Brendan Jesus
BJ: I love the found footage aspect that you bring to this film. I enjoy found footage, but it can get monotonous at times. If this is okay to ask, IMDb has a budget for this film at an estimated $1 million. Is that fairly accurate?
Scott Slone: Production budget-wise, we were at about $400k. What we spent in post? I don’t know. If you were really to break this down, you have to go all the way back to 2010. On a typical project, let’s say you and I are shooting a movie right now, we’d start by drawing up a budget. Let’s say $100k. We’d spend six months to a year making this movie and we could keep the budget at around $100k. Now imagine that goes on for 10 years and we have to pay for production office space, employees, editors, or whatever it may be. I don’t know what that would add up to. The executive producers probably know, or our sales agents probably have a good clue, but I could not tell you. The $1 million was probably put on IMDb because that was going to be our cap. That was probably designated around 2015.
By 2015, we had probably only spent about $150k to $200k. Post production and payroll for employees, plus editors and assistant editors…look, some of these people make $2500 a week! Paula Fairfield was one of our sound designers. She didn’t do the last version, but she came from Game of Thrones, Lost, all the Rodriguez movies. I’m sure she cost a lot of money! I personally don’t know these things, but she might have cost $50k on her own! I try not to worry about budget, personally, because it can hinder certain things. I also have no idea who put that $1 million on IMDb. I have more knowledge of the production side of budgeting, which was definitely around $400k, but the post budgeting, I don’t know as much. Some of the budget stuff I have no control over. Someone will come up to me and say remember that police cruiser you wanted? You don’t have it. You have a blank Dodge and we’ll put a police emblem on it in post. Those types of things I learned, unfortunately, on set. But I mean, the film was made over 12 years, so thinking $80k a year would make sense, in regards to $1 million.
I try not to worry about budget, personally, because it can hinder certain things.
BJ: One of the reasons I was blown away by that was I thought it would be more than that. I mean, you have a Snoop Dogg song! That’s expensive! Seeing a movie that is running the festival circuit with such an expensive song to license made me feel good inside.
Scott Slone: That’s actually really awesome because we’ve been paying for that song since 2012. I don’t know how much it is per year, but it goes to Dr. Dre, Snoop, and a few others. On top of that, that scene was actually longer! Before that, there was a Kanye West and Drake song, which we were also paying for for a couple of years. There was a whole 12-song soundtrack. I’m glad you say that because it’s left in there for two reasons. One is that when we shot it, I had no idea if we could actually get the license. We submitted the scene, and they thought it was cool, but you also have to get them to resay yes every year. It was going to get cut out for monetary reasons. But like you said, and the other reason is, it might give our movie more polish.
When you watch an independent film, if you see or hear bad audio or see bad acting, then you’ll automatically get that feeling that it’s indie. And if you end up liking it, you’ll say, oh dude this movie is super, super indie. What I kept thinking was, well not everyone is going to like found footage, and not everyone is going to like horror, so how can I give it that polish to make it stand out from the rest of those indie movies to make it look like it could play in theatres? Our goal all along was to put this type of movie back into theatres but to do it differently. We knew people wanted found footage but not an hour and a half of shaky cam’s worth, so we wanted to package it differently. So having a song like that and biting the bullet and paying for it was our way of saying, hey, we want to be different and be in the theatres. It’s an independent film, but we want to do everything we can to make it feel not so independent. By you catching that, it’s a check for us.
BJ: While on the topic of budget, I wanted to talk about the caves. In my review, I talk about how I can’t really tell if the caves are actual caves or some incredible set design.
Scott Slone: It’s a combination. There’s two caves. One cave, whenever they’re all together in their circle, where the tents are, that cave is the original Bat Cave. Like the original Adam West Bat Cave, which is directly below the Hollywood sign. It’s in Bronson Canyon. There’s really just a big entrance in and a big entrance out. On every exit, we set up green screens, and at night we would just set up blackout drapes. The other cave is actually on a movie ranch in Santa Clarita where they have an army base, a Colosseum, and where like Iron Man shoots their Afghan village stuff. So out there, there was a small cave system with an entry way and a walkout, which kind of looked like a miner’s cave and was built for the show Weeds. When we got there, we realized, this isn’t enough cave. We ended up building onto it and started painting the walls; at this point we filmed once. Then we came back two years later, and they let us do whatever we wanted, like you want to add to the cave? For them, they were getting more cave! The film is a combination of both of the caves. A lot of it also has to do with how you light the cave. If you just go into there with pure white hot lights and look around it doesn’t look that great at all. The majority of the cave you see is the fake cave.
BJ: The cave looked very lived in, and felt like a character just as much as anyone else.
