SXSW 2017: Karen Skloss Talks Her Inspiration for and Influences on The Honor Farm
Karen Skloss’ high school trip-out movie The Honor Farm isn’t a straight-up horror film, and the Austin-based director is quick to bring that to attention. Although it is a part of the Midnighters section at SXSW this year, Skloss doesn’t want to mislead any horror fans.
That being said, the strange and occult are well represented since we all know how easy it can be for a few drugged out kids to accidentally raise the dead.
Just before The Honor Farm‘s premiere this past Saturday night, Skloss spoke with Dread Central about how personal the film is to her and how she used genre expectations to craft a story about self-discovery… on drugs!
DC: After watching The Honor Farm (review), I wound up going down the rabbit hole a little bit, and I watched Tobe Hooper’s first film, Eggshells, which was filmed in Austin.
KS: Oh, I love that movie!
DC: Honor Farm really felt like Austin. It had some of the psychedelia that Eggshells had so I didn’t know if it was an unintentional influence?
KS: That’s really interesting. I did take a look at Eggshells, either after we shot or before we shot, and definitely Tobe Hooper was somebody that we even actually talked to and reached out to while we were in development on the project. So he was kind of a quiet mentor, I guess you could say. I never thought of it as being a direct influence, but I think that’s fair to say. I found that film to be so startling and strange and fun. It’s like a time capsule of Austin so it’s really exciting to me that you’d see a parallel between this movie and that one.
DC: Are you kind of disguising a coming-of-age story inside a horror movie?
KS: I wanted to explore certain themes, but I also wanted to make a movie that would be a fun journey and kind of “fried.” I felt like co-opting elements of the horror genre, making it have some thrills and spills and be scary, would help those scenes be more accessible and make it more fun. If you want to go into themes and delve into scenes about “Who are we?” and “What does it mean?” and those kinds of things, unless you can do it with a little bit of humor and fun, it gets a little heavy-handed. I wanted it to be kind of an exploration. It’s not so much that we’re shying away from using the word “horror.” I just want to make sure that people don’t feel like we’ve sold them on something and then they get there and it’s not what they were expecting.
DC: I related to the cast a lot. Was casting kind of inspired by Eighties stereotypes? I know you were saying that films like Pretty in Pink were an influence. There’s a little bit of John Hughes in there with the preps and outcasts meeting up and spending a night together.
KS: With this movie we’re trying to deal with some kind of esoteric content, and then we’re also genre hopping or co-opting from different genres. So, yeah, I felt like using a relatable frame of the good kids and the bad kids, the sort of honor student type with the smoking section kids, seemed like a good way to frame the story, for sure.
DC: What is the title a reference to?
KS: The Honor Farm actually came from a physical place that did exist that was called the Honor Farm. My co-writer, Jay Tonne, grew up in Pueblo, Colorado; and when they were in high school, they would all go to this place on the edge of town just like in the movie: an abandoned prison work farm. He actually even had an old VHS video that they had filmed there. It was torn down because there was so much juvenile delinquency that happened there and kids getting into trouble. At some point, some kids actually did die there just by accident. It wasn’t satanists or anything!
DC: It seems like some of your favorite films might be represented here as well?
KS: Definitely David Lynch and “Twin Peaks” and kind of the world of “Twin Peaks” was a really important reference. How he manages to create this alternative world that has its own rules and vibe and feeling. I just love that about David Lynch. I love his stream-of-consciousness approach to storytelling. Even down to in “Twin Peaks” how there’s the Black Lodge and the White Lodge, and I feel like the Honor Farm and then the experience they have coming out of the Honor Farm are kind of loosely modeled after that idea. When you go into psychological terrain, there’s going to be these physical or maybe psychological spaces that you can enter. So that seemed like a really fun vehicle to explore within the psychedelic mindset. And also the strange and enigmatic structure of Donnie Darko, where the movie is kind of a puzzle but it’s still a fun puzzle for a teenager to put together.
Written and directed by Karen Skloss, The Honor Farm stars Olivia Applegate, Louis Hunter, Dora Madison, Liam Aiken, Katie Folger, Michael Eric Reid, Mackenzie Astin, Michelle Forbes, Josephine McAdam, and Christina Parrish.
Synopsis:
After prom night falls apart, Lucy finds herself at very different kind of party… on a psychedelic trip that could be a dangerous trap.
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