Exclusive: James Sizemore Gives The Inside Scoop on The Demon’s Rook
Scott Hallam
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The Demon’s Rook is an entertaining indie horror film written and directed by James Sizemore and now available via On Demand, iTunes, and other popular VOD platforms. Sizemore recently chatted with Dread Central about his film.
Sizemore kicked off the interview with his take on The Demon’s Rook (review). “It’s a fun time,” Sizemore said. “We packed it full with as much horror insanity as possible. Overall, I was going for a colorful 80’s tone. That doesn’t mean to say I was shooting for cheesy. I wasn’t purposefully trying to make a ‘bad’ or mocking film. The Demon’s Rook is 100% genuine. Never were any of us making fun of the styles we’re paying homage to. Instead, this movie is a celebration of all that is classic, colorful, and practical.”
As you would expect on any indie shoot, there were some great stories from the road. Sizemore took us behind the scenes of the film and told an amazing story about one particular performer. “Josh Gould won the blue ribbon for toughest motherfucker on set,” Sizemore said. “He was originally our lighting technician. He volunteered to play one of our zombies early on, and he did such a good job acting under prosthetics that we ended up having him play one of the demons and also the manbeast. In fact, he played the guy that got transformed into the manbeast, and on top of that, he also played the demon that casts the hex on him within that same scene. Three different characters in the same scene! Funny thing is, Josh was a firefighter full time, and he ended up getting in a really bad fire engine accident just a couple days before shooting began. The brakes went out going down a steep hill, and he crashed and broke his back. I saw the whole thing on the news. It was kind of a big deal. Anyhow, he called me up that night as if nothing had happened and asked me when call time was. He showed up at the shoot with a back brace on and a lawn chair, so that he could periodically sit whenever his back was in too much pain. He trooped through everything. I never once heard him complain. The man is a true beast.”
One thing viewers will particularly love are the practical F/X used in The Demon’s Rook. Sizemore told all about his creations. “I designed and created all of the creatures,” Sizemore said. “For the first year of production, I actually did all of the special makeup F/X, gore and everything, with the assistance of my lovely wife, Ashleigh. Once we finally got our budget, we were then able to hire a few people to come work under me in my studio. The four of us, including some occasional assistants and interns, ended up making over 90 molds for the movie. That should tell you how many practical F/X are running throughout the picture. It’s teeming with them. We worked so damn hard on all those F/X, typically pulling 16-hour days, six days a week, for a couple months straight. Not trying to go off on a tangent here, but it’s funny because I told myself that I’d never take on that kind of special F/X workload ever again, and here I am doing it for another creature feature I’m currently producing, Tim Reis’ Bad Blood. My wife and I have been working in the F/X studio for eight weeks straight and no days off making this new monster. Once again, we’re working with not enough money and a tiny crew, but I couldn’t say no to Tim on this. Tim produced The Demon’s Rook with me, and he brought so much to the table on that production. With the team that he and I have assembled over the past several years, I’m pretty sure we’re unstoppable. We’re going for the gold, baby.”
It is said that every cloud has a silver lining, or if life hands you lemons, make lemonade, and several other shiny-happy references (silk purse from a sow’s ear, anyone?). And all these references held true as Sizemore had to deal with nothing less than a tornado strike, but he made it work into the film. “Yes, it’s true. Somewhere in the middle of production around Christmas, a tornado rolled through our land,” Sizemore said. “I was upstairs in the family house, the house I was raised in, and on the computer either re-writing or scheduling. There was no warning. It hit hard and ripped the roof off from right over my head. I was pretty sure I was going to die, but I just grabbed the computer and ran downstairs into the bathroom with it. That computer had a bunch of our Demon’s Rook footage and artwork on it, and I wasn’t about to lose that shit. What the tornado didn’t fuck up, the hail that followed totally destroyed the rest of our roofless house. We had to push back shooting for a bit so that we could demolish everything. Anyhow, I got an idea one day while looking at the partially demolished house to use it as the set for our manbeast transformation scene. The scene was originally written to be shot with a crew of construction workers, so me and my co-writer Akom put our heads together and decided to rewrite it for demolition workers instead. So when you watch the movie and hear Josh say the line, ‘I still can’t believe we were the only house in the goddamn county to get hit. Just came down and buzzed me like God ringing a fucking doorbell,’ that’s the real deal, no shit.”
And to top it all off, a great love story is found within the creation of The Demon’s Rook “Yeah, I asked Ashleigh to marry me right before I started writing the screenplay,” Sizemore said. “It was Halloween night, and we had both just finished a long night working at a local haunted house. I took her to the oldest cemetery in my town and proposed to her with a ring that my brother had forged. We got married a year later, right in the middle of production. We took a few weeks off from shooting so that we could prepare for the wedding there on our farm. My dad was the wedding officiant, and he married us in the back field under a woven stick archway. You can actually see that archway in the scene where zombies attack our barn. I know it’s a bit of a cliché for folks to say this, but the day I married Ashleigh was the happiest goddamn day of my life, hands down.”
For more on film, visit the official website for The Demon’s Rook and ‘like’ The Demon’s Rook on Facebook.
Synopsis
Chaos descends upon a quiet town when Roscoe, the pupil of a wizard monk from an ancient race of demons, unknowingly opens a portal that allows an unspeakable evil to travel freely into our world. When three grisly beasts cross into our dimension, the living are possessed and the dead rise to destroy everything in their path. Armed with demons’ magic, Roscoe is the only fighting chance to put an end to their eternal path of destruction. An ode to the DIY creature-feature classics of the 1980’s, The Demon’s Rook is a “gut-flinging monster mash” (Dread Central) that you won’t soon forget.
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