Exclusive V/H/S: Viral Interviews Part 2: Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead
Heather Buckley
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After surviving the Haunted Mansion-esque karaoke room at Fantastic Fest for Part 1 of Dread Central’s V/H/S: Viral interviews, we were led next door to the Jem and the Holograms-themed room. The walls were silver glitter, and it was… wait for it… truly outrageous.
Here there was no whiskey to be had, but on hand were directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead (Resolution, Spring). Adjacent to them were the young skate-punks cast for their segment: Nick Blanco and Chase Newton. I say that because one of them had a DRI t-shirt, and through some in-depth probing I learned that Justin bonded with them over the band Gorilla Biscuits.
Though many ideas were tossed around, “Skaters vs. Skull Monsters” seemed to hit it off with the V/H/S: Viral crew, and their segment was green-lit—that is, after they stalked the producers repeatedly to become a part of the franchise. Here relentless persistence and great ideas won out. Contained within, we discuss proper skater aspect ratio, Benson and Moorhead’s favorite horror films… and, you know, punk rock.
Look for the film on VOD platforms October 23, 2014, with a limited theatrical run slated for November 21, 2014.
BONESTORM
DREAD CENTRAL: How did you come up with the idea for this movie?
JUSTIN BENSON: Basically Aaron and I sat around and tried to find our way into making a found footage short. Find a way to motivate those cameras so you don’t have to justify it past the first image of the movie—Oh, they’re making a skate video. That’s why all the cameras are there. Plus there was this image of a skateboarder fighting a skeleton with a sword, and on the board there’s a camera. So, there’s something about that image that’s really cool.
AARON MOORHEAD: It’s a hyper 2014 Jason and the Argonauts!
JUSTIN BENSON: It’s Mortal Kombat meets Tony Hawk’s Skateboarding.
DREAD CENTRAL: Both of you kids grew up watching skateboard videos?
JUSTIN BENSON: My favorite skate videos were the World Industries ones and the Plan B ones. In our segment we wanted to do the 4:3 thing, where the edges are cut because you’re using the wide-angle lens. We wanted to make it look really legit, but it wouldn’t have looked good on a big screen.
NICK BLANCO: It’s such a debate in skateboarding, it’s crazy. 4:3 vs. 16:9. Because VXs will never die; it’s what skateboarding is filmed with.
DREAD CENTRAL: How did you find your skaters?
JUSTIN BENSON: The original thought was if we put in a casting breakdown in LA that said we need some kids who can skate, everybody’s going to be like, “I can skate!” And they learned how to skate like two hours ago because every actor’s dying all the time to get a role. It would be useless. It would look so bad. These guys had to be high-performance skaters. So we thought, Let’s find someone who skates really well, who has awesome an personality. We split up and went to a bunch of skate parks and just watched kids skating and took their pictures.
DREAD CENTRAL: Creepy!
JUSTIN BENSON: Yeah, we know! So we took their pictures and got their phone numbers—even creepier!—and we’re like, “Yeah! We’re casting for a MOVIE!” [Laughter.]
AARON MOORHEAD: This really happened by the way. It was so awkward.
JUSTIN BENSON: But what are you gonna do? You can’t put out a casting call in LA, “I’m looking for a skater dude”: Every single actor between the age of 18 and 50 will say, “I’m an 18-year-old skateboarder, and I can do this!”
AARON MOORHEAD: And then that just led us to some other connections. So then we knew people at skate shops who knew all the local skaters. We put it up on Facebook: “Hey, who can skate?” Just a very lo-fi approach to casting. Very direct-access.
JUSTIN BENSON: I remember the first time I talked to Chase, he was sitting there with a badass little cooler and a 40 ounce, and I was like, ‘Dude, I used to drink 40 ouncers! You listen to Gorilla Biscuits?’ He was like, ‘Dude, I listen to Gorilla Biscuits!’ — And I realized that in my heart I’m still 15!
