Eddie Guzelian Talks Blood Punch and Kids’ Programming!
Matt Boiselle
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Maybe no one will ever know the potential damage writing endless hours of kids’ programming has on the mind, but who better to ask than Eddie Guzelian? He’s carved out a career for himself penning endless hours of child-friendly TV and film projects… but that can make someone feel the need to step outside their comfort zone, and he did just that.
Alongside fellow writer (and now director) Madellaine Paxson, they’ve concocted a fun horror/thriller/black comedy called Blood Punch (review), and it’s safe to say that this absolutely SHATTERS the boundaries they’ve been so comfortable with. Eddie was gracious enough to sit down for a few to discuss the film, his writing, and what he sees happening for himself in the future.
DC: For the people that might not be familiar with the film itself, can you set up the premise?
EG: It’s sort of a tough movie to describe – it’s about three very different characters who go off to an isolated cabin to cook up a once in a lifetime batch of meth, and once they get there, they find themselves in a dangerous love triangle that turns out to be something much worse – supernatural carnage and mayhem, and there seems to be no hope or escape from it.
DC: You started out writing for projects that included work for Disney and the Power Rangers – how in the world did you latch onto something like this?
EG: The project is so ridiculous and unlikely, it’s hard for people to believe, and almost everyone involved had a long history of working in kids’ programming and animation. We actually had cast the three main actors in this film for the Power Rangers, so it’s an incredibly unlikely group of people that came together to make this demented and twisted movie. Trust me on this – if you had spent years writing for “Winnie The Pooh,” I’d think you’d understand that it makes perfect sense! We clearly had a lot of pent-up aggression and other issues that needed to be worked out, and a lot of that came out in this movie. We’ve played horror festivals, and we meet people after the screenings, and they’d ask us, “What’s your background or experience?” When we tell them, they’d just stare and think we were joking! A couple of people pulled up their phones and went to IMDb.com because they just didn’t believe us. It seems like today a lot of the marketing of horror movies is based upon the track record and credibility of the people involved – “from the makers of this, and from the studios of that”- in that respect, we have absolutely NO credibility – almost anti-horror credits. If you go to the iTunes page where Blood Punch is (it can also be ordered there as well), you’ll see a sub-section that mentions the crew’s other works, and if you then click on different people’s names, you’ll see credits like “Peter Rabbit,” and it looks as if iTunes got hacked or something! But despite that, there’s been a really deep love of horror, and particularly a low-budget kind of horror. Growing up with stuff like John Carpenter and movies like Re-Animator – those movies have a very special place in our hearts.
DC: Did you have a fear of not being able to go back to kids’ programming after a film like this?
EG: No, not really – this wasn’t even really an attempt to get away from that. I’m back to writing and animation right now, which is nice. We just wanted to make our own movie – we didn’t even really think about it, or care whether it would be accepted or not. We’d hoped people would like it, but we were more interesting in just doing one. At the time, we were so intent on making the movie and getting it done, which is such a Herculean effort for a small movie like this, I don’t think we gave any thought to whether or not people would take us seriously; it just came out later as a funny thing. I don’t think anyone will necessarily hold it against us that we did this… but they might; I hadn’t really figured that! (laughs)
DC: Were you and Madellaine Paxson able to complement each other’s styles of working?
EG: Yeah, it was really great because all the main people who were involved from the beginning, Madellaine and the three main actors, were all there from the start, and it was a group collaborative effort. We knew who’d be working in what role, and how we wrote that to their strength, and Madellaine had a lot more input into the script than a director might normally have, and when it came to making the movie, I as a writer had more involvement with things than a writer would usually have, just because we’d all been there from the beginning, and we were all on the same page with what we were trying to do.
DC: After the release of Blood Punch, what can we look forward to from you down the road?
EG: We have a lot of irons in the fire for projects that we’re trying to get off the ground, like a couple of other horror features that we want to get done with the same actors. And one thing we’d like to do, but we’re finding it to be a tough nut to crack, is a web-based horror series. It’s a matter of trying to figure out how do you do that, and we’re really interested in doing that. That’s the next big challenge we’re going after.
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