Writer and director of The Grand Horror, Mat Kister, steps into the closet to chat about his effective cross-genre first film, a three-hundred dollar budgeter that has stressed-out people desperately trying to not get eaten by a horde of zombies outside while desperately trying to not get killed by a homicidal ghost inside. And you thought you had it bad.
What’s a nice guy like you doing in the horror business?
Just trying to make movies. The horror genre has always fascinated me from an early age and it’s all I’ve ever really wanted to do.
How did The Grand Horror come about?
We conceptualized it and then began the first day of shooting in less than a month. My friends and I had always had ideas for movies and had flirted with the idea of doing one, but they never seemed to get past the treatment phase. My friend Braden and I were in a band at the time and we were playing a show at the Theatre. Braden’s uncle was one of the board members and took us on a tour through the basements and corridors and the various secret areas that the audience never gets to see.
The theatre itself was just magnificent and so damn creepy that we decided on a whim “We gotta make a movie here!” I went home and hammered out the storyline, conned a few friends into helping out, and off we were, on an adventure no one was quite sure how it would end.
What did it take to bring the concept from idea to finished film?
The actual shoot itself went fairly smoothly in that we had the typical problems associated with a no-budget picture (camera and sound malfunctions, a lack of any real knowledge in how to make a movie, etc.), but after a couple weekends we more or less had all the kinks worked out. Then, it was just a matter of finishing the shoot. There were multiple times when it looked like we would be shooting forever and everyone got a little, shall we say, grumpy. Originally, I was like “We’ll have this thing shot in 3 weekends”, which is all that the actors originally agreed upon. The shoot went on for nine weekends. But we all got through it
The editing process was a nightmare. We never differentiated between different takes and didn’t label the tapes in any discernible, logical way. Essentially, we had just hit “record” on the camera and kept shooting until tapes ran out. Since we didn’t shoot the scenes in order, when we started loading all of the footage and takes onto our computers, we saw right away that we were in for a stressful time.
Try going through 30 full mini-DV tapes with no guide! It was horrible! To compound how awful it was, the whole film ended up being ad-lib, which meant that even though we finally put all the footage into rough scenes, every single take had a different piece of dialogue! Trying to sync the characters dialogue was probably the worst thing I’ve ever gone through in my life. It took nearly a year for me to get through it and looking back on it, I’m surprised we were even able to garble a storyline out of it.
There are shoestring budgets, and there are no-shoes budgets: how did you get it done with so little money?
The actors and crew worked for free and the location was free. We didn’t have any major special FX work, so all we bought was some Wal-Mart brand corn syrup (Karo was too expensive for us!) and food coloring, and a white shirt with a pair of black pants. All the different ghosts in the film are wearing the exact same outfit! We just threw some blood on it to make it look gross. You’d be surprised how far fake blood can go.
Rhyann’s death, for example, is nothing more than dumping a gallon or so of fake blood all over, covering her face in it, and then adding sound FX to “show” what we couldn’t visually: namely a graphic head smash on the counter. Deejay Scharton did all of the sound FX and music in one 24 hour cram session on my mom’s living room floor, and I give a lot of credit to him for enhancing the atmosphere of the film. Without his sound work, The Grand Horror would have suffered quite a bit. And he was free, too. He is a musician and had a portable studio for recording bands and so we got all the music free and were lucky enough to have access to a talented musician.
The one thing about all of us is that we each bring a different talent and strength to the project, whether it be Deejay’s music, Steve’s enthusiasm and ideas, Braden’s wisdom and glue to keep it all together, or the rest of the cast’s dedication to see it through, we all contributed a piece of what makes us unique in order to see the project finished and I think that is what makes it most rewarding.
How did you assemble the cast? Friends of friends, family?
I just asked them. Rhyann was the only member of the cast that didn’t live in Nebraska at the time. She was a theatre actress in California and we’d been friends for a number of years and she agreed to fly out and be in the movie. That was cool because then we’d jokingly tell everyone “Yeah, we have an actress flying in from California to be in our film!”
Pam is my step-sister and Robert is my uncle and they were actually the only people in the cast who actually memorized lines and tried to create unique characters. I give them a lot of credit for that. I told everyone else to “just be yourselves”. But yeah, everyone in the film was either a friend of mine or family member with the exception of a couple people like John Evans who was a volunteer who helped out at the Grand. He was the “Cannibal Ghost” and was really enthusiastic about it, which I think shows during his scene.
Did you encounter any rough spots along the way? How did you overcome them?
The only real “rough spot” was the editing process which was akin to having hot pokers stuck into every orifice of my body. Other than that, we had to deal with losing our external mic set up which forced us to use the audio from the camera itself, which kinda sucked.
Something went frizzy with Deejay’s portable studio, not that it would have mattered since his car broke down and he couldn’t make it to the shoot after the second weekend (he was driving from Colorado to Nebraska every weekend). Since the shoot went 6 weeks longer than I had envisioned, Rhyann had to go back to California, which was a problem…until she got engaged to Jeremy (who she met on set) and stayed put.
Everyone was injured in some way while shooting. T.J. kicked a grate open during the scene when he and Steve saves Pam, but his foot got caught between the bars and when they kicked the gate open, it twisted his foot around. I have some funny footage of that. After working so many hours, the cast had the tendency to hit up the local bar that was right around the corner, so you have a lot of the scenes in the film where the actors are noticeably drunk, which I thought was funny since they “acted” better drunk than sober. But for what it was, I think we handled the problems quite well.
What advice can you give to other independent filmmakers who want to get that first film in the can?
Just go out and shoot one. Gather your close friends and family, people you know who will be willing to run the gauntlet for you, and start shooting. Come up with a basic story and let your creativity run wild. The Grand Horror is nothing more than ghosts killing people. It’s important to know that just because you think you have the greatest story ever and you want to tell it, that doesn’t mean you have to do it the first time out. Start slowly, get your feet wet, and most importantly, just worry about getting something done. Your film doesn’t need to be sold or accepted at Sundance to be successful.
I think we’ve shown that, if nothing else, you CAN make a movie for $300 and a cheap camera (ours was a Panasonic that had been bought at a retail store). The quality may not get you the Academy Award for Best Editing, but that doesn’t really matter as much as the experience you had making it. It’s something you’ll remember forever, just don’t worry about making something perfect your first time out.
What’s the one question you would love to be asked, and what’s the answer?
Q: “What is the greatest movie ever made?”
A: Big Trouble in Little China
So what’s next?
A couple things: first is a web-only horror series for Deadlantern.com that will take place within the universe/mythology of The Grand Horror. We’re going to explain a lot of things with these 5-7 minute films that will be released every couple of months, including the back story that was only hinted at in The Grand Horror; that is, what the “darkness” is, why these supernatural things are occurring, etc.
The big thing I’m excited about is that we are going to make these short films so that they have direct viewer participation. I don’t want to give too much away right now, but the viewers will have a direct impact on how the story goes. I think a lot of people will find it neat. We’re filming the first episode in May and hopefully it will go online in June.
The second thing is a feature length slasher film dealing with the issue of abortion. It’s way too complicated to try and explain here, but we’re definitely NOT going the exploitation route. We’re trying to make a new kind of slasher film that makes you think and is a sort of “cinematic debate” about the abortion issue. I hope we can pull it off.