Brendan Jesus
I got the opportunity to interview Scott Slone, who is the writer/director of the hybrid found footage film Malibu Horror Story, which is currently slashing its way through the festival circuit. This film is a fresh and unique take on the found footage subgenre, but it also excels as a straight-up horror flick. In this interview, Scott gives great insight into the film that took 12 years to make, as well as giving excellent advice and a good look behind the scenes of what really goes into making a movie. Thanks again to Scott for taking the time to sit down with us, and go catch Malibu Horror Story at a festival, and hopefully a theatre near you soon!
Brendan Jesus: What appeals to you about the festival circuit? Is it the comradery of being at a festival, or getting your films to people who may not get a chance to see them theatrically where they live?
Scott Slone: So for me, in particular, I have not done festivals since the mid-2000s—’06 or ’07 was the last time I had done a festival circuit. I’ve gone to festivals with friends and supported other friends [at festivals], but this is the first time I got my feet fully in it, as what I could consider a mature adult, and really paid attention to how the circuits work. There can be some politics in certain festivals, but I think for me, and particularly for horror festivals, it’s being able to see films for the first time. A lot of these films will go on to have a decent theatrical release or at the very least a decent streaming release on a major streaming site. A lot of my friends who are reviewers get to see things way before me. I’m just now seeing We’re All Going To The World’s Fair; all of my friends are like, oh yeah I saw it back in August! So getting to see it early is a treat, and I think for a lot of people, what I’ve noticed is they like to brag saying, I saw that a year ago at a festival. That’s a cool thing to say though!
The second factor, though, is definitely the comradery between filmmakers. You begin to see that a lot of people are in the same position as you. Plus, there are so many different tiers of films. Some of these films are bigger budget and already have distributors attached; sometimes it’s with a smaller distributor and the filmmaker is really struggling to get the word out about it. So for us with a film like [Malibu Horror Story] and it taking 10 years to finally get out there, when the first person finally saw it in a theatre, which was around Halloween 2021 at HorrorFest, I was excited! I knew I want people to do reviews, good or bad! It was just the fact that it was finally out and people are seeing it and giving their opinions, and I am not going to touch this movie again; no more tweaks, reshoots, additions…this is it! That to me feels really really good.
The festival circuit now is almost becoming as important now as it was in the late ’90s.
The festival circuit now is almost becoming as important now as it was in the late ’90s. In the ’90s you had Tarantino, Soderberg, Rodriguez, Paul Thomas Anderson, Wes Anderson, and Spike Lee. You had a slew of filmmakers that came out of that late ’90s festival circuit. It was important then and launched all their careers. Now I think we’re seeing a resurgence of how important these festivals are, and it’s solely because, like you said, the theater is dominated by the next Marvel movie or the next $100 million movie, and it just so happens that the festivals are being dominated with the best independent cinema out there. This leads to streamers being able to pick what they want from festivals. My hope is some theatrical companies are going to try taking some chances again and going independent. Without hyping up the Weinsteins in any way, shape, or form, we need another Miramax to swoop up young filmmakers and get their films to the masses. You’re right, if you’re not in a certain city at a certain time a film may only be playing in festivals and may never get a release, so who knows. At this point, we are five or six months in and have done about 16 festivals and won about 14 awards so far, so we feel really good about the response. Especially in the nonhorror festivals! I still have another six months to go with this, potentially, depending on what happens over the next few months.
BJ: I hate to say there were any positives from COVID, but I would say if it did anything good it was virtual screenings. It gave someone from, let’s say, Bumf*ck, Ohio the opportunity to watch a film that’s premiering in Los Angeles. So I do think festivals are becoming more attainable. Before we get farther into everything? Where did your love of horror come from, and how did your film journey start?
Scott Slone: When I was in high school I was in the Carolinas, and a lot of big productions were coming through. I worked on four or five movies as a junior in high school. The biggest one was Cold Mountain. That was like a seven-time Oscar movie with Nicole Kidman and Anthony Minghella. That was the first taste I got of a big film set, and I was directing background action, which was a Key PA. Wilmington and Charleston were big filming hubs back then. That’s when I figured I’d go to LA and work on sets, while I worked at Blockbuster for a day job. I’ve worked for like 12 Blockbusters. I grew up all over. I was born in Montana, and grew up in St. Louis, Maryland, Florida, so I’ve lived all over. Essentially, I worked at video stores, and on movie sets for the first few years while I was writing.
