Lone Star Film Festival Insight

Rover director draws inspiration from Heaven's Gate for cult film

Rover screens at AMC Palace 9 on Thursday, November 6, as part of the 2014 Lone Star Film Festival.

Photo courtesy of Lone Star Film Festival

Editor’s note: CultureMap has partnered with the Lone Star Film Festival to publish a series of filmmaker interviews conducted by LSFF organizers.

Writer/director Tony Blahd pulled from his interest in cults and Heaven’s Gate to tell the story of a desperate cult leader who concocts a fake prophecy for his followers to make a movie in Rover (or Beyond Human: The Venusian Future and the Return of the Next Level). The film screens at the 2014 Lone Star Film Festival in Sundance Square at the AMC Palace 9 on Thursday, November 6.

Lone Star Film Festival organizers spoke with Blahd about the inspiration behind and the process of making his first feature film.

Lone Star Film Festival: What attracted you to the Heaven’s Gate story and the decision to relate that to the plot of Rover?

Tony Blahd: The film sort came about in reverse. I was living in this amazing church and wanted to make a film about it. I knew the church was being demolished in four to six months, so I set myself to it.

I wanted to first make a horror movie, because the dilapidated church was a great stage for that, so I delved really deep into cults, something I have always been fascinated by. I realized after writing about 30 pages that I don’t actually like horror movies, but I love cults.

In my research, I found dozens of creepy Heaven’s Gate YouTube videos (including the ones of “Randall” shown in the film). In one video in particular, some of the Heaven’s Gate cult members discuss a movie project they were undertaking called Beyond Human. They had made concept art, had a script and were pitching to studios. The film was never made, but I was fascinated by what it may have been.

LSFF: This is your first feature film, and a strong subtext of the film is about the process of filmmaking. Is that something you set out to do from the beginning, or did it creep its way into the film as you were going along?

TB: I had never written anything before, so during that writing process, the questions I had usually just ended up in the script as questions. It’s really nice to have the safety net of writing about low-budget film. All of my anxieties and thoughts about the project just ended up going straight into the dialogue.

Another benefit of the film-within-film subtext was the visual effects style. I had no money to pay an effects artist and personally I had very little experience with visual effects, but I still decided to learn for the film. I think that worked out perfectly because the unrefined style of the FX shots really matches the aesthetic of how the cult in the film probably would have wanted it.

LSFF: You make great use of a somewhat limited space in the dilapidated church. Can you speak to the setting for Rover and the creative ways you developed the atmosphere?

TB: A friend and I began leasing that abandoned church about 10 months before I began developing Rover. We made the money for the film hosting concerts, parties, film shoots, etc. And for about six months, I lived in the parsonage.

By the time Rover came about, I knew every nook and cranny of that place. I knew which places would be great for which scenes. It also helped that our key crew (DP, producer, production designers, costume designers) all lived in the church with me during prep and production. The designers scoured the church and sourced a lot of props from things left behind.

LSFF: As the screenwriter and director of Rover, did your vision of the script differ from the final product?

TB: It definitely differs in some regard. We cut a few scenes out of the beginning and a few out of the middle. But the same basic story is still there.

LSFF: The score lends so much to the atmosphere of the film. Can you tell us about the music in the film?

TB: Heaven’s Gate was not a technophobic cult like many others are. For that reason, I was really drawn to the sounds of early electronic music and manual synthesizers. I really wanted Kraftwerk — a pioneer synth band from the ’70s — but their catalog is a bit expensive.

So I looked for other artists that had that same manual synth, airy sound. The tracks I chose all sort of match that aesthetic in someway, and I gave the composer a lot of Kraftwerk and other early electronic stuff as reference. The score was composed pretty much entirely on synthesizers, which I think was a new process for the composer.

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The 2014 Lone Star Film Festival takes place November 5-9 in Sundance Square in Fort Worth. For more information, visit the festival website.

Movie Review

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma gives horror a surreal twist

Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma

Photo courtesy of MUBI

Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma.

The horror genre really ramped up in the 1970s and ‘80s, bringing with it a new subgenre - the slasher - that gave audiences new visuals of gore, but also a reliance on sexism and homophobia that would come to define the era. The new film Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma wrestles with that legacy in ways that are funny, thought-provoking, and downright strange.

Kris (Hannah Einbinder) is a queer filmmaker who has been hired to reboot the moldy IP that is the Camp Miasma franchise, one that was fresh in the 1970s but which numerous shlocky sequels have rendered irrelevant. In an attempt to get to know the property better, Kris has scored a meeting with the reclusive Billy (Gillian Anderson), the star of the original film who has shunned the public eye for decades.

Turns out that Billy lives deep in the woods at Camp Rivoli, which served as the location for the first film. As Kris tries to get to know Billy and convince her to be a part of the new film, she starts to fall under Billy’s spell and the lore of the franchise as a whole. That includes believing that the movie’s villain, Little Death - a transgender person who has an air conditioning vent as a head/mask - may not just be a character created for the movies.

Written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun (I Saw the TV Glow), the film at first feels like it’s going to go the straight-up comedy route, with comic explosions of blood, a strange fascination with candy brands, and a production design that does nothing to hide that the two main actors are on a movie set with painted backdrops. This is backed up by Kris’ phone conversations with her girlfriend, Mari (Jasmine Savoy Brown) and her agent (Sarah Sherman), as well as numerous other details.

But the film starts to go down the surreal route the longer Kris stays at the camp with Billy, especially when they sit down to watch the original Camp Miasma. An extended sequence shows a good amount of that film-within-the-film, demonstrating why Kris and Billy have a love/hate relationship with the property. For Kris, though, the lines between the film and the real world start to blur, and Schoenbrun uses a variety of out-there elements to drive the point home.

The final act of the film can barely be described as Kris goes deeper down the rabbit hole, with Schoenbrun using her film to comment on the horror genre as a whole, its treatment of women and LGBT people, the movie industry, and more. All the while the “camp” of Camp Miasma maintains a presence, with candy wrappers showing up everywhere and the tongue-in-cheek references to Little Death (the French term La petite mort, which means “the little death,” is a euphemism for orgasm).

Einbinder, an Emmy winner for Hacks, is the perfect person to inhabit her role. Her established real-life and fictional personas color everything she does in the film, with her enthusiasm and curiosity shining through. Anderson leans heavily into another reference - Norma Desmond from Sunset Boulevard - to create a character that is as mysterious as she is alluring. Supporting actors like Brown, Sherman, Patrick Fischler, Dylan Baker, and Eva Victor keep the movie at the right pitch all the way through.

While other films have made fun of horror movie tropes before, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma finds a wholly unique way of doing so. It’s a funny and daring trip into the psyches of two women who may be victims of their own obsessions, and of the movies that made them that way.

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Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is now playing in select theaters

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