The Thing That Could Not Be Watched

By: Mike Drach

Canada has a surprisingly long, rich and storied history of independent horror filmmaking. From Bob Clark’s genre-launching proto-slasher opus Black Christmas to David Cronenberg’s twisted biotechnical mindfucks, right up to Ginger Snaps’ intelligent reimagining of a tired old dog of a genre, our homegrown horror has earned great respect and admiration from fervent fans around the globe.

But this article is not about that.

I wanted to look at the “industry” of those horror movies that scrape the absolute bottom of the barrel; the stuff they’d use to sweep the cutting-room floor. Films so bad, you have to wonder if they were meant to be experienced by other human beings–in more than a few cases, they weren’t. I’ve seen my share of these films, and I always ask: Why was this made? What’s in it for the creators? What drives people to produce this stuff, despite the frustrations of high budgets, terrible critical response and seemingly nonexistent audiences?

It’s hard to say exactly when Canadian (what I call) “C-horror” staggered to life like some beer-addled Frankenhoser. Bad Canadian horror flicks have been churned out nearly nonstop since the 1970s, during the so-called tax shelter years, when sneaky Canuck filmmakers could find American tax shelters for their creations. The slasher era of the 1980s–with its distinctly low-budget, cheap-thrill aesthetic–gave locally produced B-horror an unmistakable Canadian “vibe.” Thanks to the fact that most of these movies were shot during the same wintry months (i.e., when funding tended to become available), and since most of them were processed through the same film labs in Toronto, Canadian slasher movies share that same cold, washed-out look.

But these were at least quote-unquote “films.” They were shot on film cameras by people who were interested in being genuine directors and making profitable movies for wide release. If they couldn’t make it to theatres, they would at least ship across the continent on videotape–for years, the preferred medium of connoisseurs of horror and/or pornography.

The new era of C-horror is all digital, and it began when camcorder technology became cheap and available at the turn of the millennium. The Blair Witch Project, shot for $25,000 (US) and released in 1999, went on to gross more than 10,000 times that worldwide in just five years. But Blair Witch was an anomaly, with its realistic documentary style and genuine scares; our films tend to be the exact opposite. That’s why, for my money, Canada’s contribution to handycam-horror will always be exemplified by the absurd cult flick Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter.

Directed by Lee Demarbre in 2001, Jesus set the scene for what C-horror is today: cartoonish violence, zero-dollar budgets, needlessly exploitive sex scenes, malapropos uses of humour and anachronistic cameos from high-flying Mexican wrestlers. Demarbre may not have known it at the time, but he created a monster. Just two years after its release, Toronto’s Stacey Case released Zombie Beach Party, a lesbian-zombie gorefest starring a masked luchador.

These cheap popcorn flicks often fly way below the radar, getting one-night-stand screenings at repertory theatres without ever attracting real audiences, reviews or even a proper IMDb.com entry. Directors like Demarbre and Case drain their wallets, burn their free time and test the limits of their friends’ goodwill by involving them in their obsessive projects, only to receive little to no recognition for it. Why do they do it? What drives them? And more importantly, where’s the money coming from?

Blood Money

At FanExpo 2007, held at Toronto’s sprawling Metro Toronto Convention Centre, liberated nerds freely wander around dressed as giant robots, anime characters and furries. Somewhere among the booths selling comics, baseball cards and life-size chrome replicas of the Terminator exoskeleton, there’s a section devoted to horror fandom called the Rue Morgue Festival of Fear. In one of the booths sits Christine Whitlock, a middle-aged woman with short, curly hair, dark makeup around her bored-looking eyes and an unconvincing T-shirt that reads “I BITE ON THE FIRST DATE.” She fans herself occasionally with a DVD case, occasionally yelling, “Shark movies, vampire movies. Five dollars!”

In the background, on an infinite loop, we see scenes from her latest film, which was shot around Burlington Bay. It looks like a family video of a boat trip, but occasionally we hear a canned-sounding scream pierce the air, indicating that the Burlington bull shark is on the prowl again. Bemused fans raise their eyebrows at the display and move along. Rarely does someone pony up the fiver to take her flicks home.

Christine’s third independent feature (and second shark movie), Marina Monster, was shot for $500,000 over 15 days with about 120 cast and crew. Much of it was from her own RRSP and savings, although she also credits deferrals of her cast and crew as well as “patrons” contributing amounts of up to $10,000. And she’s currently using her latest work as an impromptu desk fan.

Getting funded is the toughest part of making an independent horror film in Canada. Federal and provincial subsidizers don’t often want to get involved in gory exploitation flicks, at least not as much as they used to. That’s why so many of them are paid for out-of-pocket, done on the cheap, or simply abandoned after a few months of well-intentioned shooting.

Some filmmakers, like Marc Morgenstern, have come up with innovative (if somewhat desperate) solutions. For his upcoming vampire movie, Renfield, he’s offering average schlubs the opportunity to see their name in the credits crawl, with a concept he calls “5,000 Horror fans.” For $400, a contributor will also receive a bronze-plated character bust, an 18K gold-plated title pin, two tickets to the premiere and of course, their name listed on IMDb.