Scott Slone: That’s a good point. Initially, it was too much of kids running around in the woods, and the feedback from everyone was, eh…we’ve seen enough of that. My thought then was, well we have this cave…why don’t we do more in the cave? The film you see, if you think about it, all takes place in the cave. It opens in the cave, she plays the video inside the cave, and then it closes in the cave. I love The Descent, but I couldn’t think of many cave movies. I tried to watch all the cave movies I possibly could, but I thought we were in a pretty good spot. No one is going to say, I’ve seen too many cave movies! But kids with a flashlight in the woods? You can name a million of those. We did want there to be a claustrophobic element to it, and like you said we wanted the cave to feel lived in. That could come from sweeping up all the dust before you roll, or smoke machines, or just the fact that the art department spent a lot of time making it look as real as possible. When you looked at that cave, normally you wouldn’t think it looked that great, but when you dressed it and lit it up, it looked much better. I’m glad you picked that up.
BJ: You talked a bit about special effects, but I did notice quite a bit of practical effects here.
Scott Slone: There are not many digital effects in the film. Maybe there are like two or three, what I would call, modern visual effects in the film, as well as a bit of compositing. This movie is probably 98% practical. It’s that way because you can’t always trust visual effects. An [assistant director] or a producer will tell you the classic line, ‘We’ll fix it in post[-production],’ it’s bullsh*t. You’ll never completely fix something in post. So I wanted to be able to see everything in front of me. We hired an amazing company called Spectral Motion to do Troy’s, like, riverbed look. A lot of what Troy does, say Scary Stories or Hellboy, it’s Troy, but there’s a lot of CGI thrown on top. And Troy can do amazing things! When a kid gets sucked up into the air, that’s a sling pulling him up.
BJ: How did you do the tent pull?
Scott Slone: That was done about twenty-something different ways. If you’re asking how it was successfully done, that’s a journey. We tried it many different ways over a five-year period. There’s a stunt performer Steve Rizzo, who has a great team, he came in with a 4WD Jeep. Keep in mind we have tried this a bunch of different ways, and it didn’t look good. We tried to speed it up and do all this stuff, and it just didn’t work. Steve came in, and we told him our problem. This led to a one- or two-day shoot just for this. He brought in a Jeep and attached the tent by a rope. The Jeep was outside the cave. Steve says he’s just going to drag the tent out of the cave, and I’m like, okay, cool. Now there’s a lantern in the tent. In the original design, there’s also a camera inside the tent. Essentially, he says he’s just going to drag the tent, but I ask him how we’ll make it look like somebody. One person recommended we put basketballs inside, which we tried, and it looked good. It just didn’t look great. That’s when Steve told me Ashley’s stunt performer would just do it. I said, what do you mean? And he said, well, she’ll get in the tent. I haven’t worked much with stunts before, so I was just like, oh sh*t, you really just get in this tent and go? She was on a harness so the Jeep was pulling her and the tent. Long story short, that is a real person in a real tent getting pulled by a Jeep.
BJ: I don’t know how I didn’t put this together, but when you’re referring to Troy, that’s Troy James. He is absolutely amazing. How did you get him on board?
Scott Slone: We had one creature in our film who was played by Doug Tate. Doug did a lot of work for us and was one of our creature builds. He was a stronger warrior-type build. When we needed a second creature, we needed someone who was kind of skinny and snakey. It was the Canadian version of America’s Got Talent and there was this viral video in like 2013-14. It wasn’t even the video from the show, but a video from backstage after the show had wrapped, and someone was just filming him walking around the room. At the time, it felt new and fresh, though the spider walk has been around for a while. When we filmed, this was his first feature film. He went on to do Channel Zero, Scary Stories, and Hellboy, but at the time I didn’t have much to pull from besides that video. When I met Troy, he was just a super cool person who was down to do whatever. Plus, it was cool that he didn’t have to have like a green suit on or anything. I’m also happy that he has lines in Nightmare Alley, he’s a character in that. Initially, we were going to have Ashley’s character get possessed, so we were looking for a female. It’s funny to think, though, that our movie is going to come out after all these other movies he was in! Troy definitely brought that creepiness that we needed for that character. Before him, we didn’t have much of that creepy factor. I mean, we had the FLIR camera and the cave chamber stuff, but being able to add him in there gave it that extra factor. If you look at our branding, now it’s Troy on the posters!
BJ: FLIR footage became a tool a lot of filmmakers in this subgenre overuse, and often done incorrectly. The way you incorporate it works so well. When Troy does his dead drop in the FLIR footage, something he’s become famous for, it works so well and is one of the scariest moments.
Scott Slone: I appreciate that. That section is one of my favorite sections. Adding the FLIR was nice because it still gave us that found footage feel. I thought it would be too jarring if I made the filming too traditional at the end, so it kind of gives you that found footage element. Back in the day, not many people had used it, and it was new and cool back then. Then it became more about giving the audience that found footage feel even though we’ve left that portion of the movie behind.
BJ: As someone who watches tons of professional YouTube true crime and paranormal videos, your exposition scene feels like the top of the top of these creators. You have KTLA news anchors, are they an actual channel?
