Crew Position: All
Status: Unreleased
Genre: Horror, Drama
Prod. Co.: Fierce Filmworks
Release Date: TBD
Rating: Unrated
Plot: In a sleepy rural American suburb, on a snowy winter night, a group of friends rent a movie only to discover that they have been given the wrong disc. As they keep watching, each story in the "movie" grows darker and they begin to realize they are the next act in the movie.
About the Film:
This was my 4th attempt at shooting a feature with my 4th finished screenplay. (My 3rd attempt is the DVD at the video store being mulled over.) I had just graduated college the year before, which was totally pointless with courses designed for children, and I no longer had access to film equipment, so I maxed out a credit card for a Mini-DV camera and minor production expenses. I also still had my parents Super Hi-8 family video camera that I basically commandeered from them.
In terms of film industry, we were on the other side of the country from anyone who even worked on a real production. Youtube didn't exist. Film Riot didn't exist. There was very very limited info online about how to create cinema. RewindVideo.com was sort of an amateur production webzine that I followed religiously. Their work is featured on the TV's hanging in the video store.
Since film & tv production didn't exist there at the time, there weren't any actors. Kevin, who plays Barry, had done some commercial work. Ryan, who plays the hot tub guy with the dreads, was a theater kid friend from high school. That was it.
As the 4th attempt at filming something, we had learned a lot from the previous 3 attempts, but we still didn't know what we were doing in terms of professional camera, lighting, coordinating.
Actual Plot / Backstory:
An obscured guy moves from town to town working at video rental stores, filming his murders, obtaining weapons for his next murder at the crime scene, and crudely edits the murders onto a single VHS tape (eventually graduating to digitizing them onto DVD.) He names his film "You're Next" and hides the video in a random movie case on the shelves at the video store and follows whoever rents the movie home to kill them and add their murder to the video. This was way before V/H/S, Poughkeepsie Tapes, Killer Movie, and 2 years before The Last Horror Movie.
The Last Horror Movie's nearly identical plot, that came out while BY was in post production, really was bizarre though. The killer basically does the same thing, but it has more of a Man Bites Dog angle and the reveal of the plot and the motiviation for the story comes way out of left field and is ultimately silly. All I can attribute to that is unfortunate synchronicity.
