Exclusive: Creep Creepersin and Nikki Wall Talk Lake Death and The Catacomb Tapes in Vegas
Steve Barton
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This past Saturday, May 15th, Dread hit the road from LA to Vegas, and sometime between playing fetch with a border collie over Bloody Marys in a dilapidated desert bar in Yermo and winding up with a gastro-intestinal malady (Sin City is apparently full of germs), this writer swung by The Polly Staffle Grindhouse Fest at the Sci-Fi Center for the world premieres of director Creep Creepersin’s features Orgy of Blood, Vaginal Holocaust, and Caged Lesbos A-Go-Go.
On hand for the event were filmmaker Creepersin and producing partner Nikki Wall, and just before the two engaged in an audience Q&A for Orgy of Blood, we managed to sneak a few minutes outside the Sci-Fi Center in order to get the skinny on release plans for the previously mentioned trio as well as the duo’s latest ventures: the feature films Lake Death and Wall’s forthcoming directorial debut, The Catacomb Tapes.
“Shoreline Entertainment has them (for distribution) right now, and ‘later this year’ is all we’ve been told,” said Wall regarding the company’s DTV release plans for Orgy of Blood, Vaginal Holocaust, and Caged Lesbos A-Go-Go.
“We did behind-the-scenes shit for them,” added Creepersin of the releases’ expected supplemental features. “There will be interviews and commentaries and ‘Creep-Cam,’ which is me holding the camera and hitting people in the balls with ropes and bottles and stuff.”
Dread questioned how much nudity these features will contain, particularly with Orgy of Blood, given the film’s subject matter. “Yeah, there were a lot of interesting and comical moments which happened behind-the-scenes and a lot of drama,” chimed in Wall, “and a lot of nudity. There were a lot of penises running by the lens, and (cast-member) Rage Ng definitely had the biggest one on set!”
As for Lake Death, which went into production on May 17th in Big Bear, CA (see exclusive photos from the set below), Creepersin described it as, “an old-school slasher movie. I’ve never been able to do one, and an opportunity came up, and that’s the genre I grew up with so I’m very excited to go out to the woods and kill people.”
“There’s a lot more plot and twists,” says Creepersin, who wrote the script mid-April based on a treatment by Kevin (“Chowder” – The Cartoon Network) Kramer and whose shooting schedule is a brief five days – these fast turnarounds have become the norm for the filmmaker (see our last article on his cinematic methodology here). “Intervision came to me and asked me to write and direct it, and they are planning a million sequels, so they wanted to make sure that there was enough shit in the first film that they could branch off and make another one every year.”
Creepersin alumni Rachel Zeskind and Chandler Maness (The Brides of Sodom) and Charlie (The Brothers Cannibal) Vaughn join actors Jamie (Absolute Evil) Bernadette, Holly King, Greg Duke, and Cheryl (“Nip/Tuck”) Sands, among others, for a romp in the lake. Jen Giragos is providing the practical effects. The main draw, however, at the center of any slasher flick is the killer, and Dread questioned the filmmaker on the nefarious force he’s concocted at the center of Lake Death.
“I can’t say a whole lot,” responded Creepersin, “as I’ve had to sign a lot of papers saying that I won’t say certain things, but I really like the killer, and I kind of did research on what cinematic killers become icons and which ones don’t, and we wanted to make sure that we didn’t get caught up in the snares that kill a lot of franchises because the killer didn’t have enough ‘something’ to make them last. One of the main things that Intervision wanted to make sure of is that they would have a very marketable thing, which they could put on any type of merchandising which you could imagine, whether that be an action figure, a t-shirt, a poster – they wanted to make sure that they can make a Lake Death movie every year.”
As for The Catacomb Tapes (teaser art below as well), which is scheduled to go before cameras for a twenty-one-day shoot this August in Marseille and Paris, France, Wall says of the feature’s inception, “In January Creep and I started going over some plot points and characters and just sort of flushed things out together. Initially when I finished the script, I was going off the assumption that since we’d shot all of our films independently, we’d go to France and shoot some exteriors for four days and then come back to L.A. and finish the film on a soundstage. But when I submitted it to the French Film Commission for review just to see how much permitting would cost, they ended up really liking the script and offered partial funding and starting setting everything up for me.”
Of the narrative, Wall reveals, “The best way I could classify the film is a ‘creature feature.’ It’s about a group of amateur ghost-hunters from the U.S. that have a web series that go over to France to celebrate a recent elopement of two of the characters so it’s sort of their honeymoon/them doing an international web show to see if they can get pushed to television. Everything they are doing there is totally unsuccessful, though, until someone tells them that they should go into the catacombs, and when they get down there all hell breaks loose.”
“We have a lot of ‘A’ and ‘B’ list names in it that are going to make horror fans very happy,” said Wall, “although the only two cast members at this time that I can talk about are Buz Wallick and Joel Hebner, who we have worked with in the past.” (Note: Letters of intent have been submitted by renowned horror luminaries although we’ve gotta remain mum on those until contracts are signed).
“As for the mood and the fear and the emotion behind the story, we agreed to structure it as kind of a ‘lost tapes’ type of film,” said Wall, who also revealed that long-time collaborator Andrew Ceperley will serve as cinematographer on The Catacomb Tapes, “like Cannibal Holocaust or Quarantine or The Blair Witch Project, something along those lines. We are looking, too, at a very bloody movie. There will be a lot of practical effects.”
This being a genre film, the talk unsurprisingly turned to sequels.
“The second one, there’s no way it can be a ‘lost tapes’ (type of film),” said Wall. “The story I’m really trying to get at and really am trying to tell with the sequel will have to be shot traditionally. There will be two pretty big names from the first film that will carry over as well so I’m really stoked.”
Look for more about these flicks and more really soon!
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