a monster, and a sense of ambiguity over what’s real and what is manifested by a child’s imagination. If you haven’t seen the movie, go track it down - it’s an indie masterpiece.
After several years of producers trying and failing to get this story told, I gave up. I put the script away in a drawer and devoted myself to work-for-hire directing, not unlike the Roger Corman school of filmmaking where you are handed a script and told, “We have a slasher in the woods movie and Tom Savini for three days, go direct this to the best of your ability staying on time and on budget.”
That’s good practice for sure, but those projects are largely outside of your control. One of them had no less than five writers, including myself at one point writing 20 pages worth of material as glue to help the finished movie make some sort of cohesive sense. One of them told me flat out, in these words, “We’re not interested in rewrites, we want to make THIS shitty script. Are you interested or not?” Like a dutiful mercenary, we go in and draw our wages and make the best movies we can under the given circumstances. I’m not complaining; I learned a lot.
SLAPFACE had been long forgotten by this point until my friend, and director of photography, Dominick Sivilli suggested that we go out and make a 5-minute proof-of-concept for the movie of my dreams. “Just put together a few of the best scenes and we’ll go shoot it! I need some fantasy material for my reel and five thousand dollars. Let’s go make a movie!” Once I had agreed, he further suggested, “Why don’t we crowd fund a little so I don’t have to spend ALL of the five grand myself?”
After a few weeks of successful crowd funding where I remain indebted to the people who believed in me and this project, all of them, more than I could possibly say, Dominick patted me on the back and said, “That’s a good thing we did that because I DID NOT HAVE FIVE GRAND AT ALL. I just wanted you to make your film!”
While I was torn between throttling Dom and hugging him, he was right. Honestly, I would have never have gotten this going without his push. We shot for two days (and one half-day of pickups) using a cast and crew of friends we had worked with before over our years of grind in the independent film community, edited the piece ourselves, and put it out there for film festivals and critics to judge.
I told myself that no matter what, I had done something that was close to my heart. Even if the feature never got made, I could sleep peacefully at night knowing I had told SLAPFACE even in this abbreviated form, as a short film.
The short connected with horror audiences who identified with the child protagonist and saw in him the outsiders in themselves. All I’ve ever cared about as a storyteller is finding a way to share something with the audience; once the movie is done it completely belongs to them.
I’m grateful to all of the film festivals, mostly in the horror community, that programmed our short film. We used social media to keep people abreast of what was happening with the film and had a lot of fun along the way. We ran for three years, and along the way were discovered by two producers (Joe Benedetto and Mike Manning) who were interested in optioning the feature.
I’ve very much become an advocate of doing a proof-of-concept short film as a way to get the word out about your feature. Doing a short version of your story, with its own beginning, middle, and end, or a piece of the larger story (which is the direction I chose to go), allows you to have an offering that producers can look at and get a sense of tone, performance style; what the monster looks like...! It is much easier to get someone to watch a short film under 10 minutes than to read a 90-page script. If they are enticed by the short version, it accomplishes in a visual way what most people try to do with a logline or an elevator pitch. It’s a living, breathing pitch deck and an expression of your idea.
When Mike and Joe optioned the feature length script, I figured we’d take a year and see what happened. Other producers had tried to get investors in the past. Having the short film proof of concept definitely helped in attracting the money and was also instrumental in hiring Dom (who shot the short) and Lukas Hassel (who played the monster) on the feature. People don’t have to use their imagination; it’s all right there in front of them.
Eight months later I was out there scouting locations, casting, crewing up...and once again most of the crew was people I had long term working relationships with. When you’re doing low budget horror (with kids and animals, as I said earlier) it helps to be working with industry professionals who are your friends and have your back. They knew this was my dream project and they wanted to be there to support me because we had all been in the trenches together for years. Having a community is vital.
When we shot scenes involving extras, I called up my family but also indie horror directors and producers I’ve known along the festival circuit who were happy to show up and be bar patrons. Trust me, those friendships matter. When your back is against the wall, a friend will roll up their sleeves to help. This is a business of relationships.