“If 5,000 end up making the credit block,” says Morgenstern, “it’ll break the Guinness World Record for most credits in a film.”

In the meantime, Morgenstern earns money by directing commercials, music videos and educational PSAs about germs and hand-washing, including one called “Attack of the Mutant Germs.” His first movie, The Vampire Conspiracy, was just released by Brain Damage Films. It cost a mere $30,000 to make. Back in the ’80s, the typical budget for a comparably small independent horror film would have cost at anywhere from one- to three-million dollars.

“It’s a totally different marketplace right now,” says Caelum Vatnsdal, a Winnipeg-based filmmaker and author of They Came from Within: A History of Canadian Horror Cinema. “A lot of these things aren’t made for theatrical release anymore, so the budgets can be whittled away when you don’t have to make a thousand prints.”

But what’s truly startling about the hoser horror business is the fact that many of these directors go on to recoup their costs–regardless of the quality of their product or their ability to market themselves.

“There’s a base out there of people who’ll watch any horror movie that comes by,” says Vatnsdal. “You don’t really need big stars. You just have to spend a little money for some blood and maybe a monster suit, so for a relatively low investment you can turn it around and more than likely sell your movie.”

“We’re Not Selling Out, We’re Buying In”

Carrington Vanston, 39, is the most hyperactive bald guy I’ve ever met. He claims he sleeps an average of three hours a night, but only sleeps every other night. And, for someone who calls Quentin Tarantino a “hack” during his rapid-fire interview, he sure speaks a lot like him. Playing back his interview tape, I had to slow it down by 33% just to make out the words.

“It’s possible to make indie films now for a couple of dozen thousand dollars,” he says. “I can make a film out of my own pocket, and we can recoup that money with one broadcast from the Independent Film Channel one time at 5:00 in the morning on a Sunday.”

A computer programmer, website designer and occasional playwright, Vanston has been a horror buff ever since he was able to watch NFB-funded Canuck horror at the library as a teenager. He made a short satirical vampire film called There’s a Bloodsucker Born Every Minute and he’s currently working on a feature, a self-penned self-directed comedy-horror called Zombies vs. Vampires (not to be confused with 2004’s Vampires vs. Zombies, I guess).

The location was scrounged for free, at the same campsite where the first Meatballs was filmed. All the cast and crew are volunteers, despite the fact that Vanston describes himself as a “big bald meanie” on set. Actors receive “inflection guides” for each line and Vanston redubs any dialogue that isn’t spoken just so.

“One of the things that insulates me from criticism is the fact that I honestly don’t care what people think about the work that I create,” Vanston says. “I absolutely would make better films if I were a more collaborative artist. Every one of those people would make better decisions than me on almost everything. And I don’t care; they can go make their own films.”

Yet Vanston is completely assured that his film will make money, despite the very real possibility that he’ll be the only one who enjoys it. And that’s all thanks to globalization: The reason so many Canadian directors go the cheesy indie horror route is because there’s almost always a buyer for it on the international market.

Direct-to-DVD horror s disturbingly popular in places like China, India and Singapore. Walking through one these urban markets, one can find endless stalls of horror flicks, many of them only partly dubbed or subtitled, if at all. Sometimes they even make it to the big screen, although the experience is somewhat less glamorous. In cinemas in India, features play on a loop and audiences can come in and out as they please, often talking or eating throughout most of the production.

“Horror comes from an exploitive mindset,” explains Vanston. “It panders to people who want to be titillated, and you can often follow them without dialogue. That gives it appeal for the international market. All you need is a good poster with a hot chick and the implication that something bad is gonna happen to her.”

The beauty–and the perverse ugliness–of this system is, if you can bother finding yourself an overseas distributor, C-horror can become a viable, even lucrative business for even the schlockiest filmmaker in the country.

The Canadian Unaesthetic

“When you go to a strip club, you don’t get a lap dance and say, ‘Excuse me ma’am, can you pull the receipt out of your tits?’ You don’t do it. You just do it as a hobby. I go into a store and I see an ugly rubber mask for $2.99. I’ve used that skull mask as a prop in three films. If I see a prop for a severed leg, you know that the next week someone’s gonna have a severed leg in my movie. It makes the film look more expensive because it looks like, ‘Oh yeah, I had to plan all that shit.'”

Tony “Tex” Watt is giving me his one-minute course on Indie Horror 101. He wears track pants rolled up on one knee and no shoes. When he wants to drive home a point, he leans forward on his silver cane, a reminder of a car accident that greatly reduced his mobility and left him looking a bit like a paunchier George Stroumboulopoulos with a curly devilock.

Watt has several horror projects on the go, all at various states of completion. Since his filmmaking style is piecemeal — scenes are added on a whim, his scripts are housed entirely within the body of web-based emails — it’s tough to say what his next film is, or even what it’s going to be called. Currently he’s concentrating on a zombie blaxploitation flick called Frankenpimp. So far it’s shaping up to be a straight-to-YouTube production.

“I don’t know what the budget is,” he continues. “I’m pretty sure it’s in the thousands. I don’t know if I’ll recoup it. But the thing is to have it out there. Because once you have it out there, do you know how much clout you have? To say were good or bad is besides the point. What I do know is, even if you make a bad movie, you get respect.”