DREAD CENTRAL: Chase, what was it like for you working on this film?
CHASE NEWTON: I had one other small role in a film about skating, but it was nothing like this.
DREAD CENTRAL: How was it to perform actual filmed set-ups?
CHASE NEWTON: It was really awkward at first. There’s a lot of choreographing and planning. I wasn’t really expecting that. I thought it was going to be easy, like “Hey skating.” But it wasn’t like that. It was like, hard. But it was fun.
JUSTIN: Our action director, Vince Capone, brought on the stuntmen that attacked them and all that. But these kids did their own stunts. I was worried, “These guys, they haven’t acted before…” But [Capone] was like, “Those guys? They’re gonna be fine. They basically just run around all day every day and break themselves skateboarding. Those guys know how to hit, know how to take a hit, know how to sell a hit, how to take a fall. Those guys are fine!” WE [the co-directors] were the ones who were tired every day. These guys were just like, “Yeah, it’s just another day!”
DREAD CENTRAL: Where did you feel you pushed yourselves artistically because this isn’t the style you usually shoot in?
AARON MOORHEAD: That’s what we loved about it.
JUSTIN BENSON: We set a record for ourselves for how many practical effects we could do in one day. It was a nice warm-up for [our follow-up movie] Spring because spring has a ton of creature effects in it. We did a LOT of practical effects in one day. Found footage really frees you up; you can cheat and get away with stuff.
AARON MOORHEAD: We didn’t actually use a lot of glitch effects in ours, because we wanted it to seem more like an edited video, with split-screen effects. Our usual style is more of a quieter, character-driven kind of thing. But we’re like, “Look, we’re two dudes who also love kinetic cinema.” We just wanted to go crazy. The V/H/S: Viral [producers] were like, ‘Just go nuts with it!’ And we went berserk!
DREAD CENTRAL: How did the producers contact you for this segment?
JUSTIN BENSON: We pitched. We saw them walking by us, and we yelled at them!
AARON MOORHEAD: There was one day after a screening of Resolution at Screamfest, and the producer Brad Miska just walked by and was like, ‘Would you want to do a segment in the next V/H/S?’ And he probably meant it rhetorically or in theory, but we just took it literally and kept submitting concept after concept after concept.
JUSTIN BENSON: Finally he was like, [exasperated tone] ‘OKAAAAYYY!’
AARON MOORHEAD: He probably just had a few too many drinks one night and was like, “I’ll just say yes to them!”
DREAD CENTRAL: So you were stalking him! What were the concepts that didn’t make it?
AARON MOORHEAD: There was a sweet skydiving one. There was actually a really fun surfing one, like a haunted reef basically, if you can imagine. There was a scene where they don’t know it, and some weird stuff happens at the reef already. The surfers are there waiting for a wave, and the viewer sees a dorsal fin of a shark coming towards them—and then for some reason the shark is scared off and goes the other way. There were so many of those fun little moments. And that would have been SO hard to shoot!
JUSTIN BENSON: [In] the one about skydiving some military enthusiast dorks go up and skydive. One of them has a gun because he’s a dork. And then there’s something up in the air that just blasts onto their plane. They have to jump out without the parachute and it’s all one long take, one long shot of this guy’s GoPro, freefalling to grab his parachute and then with his gun shooting this thing that’s attacking him in the air.
AARON MOORHEAD: There’s this thing, this creature that really exists, but you never really see it because its belly is the same color as the sky. And this is the day, it’s mating day. And a plane has hit its mate, and it’s PISSED. In the beginning, there’s dead birds falling from the sky—This is the day when the Lovecraftian sky creature’s gonna take some motherfuckers out.
DREAD CENTRAL: Speak to me about your love of horror; the both of you—
JUSTIN BENSON: We just love movies, and a lot of time those movies have horror elements in them, but we never talk about what genre our movies are in.