For me, the most important thing was writing, I wanted to be a screenwriter first and foremost, I thought it was going to be really really hard to direct a movie and have people back you on that. I learned that if you write a screenplay well enough that people see your vision—like for me, I tend to put a lot of terms and techniques into a script, so it seems like it’s written from the director’s perspective. In a typical screenplay, you’re taught not to put camera words or anything. I always tell people to write your script as you see it, that way people will see the script as you see it and then they will see your vision. That first screenplay I wrote was called Old Man Music, which won a couple of competitions back then. When I was barely 21, I was living in Los Feliz and a friend of a friend, Lightfield Lewis, whose sister is Juliette Lewis. Their father is Geoffrey Lewis, said he’d give it to his dad. I was a big fan of his dad! He’s been in hundreds of movies—one of the best character actors of all time. He said he’d give my script to his dad, so I put it on his desk. He read it and called us up the next day saying he wanted to do it. This is back when it was 35mm film, so we had to get Panovision and Kodak on board because we had no money.
Then I got a bunch of other friends who were actors around—like one of the kids from American Pie, just trying to get some people who were recognizable. When I put that together I was young and didn’t have much experience, but I had a vision and went for it. Then it hit the festival circuit and won a few awards! From that point on, I’ve just been going. It’s kind of a typical story of working on sets and at a video store. The video store was like my film school. I was watching 30 to 40 movies a week. Also when I was on set, I was just studying. I would tell my friends to get jobs as an extra on sets because you still get to be on set and study. So all of that kind of compiled with making my first film, and having that typical LA thing that’s like a friend put a script on another friend’s desk, and they called us the next day.
BJ: Do you have a favorite horror movie?
Scott Slone: I’m a list guy. I technically have a 100 list for everything, it’s on my website. So if we’re going by that ranking, my favorites are going to be the classics. If you say, hey what are your three favorite horror films? I’d have to sit here and say, on a movie level it would have to be around The Shining, Rosemary’s Baby, and Suspiria range. If you were going to ask, what about films that will go down in history or my favorite horror movie of the last 10 years? I have a million of them. There are just so many. You’d have to ask, what’s your favorite James Wan movie, or what’s your favorite found footage movie? I can’t really pinpoint just one, but I could name hundreds that I vouch for and could recommend.
BJ: You mentioned Malibu Horror Story was a 10-year production. When did you start shooting, and what all went into the 10-year production?
Scott Slone: I’m glad you asked; not many people do. They just hear 10 years and write “10 years in the making.” It was actually a little longer. We started in 2010. It started after Paranormal Activity, which was ’09. I saw it in theatres, and it immediately reminded me of Blair Witch. Plus, social media was not that big around that time, so there weren’t tweets and people going onto Instagram talking about it. There was still that word-of-mouth marketing that Blair Witch had. Also, I was a kid when Blair Witch hit, which went around like wildfire. I thought the whole Paranormal Activity thing was interesting, and it wasn’t about the money. It was about the style.
At this point, I haven’t transitioned into digital. I was still shooting on film. I thought [found footage] would be a good way for me to transition from film to digital. A couple years prior, I did a short film [in which] I was able to use the new digital cameras that were coming out at the time, but I ended up shooting on film. After seeing Paranormal Activity, I went home and wrote the story of Malibu Horror Story, which at the time was called Malevolent. I get the script for that finished in 2010, and think let’s find out what camera Paranormal Activity used and buy it, cast some unknowns, and shoot this thing for under $50,000. To me, this seemed doable.