Watt was born in Kingston, Jamaica and was brought up in various parts of the United States, including Fort Worth and New York City. He moved to Brampton, Ontario when he was eight years old and he now lives in Toronto’s Greektown. He shares a bedroom that serves as a makeshift home studio with his girlfriend/editor/scream queen Vivita (Ilham Khoshaba). As we talk, she brings us a decidedly un-horrific snack of milk and pastries.

Watt is a somewhat notorious figure in C-horror. He created the “TonyWatt.com Twisted Sinema Underground Movie Festival” a few years ago, after attending the Brampton Indie Arts Festival and believing the results to be fixed. Now he carries on the Twisted Sinema name as a Yahoo Groups mailing list, where he relentlessly promotes local horrormeisters, including himself. He has acted in a several low-budget movies and served as crew, but since his accident spends the majority of his time sending out emails, networking, and posting on “YouTube,” as he pronounces it, shades of a New Yorker accent coming through.

Although Watt has some background in the filmic arts–he started off making infomercials for 1-900 services–like many horror directors he simply sees the genre as a launching pad for bigger and better things.

“Historically, horror has been a popular stepping stone into the industry,” says Jennifer Adcock, a CBC documentary producer who directed 2004’s Nightmare in Canada: Canadian Horror on Film. “Many novice horror directors still cling to that tiny possibility that their low-budget indie horror could launch a career, just like George A. Romero, David Cronenberg, John Carpenter and Sam Raimi.”

Take Toronto’s Jerry Ciccoritti, who created Psycho Girls in 1985. Today’s he’s directing big-budget miniseries like Shania Twain: A Life in Eight Albums. “There is a guerilla filmmaking mentality involved with B-horror,” says Adcock. “These movies can be used as a calling card for a director to say, ‘Here, look what I can do.”

Because of its association with cheap thrills and mindless clichés, many first-time directors also consider horror among the easiest genres to direct. While more seasoned directors would argue just the opposite, Tony Watt certainly holds this opinion.

“This is kindergarten,” he says. “Anybody can be a fucking filmmaker! Look at YouTube, look at all the videos getting the big hits. Not rocket scientists. It’s the easiest fucking thing, a monkey can do it. I had my five-year-old nephew as a cinematographer. I said, ‘Hold the camera, uncle’s gonna walk in front of the camera, you gonna hold it?’ He says, ‘Uncle, uncle, you’re out of the fwame.’ What the fuck…how does he know that? Five years old!”

He makes a pretty convincing argument. That is, until you see the films themselves.

Tony shows me some scenes from Frankenpimp that he’s already uploaded to YouTube. It’s a hodgepodge of unsteady-cammed scenes with little order or sense to them. The man playing Frankenpimp is clearly not an actor. He just threw a “crunk cup” full of human urine into the eyes of a gangbanger, causing him to clutch his eyes in pain. He then yells, “Feet don’t fail me now!” and jogs away to the sound of a cavalry trumpet call. Now Vivita, the female lead, is stumbling through her lines. English is obviously not her first language, and I’m not sure it’s her second. There are incidental sound effects thrown in: loopy cartoon noises à la Russ Meyer, except they’re not synched to the action or even leveled for volume. This is just as well, because the ambient noise drowns out most of the dialogue anyway. Camera shots are at seemingly random angles. No attention is paid to the time of day. Shots go from day to night from one second to the next, just as the locales switch incongruously, just as the film goes from colour to black-and-white. As far as costumes, Vivita’s “Officer Ilham” uniform consists of black high-heeled boots, a paper U.S. flag taped to her blouse and an “I heart NY” cap. Also, gigantic fake breasts.

As I watch this train wreck, Watt offers his strangely earnest director’s commentary. “My filmmaking is like a documentary-type film, like they made in the ‘70s, like Taxi Driver, Serpico, The Chinese Connection.” “This scene was inspired by Hitchcock. He did a lot of stuff like this.” “This shot, here, I got from porno movies.”

I leave the interview feeling a little bit shaken. The scenes weren’t frightening, per se, but there was something horrific about the experience: It’s scary to think someone may someday pay good money to see that.

“This is a beloved genre by a lot of people,” says Vatnsdal, the filmmaker and author. “But there are a lot of mercenary people out there who say ‘I’ll just knock off some cheap horror movie.’ And I think that’s the reason why there are so many awful ones — just unspeakably bad horror movies.”

Vatnsdal says he was cured of the need to see every movie with a bloody hatchet on the cover when he was 15. But, having literally written the book on the subject, he’s probably seen more bad C-horror than anyone in the world.

“You’ve got to embrace that as someone who loves movies,” he continues. “I find that kind of strengthens my love of it, because it makes the good ones seem that much better, and that much rarer too. It also saves time, because there’s only so much crap you can endure.”

Mike Drach is a Toronto-based journalist, screenwriter and voice actor. Currently he is co-producing an online role-playing game for Crotch Zombie Productions. Mike acknowledges the generosity of the Ontario Arts Council in funding this article.

Canadian Horror and the Insatiable Lust to Make Bad Films