Keith Hodder and Peter Strauss Talk Van Gore

Steve Barton   |  

Apr 29, 2011

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Chances are, if you follow the news here at Dread Central, then you most likely are aware of the amazing story behind how writer/director Jason Eisener’s faux trailer Hobo With a Shotgun was picked as the winner of the 2007 Quentin Tarantino/Robert Rodriguez Grindhouse fan trailer competition. After Eisener was awarded the top prize, Hobo continued to gain a huge amount of fan support which ultimately fueled the demand for a feature-film version of the tale of a street urchin dishing out justice, one shell at a time.

Eisener, who still remains humble about his success to this day, decided he and his other Hobo collaborators wanted to give back to the community that got them to where they are today and held their ownfan trailer competition. The trailer that slayed the competition, Van Gore, the twisted tale of an artist that uses human blood to create his masterpieces, was conceived by three of Eisener’s fellow Canadians: Peter Strauss, Keith Hodder, and Jerrad Pulham.

Recently, DC had the opportunity to chat with two thirds of the creative team behind Van Gore– Hodder and Strauss- about how their following of Hobo over the last few years led to the creation of ‘the world’s first post-mortem artist,’ some of their inspirations for Van Gore, and what the future holds for their production house, River Rogue Productions.

Hodder and Strauss discussed how they had been following Eisener’s career since 2007 and jumped at the opportunity to be a part of a contest being held by a filmmaker they admired. “I am a huge fan of Hobo With a Shotgun and had been following the project since Jason won the Grindhouse competition in 2007. So I definitely thought it was really cool when he announced he was going to be paying it forward with his own contest,” said Hodder.

“We saw the contest announcement on a Friday and Peter and I got together that Sunday to work on the treatment,” explained Strauss. “We wanted to flesh a few things out in case we ever make Van Gore into a feature so it was important that there was an actual story to the trailer. We shot Van Gore in two days and spent about a week on pre-production and a week in post and even had a composer scoring the trailer overseas via Skype. It was pretty amazing how it all came together so quickly.”

For this writer, one of the reasons I fell in love with Van Gore is that it felt like an updated and twisted version of the 1959 classic flick A Bucket of Blood which starred the legendary Dick Smith and was helmed by the equally legendary Roger Corman. However, Hodder and Strauss had different inspirations behind their maniacal artist with an unquenchable blood lust.

“Van Gore was one of the first ideas we came up with and it ended up being the best of the bunch of our ideas so we just went with it,” explained Hodder. “The inspiration for Van Gore as the killer is that we wanted to see a slasher that hadn’t really been done before. We tried to not do a lot of homages because we wanted to stay true to our story but the one big homage we did include was in the final shot where the paint brush shoots down towards the woman’s eye. That was us paying tribute to Zombi and Zombi 2.”

Strauss said, “We’re both students in Toronto and I’m very much involved in the art community so we wanted to take those artistic pretenses of that culture and turn it on its head. It does have an era specific feel which was kind of inspired by the show ‘Mad Men.’ In that show, Don Draper hates beatniks and so we wanted to poke fun at that idea in our own strange way.”

“Poking fun at the beatnik culture was our own little personal twist because everyone generally just makes fun of hippies or the hipster culture these days. We just thought it’d be fun to do Van Gore at the expense of the beatniks,” Hodder added.

Hodder discussed how even though the idea of Van Gore came to them relatively easily, the actual design of the killer itself had gone through some changes. “Originally, we imagined that Van Gore would wear a mask when he killed his victims and he’d then paint the mask with his victim’s blood. But as soon as we cast Garfield Andrews as Van Clark, we saw what an amazing actor he was and how we didn’t want to cover up his facial expressions at all so we ditched the mask idea. And I think the trailer was better for it.”

Both Hodder and Strauss expressed how they’re both still stunned that Van Gore was not only chosen to be one of the top five finalists in the Hobo trailer competition, but were ultimately selected to be part of the home release for the flick this July.

“I remember Jason called me on a Friday to tell me that we had won and that I couldn’t say anything until it was officially announced on Monday or he’d send ‘The Plague’ after me,” said Hodder. “He kept laughing at me too because I was so speechless I just kept repeating the same thing over and over on the phone- I must have sounded so dumb. But honestly, I still can’t believe we actually won. I don’t know if the shock will wear off anytime soon.”

Strauss added, “For me, I think it’s awesome to see Hobo doing so well especially since if you remember back, the actual Grindhouse movie by Tarantino and Rodriguez really didn’t do that well in theaters. So to be a very small part of the Hobo world is really cool. And I am still just as stunned as Keith is that we won- it almost feels like the passing of the torch in some ways.”

During a recent press day for Hobo, DC had the chance to chat with Eisener and co-writer and producer Rob Cotterill about their thoughts on what made Van Gore such a hit amongst the contest’s voters.

“The first thing I want to say is that I couldn’t believe the amount of awesome trailers we got in our contest,” said Eisener. “I am still blown away by that. But I think what sort of set Van Gore apart at first was that it felt like a real movie. Like this is something I’d want to sit down and watch. There are a lot of trailers that were submitted where it seemed like they just got friends to come in and play characters for them but with Van Gore, you knew you were watching professional actors.”

“Watching the trailers without professional actors were definitely a lot of fun too because you could see the heart put into them but you could just tell these guys really went the distance in making Van Gore. The trailer was just the entire package of what you could want from it and I think that’s why voters responded to it,” added Eisener.

Cotterill said, “You could tell these guys had costume designers, great special effects and put a lot of effort in finding the right people to play these roles and tell the story the right way. In fact, you could sense that there was an entire movie already worked out just from that trailer and I think that is very similar to what we did with our Hobo trailer a few years back.”

Strauss discussed how the world of River Rogue Productions has changed in just a short time which is mostly due to the resounding support from the fans that not only voted for them, but reached out to the filmmakers to express their support.

“Horror fans are so supportive and they’re the reason the genre will always keep moving forward,” Strauss said. “There aren’t any other genres of film where fans truly embrace your work like they do in horror. We’ve been so surprised by the amazing responses we’ve gotten since the trailer was in the competition and being a part of this has opened up a whole new world to both of us.”

Now that Van Gore will be hitting DVD and Blu-Ray shelves as part of the home release of Hobo With A Shotgun on July 5th, both Hodder and Strauss are more motivated than ever to keep working on new projects, which will hopefully include a feature-film version of their winning exploitation trailer.

Strauss said, “We have been writing a treatment for Van Gore over the last few weeks but it’s a project in the infancy stages really. We have gotten some interest about the project too but that’s a long ways off I think.”

“Even though we are doing some work on Van Gore, right now we are focusing on other projects including an exploitation flick called White Trash and we are also working on creating a web series that is in the vein of the “Twilight Zone” television anthology. We think it’s time someone brought those kinds of stories to the internet so that’s going to be a really unique challenge. Eventually, we hope we’ll get to bring Van Gore to the big screen but I don’t think it’ll be anytime soon,” added Hodder.

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