The highly-anticipated thriller Devil’s Mile will have its world premiere at the Fantasia International Film Festival on July 26. The Joseph O’Brien directed movie follows a trio of kidnappers who take an ill-advised detour en route to deliver their hostages – two teenage girls – to their mysterious and powerful employer. We caught up with O’Brien to discuss the well-received thriller.
You’re making your feature debut with a horror movie – and many do. Why do you think that is? Is it that horror is an easier-sell to an audience – or investor?
There were a lot of reasons, first and foremost being that I live and breathe horror movies. Some of my earliest childhood memories are of getting the shit scared out of me watching monster movies in the dark with the sound turned down on the TV so my parents didn’t know I was up. Weird, fucked-up exploitationers that they’d never dare show at a civilized hour. Blacula. Don’t Be Afraid Of The Dark. Equinox. Horror Express. The Brain That Wouldn’t Die. Loved ‘em then, still love ‘em now.
And sometimes the movies weren’t the scariest part – back in the 1970s and into the 1980s, when I was growing up, the ad rates were cheaper after midnight, so that’s when they’d run commercials for low budget horror movies opening in theaters that couldn’t afford prime time slots. I remember TV ads – Basket Case, The Beast Within, Return To Horror High – that freaked the hell out of me. Many of them didn’t even have footage from the actual movies, but they would build these absolutely terrifying ad campaigns around them, sometimes just some evil-sounding guy doing voiceover with the title slowly approaching camera. I still remember seeing the original TV trailer for Larry Cohen’s It’s Alive: the sound of a baby crying while a cradle slowly revolves in total darkness, until we see a horrible claw hanging over the side, and the voiceover going “There’s only one thing wrong with the Davis baby … IT’S ALIVE!” Cue seven year old me having a full on panic attack in the dark, pulling my feet up for fear that claw was going to snap out from underneath the sofa and drag me down with it.
Anyway, I guess all of that must have shaken something loose, because I never got over that feeling, and it instilled in me a desire to inflict it on others, I guess. When it finally came time for me to direct my first feature, making a horror film was a very natural choice. I don’t think I even seriously considered another genre.
And yes, horror was an easy sell to my producer partners and principal investors, Mark Opausky and Motek Sherman. There’s a quote from (I think) the great Samuel Z. Arkoff: “Nobody every lost money on a horror picture.” And that’s arguably true. And I’m sure no one’s ever lost money on a low-budget horror movie. Horror sells really well internationally and domestically; it’s one of the only genres that transcends all social and cultural barriers, because everybody gets scared, everybody has nightmares, and we all need a way to deal with that.
Fear is the most primal emotion; our most primitive ancestors spent 90% of their time in a state of fear. If they weren’t fucking or eating, they were scared … probably of getting fucked or eaten. And in a way, we all, deep down, enjoy horror movies because they allow us to experience fear in the safety of our own homes. Even people who claim to never watch them have at least one scary filmgoing experience rattling around in their closet that they can’t forget, no matter how hard they might try.
How did your work in television prepare you for your film debut?
TV is made on very tight schedules and you have to be prepared to think on your feet and come up with effective solutions to problems as the arise, and that’s certainly also true in low budget features, and it was definitely true in the case of Devil’s Mile. Now, I hadn’t directed any television prior to this movie (I’ve directed one pilot since, not coincidentally with many of the cast and crew from Devil’s Mile), but I had spent a lot of time on sets of projects that I’d written, and that was an invaluable learning experience.
Did you bring with you any of the cast/crew from your TV work?
I had met Maria Del Mar on the set of Robcop: Prime Directives, which I wrote and she played one of the principal villains. I really liked her and the energy she brought to the part, and had always wanted to work with her again. And though we hadn’t seen each other in a lot of years, we were still acquainted via the magic of social media. When Mark and I were first putting the project together, she posted about looking for something different to do, so I sent her a message, not really expecting her to say yes: “You could always come star in my low-budget horror movie!” And to my great surprise and delight she asked to see the script, and to my even greater surprise and delight, she signed on a full year before we went into production.
Independent films generally take quite a long time to come together. How long have you been on board the movie?
The movie came together surprisingly quickly, but it wound up taking forever to finish. I started work on the script in the summer of 2010, and we went to camera in the fall of 2011. The bulk of post-production was taken up by the visual effects, which I worked on for the next two years. We had a distribution deal in place with Phase 4 Films at that point, so this year has been about getting the word out ahead of the release. So as of today it’s been almost exactly five years of my life to get to this point.
Did the script change much before it went before the cameras?
It developed, for sure, though it never veered too far off the initial premise, which was always about a group of people who get trapped on an endless, haunted stretch of highway, and how their relationships change under that pressure. When we started, it was more a straight horror movie, with three quote-unquote “regular guys” on a road trip. But it’s always a struggle to keep that interesting, and one night I had an epiphany while writing the scene at the gas station: “What if one of them opened the trunk, and there were two girls tied up inside?” It was a good first reel surprise, the first indication that things were not what they seemed. Making them a trio of kidnappers opened the door to more of a crime thriller vibe, and the notion of blending the two genres was very appealing. They’re very complementary genres – horror movies are about unfortunate people in dangerous situations, and crime movies are about dangerous people in unfortunate situations — and once the story got going they hybridized very well. I got little crime thriller in my horror movie, and a little horror movie in my crime thriller, and hopefully we wind up somewhere neither one would have taken us on their own.
Great news that the film has found a distributor. How long of a process was it, finding a home? And is it just a matter of sending a DVD out to various companies hoping someone will be interested?
My producing partner Mark has a saying that I’ve adopted as my mantra: “Hope is not a valid management strategy.” It’s not enough to just make a movie and hope someone picks it up; you have to make a movie with a clear idea as to how you can sell it, and to whom. As a responsible filmmaker I think I have an obligation to get my investors’ their money back. To that end we teamed up with Colin Geddes, who is, among many other things, the programmer for TIFF’s Midnight Madness program. Colin is plugged into the world of film sales and markets all around the world, and with his involvement we started having conversations with distributors and sales agents months before we ever rolled cameras.
At that point it wasn’t so much about securing a distribution commitment – we didn’t have the track record and the current state of the film market doesn’t realistically support that kind of risk – as it was getting a handle on what distributors were looking for, getting a sense of the domestic and international market and just seeing the lay of the land. We had some very frank and honest conversations with a number of parties, and that in turn helped us avoid a lot of pitfalls along the way. We developed a lot of useful relationships that paved the way for our deal at Phase 4 Films, who actually came along towards the end of post-production. So it was both a very long, ongoing process of learning and a relatively short one in terms of ultimately securing a distributor. It pays to educate yourself, and it pays to have a plan that gets you all the way to the end of the road, not just the end of the movie.
What do you think makes Devil’s Mile scary?
I think the greatest fear is and always will be fear of the unknown. The thing you can’t quite see. Lurking over your shoulder. Under your bed. On the other side of your closet door. We conjure up our own personal demons to fill in that void, finding the thing that terrifies us most. Lovecraft was all about that, the idea that there are malevolent forces existing just beyond our capacity to perceive them, but that we nevertheless experience the effect of. You hear the scratching at the door but never see the claw, or you see the claw but never what it’s attached to. I tried to incorporate that idea, in big and small ways, into the fabric of Devil’s Mile. The road itself is just the tip of the iceberg, a physical artifact of a greater, darker force, that the people who travel on it couldn’t begin to comprehend or understand.
And finally – of course we have to ask, it’s in the title! – do you believe in the devil, Joe?
No. I don’t believe in the Devil. But I am afraid of him.