We went out and shot the movie and spent basically all of 2010 doing it. Once we got into the editing room, we realized we didn’t have any money left. We started calling in favors from editors, and at this point, I was not able to edit. I had no editing skills at that time; I was still just a writer/director. Essentially, we started putting the movie together the best we could and then realized we didn’t have much of an ending. It was kind of trash. There was no money for special effects. We ended up using this as like a 45-minute feature with no ending as a proof of concept. Then we started shopping it around town, but no one was really biting on it. This is before found footage got really hot, this is before things like Chronicle came out.
Eventually, we found a few people who were willing to give us funds for it, so we finally had a good bit of money. This took us from like zero crew to like a hundred-person crew. At this point, it was 2012, and we reshot the whole thing under the name Untitled Found Footage Project or something like that. We realized the title Malevolent had problems; people were reading it as “male-violent,” you know reading it like that. I loved the title at the time, and now it’s been used like six times! We shot the 2012 version of the movie, which is essentially all of the found footage you see in today’s version. The movie you watched had the found footage shots from 2012, all compiled and edited in 2012. So that was that version, and the whole thing was found footage.
It’s been a journey to get it done. I mean, we thought we were done like three or four times.
It ended up taking us a couple of years to put it together in post[-production]. It was a lot. There were special effects, creature stuff, green screen, just a whole lot. We were just very overwhelmed in post. Editing was 2013, 2014, and even into 2015. Finally, we had what we considered to be a decent version of the film. At this time, we were on the Paramount lot at the Robert Evans company. One of our producers decided we were going to call this The Malibu Tapes. To be honest, I didn’t even really care about a title. I didn’t even title this Malibu Horror Story. I just cared that whatever we called it fit. When we were filming, it was just us and Chronicle. We were very early on. But we had one extra on our set who said they just came from a set: ‘It’s just like you guys, but it’s on the Warner Brother’s lot, and it’s a huge party where a kid follows people around with a camera.’ I asked what it was called, and they said Project X, and I was like, ah sh*t. So now I thought we had to tone our party down because our movie was like 45 minutes of a house party and a rave, and then [in] the rest, they go camping and get killed. That’s essentially how this movie was.
I realized this wouldn’t work, and it would look like we ripped off this movie and that movie. The tagline for this movie at the time was, “[P]arty then die.” The other tagline was, “[T]hey graduated, they partied, they vanished.” That’s how the movie was being branded at the time, kind of going for like a spring break release—you know, like a horror party theme. When we finally got it finished and started taking it around people were like, this is good, but found footage is kind of dying right now and [were saying] that no one was going to see these movies anymore. This was like 2016. All the studios were like, we’ve been doing this since ’09, we think it’s done. There were a few stragglers at the tail of it. Phoenix Forgotten was one of the last ones at that time and got put into theatres in 2017, making like $3 million.
At this point, anyone who had interest in making out film—keep in mind this is before streaming became what it is—everyone who had interest in our film was out. It became an oversaturated market. Now we had to sit there and go back to the drawing board. We were like, oh sh*t, I don’t think anyone is ever going to see our movie. Found footage is dead. We went back, did some test audience stuff in a live theatre with an audience of all demographics and age ranges. We got a lot of feedback, then we compiled a newer story based on feedback. That’s sort of where the horror film with a found footage aspect came from. I knew people would look at this movie and say, oh it’s a found footage movie, but I wanted it to be branded as a horror movie with found footage aspects in it.
I wanted to give the found footage [aspect] in a more palatable way, something that made it easier to digest. A lot of people can’t sit through an hour and a half of nauseating footage that’s shaky all the time for 10 minutes of payoff. We really paid attention to all the feedback we got and started tweaking certain aspects of it, while also looking at what was popular at the time. Ghost hunting shows were popular at this time. Tons of them were being made. That’s when I thought a ghost-hunting show would be a good way to deliver this, so that’s how that became incorporated. Then I knew the movie needed to be more creepy. That’s when we brought in Troy [James], the contortionist, so we brought in his character and storyline, as well as these new kids, these like YouTuber kids. The Paranormal Files ghost hunters. That whole aspect of the film, we just finished almost seven months ago. It’s come a long way. There are technically four final versions of this movie that got us to this one. Four times we were like, here, it’s done! It’s been a journey to get it done. I mean, we thought we were done like three or four times.