Scott Slone: Oh yeah, they are an actual channel out here. You might recognize Rick Chambers because outside of working here in the local news, he’s in a ton of big blockbusters. He’s like the go-to news guy. I knew some people from the area who would see this would think, oh sh*t this is real because that’s KTLA, and people outside of LA might think, this feels too real. I hate fake news channels and news footage in movies. We made it a point to go out and film everything ourselves. We had 30+ different cameras being used for filming this movie. Every year a new drone would come out, so we’d get it and go shoot some footage. I did have one of the editors on the film, Dustin Fine, tell me this looks too polished and that maybe we should dumb it down a little. But when I also watched some of the stuff you’re referring to, the ones I liked the best were put together the best. I like the videos that are made of like a million elements; give me archival footage, interviews, and search and rescue videos. So there are probably 300 clips in that portion of the film. The modern audience wants you to get to the point of the film, so it’s kind of hard to put things together a certain way and still hold someone’s attention. That’s probably the most technical section of the movie with everything that’s involved.
BJ: One of the most psychologically jarring moments is when the four investigators get the footage off the corrupted SD card. I think I had the realization at the same exact moment as them when they realize they’re in the same cave as what’s on the SD card. It becomes psychological at that point.
Scott Slone: Those are things you think about. In a horror film, you have to sometimes cram in something where you think it might not fit. Plus, I’ve dealt with corrupted memory cards before, so it seemed like a good fit.
BJ: You did kind of speak on this, but is there a physical release planned?
I am a major physical media person. We have created a physical version of this movie that I don’t want to give away—I don’t want anyone to jack this idea.
Scott Slone: Right now, the whole movie release pattern is up in the air. The goal from the jump was to get this in theaters for the first quarter of 2023. Maybe a year ago, we had September or October in mind, but you’re competing with a lot of studio horror films at that time. Now we’re talking with many different people about releases and how we’re going to go about it. I am a major physical fan. I love physical media. I just spent the last two years rebuying all my physical media on iTunes. I couldn’t tell you the amount of money I spent on that, but it was roughly around 3000 movies. I have Apple TVs in every room, so I have my own digital library, mainly because a lot of streamers are dropping the ball a little. That being said, I am a major physical media person. We have created a physical version of this movie that I don’t want to give away—I don’t want anyone to jack this idea. I will say it was a really cool physical release. There was a leak around 2016-17 so some people might know about it because we were sending them around to studios. No matter what we know, this movie will be coming out within the next year, but we are also doing festivals for a little while longer. I do really want physical media to be a part of this film. Whether it’s streaming or theatrical, I am going to make sure in that contract there is a physical release. At our stage, though, we don’t really know. Someone may say we’ll do a small theatrical run, and then hit streaming, and some might say we’re just going to do streaming, no theatrical.
BJ: I want to end this by thanking you for taking the time to sit down and chat with me. I f*cking loved this movie. I’ve been able to do a lot of festivals through Horror Obsessive, and I’m thankful for that. Not sure if you remember Mick Garris’ Masters of Horror, but I’ve been putting together my own list of who I think the modern Masters of Horror are. So far on the list I have Nathan Crooker, and Jane Schoebrun (We’re All Going To The World’s Fair), and I think I can safely say you’re on that list. You’re taking ideas that a lot of people have done, and you did them first, but people might not realize that. It would pain me for someone to watch Malibu Horror Story and say, this has already been done.
Scott Slone: I appreciate that. It is one of those things where we were constantly changing the movie. Movies would come out, and I would think, someone is going to say we ripped this off. There were parts of me where I didn’t want it to feel like it was mirroring something else. I stopped watching these types of movies around the last three years of post because I knew I would want to change things. You’re correct, some people might look at this unfairly and say, I’ve seen this and this done many times before, and that’s fair. It doesn’t matter when you start a film, it matters when you finish. For me it’s more about the compilation of things. You may have seen x, y, or z, but you haven’t seen them compiled like this. My biggest thing, especially for people who hate found footage, is this could be the bridge to make you interested in found footage. I don’t really care about the tropes that have been done before, as long as you look at this and think, there’s not many hybrid films that feel like this. So I’m okay with it coming out late. All I can say is our movie would not be what it is today without the time it took to tweak this film.
BJ: Do you have any advice for aspiring writers, directors, or filmmakers, in general?
Scott Slone: For me, it’s a three-part thing. One is what we talked about a little bit: invest in yourself. Whether it’s a camera, a microphone, or a final draft. Two is that where you live makes a difference. I knew those stories you hear, and the things that happen normally take place in NY or LA. You can live in Connecticut or New Jersey and still have that comfortable NY lifestyle. With the way the internet is now, communication has evolved. With these new forms of communication you can probably get involved with people if you live in, like you said, Bumf*ck, Ohio—I usually say Topeka, Kansas. If you don’t live in one of those hubs, you just have to hustle harder.
I’ve lived in LA for 20 years, and you could be at a bar one night, and there could be a lot of people who will change the trajectory of your life. Being in that atmosphere plays a huge part. And three is to do something original or unique. It doesn’t matter if someone has seen something before, if you can make it different and your own, that’s important. It’s like with music. If someone comes in with a song that sounds like what everyone else is doing, you may like it, but if you come in with a new style, it changes the game. That’s how you inspire people. Just never sit and twiddle your thumbs. Everyone sits around and says things like, I’m an actor, what can I do with my spare time? Write a script! Hustle and do something! Competition today is different than what it used to be.
