Just saw it this evening and I really dug it. Congrats Seth!
My fiancé and I were wondering if the mask was an original design or a modified existing mask in the spirit of the Shatner mask. Would you possibly know?
Cheers!
It was an original design. I'm sure the team behind was certainly inspired by Michael Myers/Shatner somewhat. The idea was that The Other scopes out his killing ground ahead of time. He got his hand on a mask being used in the park, given that unless you go to a place like Universal Horror Nights, you won't see copyrighted masks. (Also, real world, we couldn't used a copyrighted iconic mask). But this imaginary theme park would have masks that evoked slasher films. So that was what we went for. It wasn't mean to be TOO iconic though because one, he has to blend in, and two, he uses a different mask every year.
Just got out a late showing with a friend and I thought this was fun! A whole heck of a lot more fun than I was expecting. The only minor gripes I had were, like @
Snikt, the punk girl being a bit obnoxious (but that's how kids kinda act so it wasn't that big a deal for me)
True story, Bex Taylor Klaus is freaking huge to younger audiences, especially the LGBQT community. She does the voice for Pidge on Voltron and was most recently on the Scream TV show. Her social media following was like a third of our audiences. She, as a lesbian, said she always wanted to play a slutty, obnoxious, wild girl in a slasher movie. So I did my best to write to that-- and she went to 11 with it.
I can see how some people don't lime it-- but I think it's okay to not like her. To say "I don't like that type of person is legit, you don't like everyone in the world. I'd only be insulted if people said she wasn't believable. I made a choice in the writing, and she made on in her performance, and when the director and producers saw her go, everyone agreed we wanted that energy and obnoxious behavior in the mix.
the structure I felt was a bit too close to Halloween
Sure, but name a slasher film that isn't in some way indicative of Halloween. It's the original slasher film. Everything takes a cue from it. I think, for me, slasher movies went from terrifying in the 70s and early 80s, to camp in the late 80s, to self aware and poppy in the 90s, and then fizzled in the early 2000s. You can't out-meta Scream. Scream sort of capped the subgenre by having a pst-modern approach to it. Horror fans have wanted a back to basics slasher movement to fire up for awhile. It's a little unbfortunate for our bottom line that Michael Myers is getting his big return while we are-- but at the end of the day, I wanted to play by the slasher rules, and just toy with the results and expectations instead of changing the rules. Also, Gale Anne Hurd, the producer (who made very truly great classic Cameron film) was a mentee of Deborah Hill, producer of the original Halloween.
So the DNA is hard to avoid.
and I thought the first kill at Hell Fest kinda upstaged the later ones because I thought it was such a classic gag.
If I had one regret, it would be that after the high-striker, needle, and guillotine gags we went back to the knife. It was a time/production issue more than anything else.
congrats to our boy @
SethS because in a short amount of time, I think I've seen his name attached to three features now. That's a hell of an accomplishment! Congratulations on a successful career... and would you give me some notes on a script I'm working on?
Thank you! I have a TV show dropping next week on Hulu too! And I would read your script, but the union legally forbids me from doing so! The jerks!