DREAD CENTRAL: But what is it about that aesthetic or iconography that keeps attracting you over and over to it?
JUSTIN BENSON: We both grew up on a lot of Stephen King, so there’s that. There’s the juxtaposition of a beautiful moment between people and then something really grotesque happens—there’s that.
AARON MOORHEAD: I think I just like the bizarre, and it’s not just horror, it’s also sci-fi. It’s just something that’s not in this world. I’ve always just gravitated toward something that’s fantastic because it’s just so interesting. That’s I think the only way you can completely invent anything, just in sci-fi or in horror—if you want to call it that genre.
JUSTIN BENSON: When you’re telling a story in cinema, it’s pretty easy to get people to laugh or to empathize with the characters, but to really scare people? It’s really hard— and I don’t think our V/H/S segment does that, but that wasn’t really the intent; it was just to be fun—but when we do projects in horror where that’s the intent, and we pull that off, when we actually get under people’s skin and frighten them, that’s really satisfying. And it’s a really hard thing to do. Probably the hardest emotion to evoke in cinema is fear.
DREAD CENTRAL: What was the first movie that scared you?
JUSTIN BENSON: This is embarrassing, but it was first The Exorcist, but then Evil Dead II, because I saw it when I was six, and I didn’t know it was a comedy. I’m just like, “This is horrifying! There’s all these demons!” But now I see it and it’s like, ‘This is just broad comedy.’ It’s brilliant, but not scary at all.
AARON MOORHEAD: I was so young I don’t even remember it, but my parents love telling this story: I have an older sister. My parents were reading in bed and my sister runs in screaming “FREDDY KRUEGER! FREDDY KRUEGER!” I was too young to have seen Freddy Krueger, but she comes running in the room screaming about Freddy Krueger, and then a couple of minutes later I come running in screaming “UNSOLVED MYSTERIES! UNSOLVED MYSTERIES!” “Unsolved Mysteries” freaked my shit out when I was like four. Something about it made me think that I would see the people from the creepy mugshots right outside my window. I was horrified of that! Just the image of that man speaking with gravitas walking next to ambulances with their lights on…
DREAD CENTRAL: What are your dream projects, after Spring?
JUSTIN BENSON: We’ve already been working on our dream project, a movie about Aleister Crowley. We’ve been working on it for probably a year now. The script’s almost there, and we’ll probably go shoot it next summer in the UK.
DREAD CENTRAL: Are you fascinated by the occult?
JUSTIN BENSON: I’m fascinated in that particular area of the occult, in those old esoteric traditions. I don’t follow them myself. I find them interesting, and it’s a mythology that’s never really been explored in cinema. Cinema has two mythologies it explores—God and the Devil as we know it, in Christian religions. No one has really explored THAT area of the occult, that older thing, which I think can really get under people’s skin. I think it’s a fun way into a story.
DREAD CENTRAL: How does co-directing work, how do you differ?
AARON MOORHEAD: It’s not even like something where we set down a lot of rules. It’s like one of us will ask the other, “Hey, do you want to make a movie? We’ll have four arms instead of two, and two brains, and two computers to work at!” We’re both making the same movie; we have the same wellspring.
JUSTIN BENSON: I say action so loud as a practical thing because it’s to make sure everyone hears from like a mile away so you KNOW that everything is locked up, no one’s talking, all that.
AARON MOORHEAD: And conversely since I have the camera, I’m closer to the actors, and I don’t want to yell in their face.
Synopsis
A police chase after a deranged ice cream truck has captivated the attention of the greater Los Angeles area. Dozens of fame—obsessed teens flock to the streets with their video cameras and camera phones, hell—bent on capturing the next viral video. But there is something far more sinister occurring in the streets of L.A. than a simple police chase. A resounding effect is created onto all those obsessed with capturing salacious footage for no other purpose than to amuse or titillate. Soon the discovery becomes that they themselves are the stars of the next video, one where they face their own death.
Categorized:News