There are harsh realities of going from a short to a feature as well. For instance, we had to recast some of the lead roles with name talent. 12-year-old August Maturo from GIRL MEETS WORLD and THE NUN was extraordinary as the lead actor in our feature, a brilliant performer and a true partner in every sense of the word.
But I did have to have some not fun correspondence with the child actor from the short film (who had aged out of the role, but still...) and say there was no role for him in the feature length. That was uncomfortable, but you always must do what is best for the movie in as respectful a way as you can.
Another note for aspiring horror filmmakers is to always contractually obligate the special effects department to do a test. If you don’t do this, your effects test will happen during principal photography on set with the entire crew standing around watching you figure it out. That’s basically setting fire to the investor’s money and a gigantic waste of everyone’s time and labor. If you’re forced into this situation by a given circumstance, start with scenes you know you can cut out of the movie if you have to in case the effects don’t work. But better than that is to do tests ahead of time where you can give notes and improve what your whole movie is depending on. This is a horror movie after all!
Always listen to your collaborators with no ego attached. Our producer, Mike Manning, was incredibly creative and hands-on. He gave notes that were brave and thoughtful, saying things like, “What if you made the ending EVEN darker; it would be much more tragic...” or “What if the opening scene was in media res and we throw the viewer into a disturbing scene so that they’ll always feel uncertain for the rest of the running time?”
One such note that was initially difficult to hear but wound up being profoundly good for our story was a suggestion that seemed like a radical shift in story. The short film was the story of a father and son, but he suggested it be about a younger brother and an older brother.
I immediately thought of how THE FOG remake cast all of the actors younger and stripped them of all character and personality.
I didn’t want to make a WB movie. I wanted to make something lean and mean. I balked at the idea but Mike asked if we could talk on the phone for two hours so I could hear him out. With a deadbeat dad, there’s no hope at all...with an older brother, it is a troubled young man trying to take on the responsibility of parenting using tools he learned from an abuser. It would enrich the role and make a character more complex.
Fortunately for me, I had been reading Mark Twain’s HUCKLEBERRY FINN at the time and that book is all about a young man plunged into the violence of an older person’s world. I am so grateful to have listened to Mike, who ultimately made the movie better. That’s the great gift of having smart collaborators building a project with you. If you remain open and listen to them, that is a force multiplier...
We finished the film and edited during the pandemic, which thankfully gave us something creative and enriching to do during lockdown, a weird time in all of our lives. Once we completed the film, we put it out there to film festivals knowing that our goal was to sell the movie and we limited our scope to places that could attract either a sales agent or a distributor. Dread Presents picked up our movie and sold it to Shudder, where we will premiere in early 2022.
It has been a fascinating journey going from a feature length script to a short proof-of-concept to a finished full-length motion picture. As a character says in MAD MAX FURY ROAD, “I live...I die...I live again!”
If you have a script with a high concept idea, maybe you can get the producers on board that way. SLAPFACE is a character driven thriller with a monster in it, and its unique quality was served by starting small and slowly building. I hasten to add that the feature length script was written BEFORE we did the short, so we had a lot to draw on. I don’t recommend going the opposite way necessarily; plenty of short films expanded to features get the critical smack down of, “It feels padded and should have stayed a short!”
Really it all comes down to following your passion and believing that there is always a way. Sometimes it is a sprint, sometimes it is a marathon. At the end of the day, I made the film I wanted to make and am extremely grateful for the journey with the cast, crew, festivals, critics, and collaborators along the way. I can honestly say, even when it was challenging, I have loved every minute.
Jeremiah Kipp's directing credits include SLAPFACE (coming to Shudder in early 2022), the Chinese-American co-production BROKEN BADGES, the HP Lovecraft-inspired BLACK WAKE, and THE SADIST starring Tom Savini. He is currently in post-production on DRAW UP AND STARE starring Michael O'Keefe, Linda Powell and Melissa Leo. He is a graduate of NYU Tisch School of the Arts.
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