I’d like to preface this by saying that while that title may seem dramatic, it’s ultimately what this project became. So what was this project? Our task was to use what we had learned in our horror unit and create a short horror film surrounding the driving question:

“Why is horror such an effective way to reflect and comment on our society?”

But let’s take a step back. Where did this all start?

Well, that being Seattle. We traveled down and went to the MoPOP, a museum that had a whole exhibit just on horror. It was really interesting to see interviews with famous directors and horror actors, and see their perspective. We also got to see examples of different horror monsters, such as the difference between an <alien> and a <person>, and how that affected the theme and tone of a movie.

With our research started, then came the next part: planning the movie. After a few pitches, we had a fairly good idea of what we wanted to do. We needed to cover something that was doable with what he had, obviously, and it had to comment on our society.

We chose to go with something relevant to us: teenage stereotypes. Our story was going to center around two groups of teenagers who don’t like each other, nerds and jocks. They had planned to put halloween pranks around the school on the same night. Slowly, the students are picked off one by one, and each side suspects the other side did it. At the end, however, it’s revealed it’s the janitor who’s tired of their antics and cleaning up after them.

It felt strong, though that was probably where this project peaked. As they say, it all went downhill from there. Our script had quite a few revisions to do, including cutting characters and making the students be in detention, set after the pranks had happened. Next, we were on to filming.

 

If we thought script revisions were hard, we had no clue what was coming for us with filming. I was set to makeup department, so I luckily didn’t need to deal with anything such as directing, but it was still difficult. Origin in ally, we had Ryan set as our beautiful Janitor. Of course, Ryan is not a middle aged man, but I used stage makeup the best I could to make him look as such:

I was also acting, playing the character of a gay theatre geek named Kirk. Acting was interesting, as it was a lot of waiting around for everything to be set up, and doing the sam elites over and over and over again. I think over all, I preferred doing makeup.

After a long few weeks of work, we found that our film wasn’t quite there. So we had a few recasts, in both actors and production crew, and reshot everything. Everything. It was exhausting, but I got to do a major part of my job: more makeup.

Then came the final day of filming. We were so close, we had just shot Willa’s death, and the news came. We would have our filming cut short, and we didn’t get to film our final scenes

We didn’t communicate very well in the end, I think. We were trying to manage a full class of people and work around all of their schedules on short notice. So, fo the future, we really need to plan ahead of time, and communicate better.

But, on the bright side, we made a really good trailer!

I still have 2 gallons of fake blood in my house that I never got to use, but I’ll find something for it.

Read ya later

Parker