Viel, Christian (Samhain)
The first cut of Samhain was a brutal, balls-out splatter fest. It crashes through boundaries and shatters every politically correct guideline that the entertainment industry has today. When the news came that it was finally getting a Region 1 DVD release, I, like many gore-hounds, couldn’t wait to get my hands on it. Then the bad news started trickling in. The cut of the film being released was rated R.
Sometimes a director can put his heart and soul into a project only to have it ripped out. That’s what happened to Christian Viel as the release of Evil Breed: The Legend of Samhain is just a shadow of his original vision. To make matters worse, it seems that every film nowadays is getting the now cliche “Unrated” treatment. Here’s a film that really deserved it, and guess what? It was cut to shreds to maintain an R rating! Why? What the hell happened? For the answer I went straight to Christian himself. So sit back, relax, and get ready to listen to one filmmaker’s true to life tale of terror . . .
For your viewing pleasure I have provided some stills of the stuff that was excised. Please note that the images in this interview are rather hardcore. They contain nudity and a healthy dose of super spurting splatter. They are intended for a mature audience, so if you are offended easily, or are just too damned young, please don’t read any further.
Uncle Creepy: Samhain was originally a very gory film and fans have waited years to see it. What the hell happened?
Christain Viel: A moronic and greedy risk-adverse Canadian distributor; a greedy, crooked thief and pathological liar of a producer; a way too lenient government funding agency; the welfare mentality of the Canadian film industry; bribe taking mafia-like unions; greedy and/or drugged up stars. Greed and easy money had a lot to do with it.
UC: Most of the violence and kills in this film were way over the top. However, some of them never really amounted to anything more than being pulled under a bed. How far did you want to go, and were there kills in Samhain that never got to be filmed at all?
CV: Some of the kills where scaled down or cut because of budget limitations, some had more (including the pull under the bed), but somehow they were never completed in the final version, either because they lost the footage or they didn’t know what to do with it. I think it is a bit of both.
UC: Everything seems to have been changed. Even the title. What percentage of this film is still your original vision?
CV: About 25%. For some reason they cut a lot of the nudity, a lot of the gore, most of the humor. Even more strange, they cut most of the milder deaths yet expanded on the Taylor Hayes scene, which they originally threatened to cut out entirely! Go figure! Some scenes are better in the new edit, particularly the opening sequence (before Chasey Lain’s death), but others are just plain atrocious. They hired a music video editor in the hopes of making the film more hip and youthful, basically trying to MTVize it… Ironically, none of the people involved with the trashing of the film left their names on it, leaving me to shoulder the entire blame for the mess they’ve made. I think it is hilarious that an unfinished rough cut with only production sound and no music is better liked than the completed film that has been released. Unfortunately, since this was a Canadian film (and non-union to boot on the directorial side of things), we do not have the famous Alan Smithee clause, which is unfortunate because if there ever was a time for it, this was it.
UC: Obviously there were a lot of obstacles set in your way. Did this happen from the get-go, or was it more of a post issue?
CV: Samhain was plagued with problems from the get-go. From the casting on, we had issues. ACTRA, the Canadian performers union, was a massive pain in the butt and eventually prevented Mark Borchardt from being in the film. I had to do overnight rewrites the day before the first day of shooting and cast an actor without auditioning him – I based myself on past auditions for other projects – and he was kind enough to accept the role after a brief phone conversation and did a great job considering the short amount of time he had to learn his lines. Many thanks to Simon Peacock (Gary) for stepping in last minute. The character Borchardt was to play was renamed Gary Saxton in honor of Gary Saxe, the ACTRA organizer who caused me so much grief. And the scene where Gary gets rectally eviscerated was written specifically after ACTRA tried to force us to recast the entire movie barely two days BEFORE the shoot, regardless of the ten thousands of dollars and months we had spent on molding those actors! It would have been what I would have done to Mr. Saxe if there was no laws in our society. Because that’s what he deserved… Mariani (the producer) also had to pay a $25,000 bribe in order for them to leave us alone, something for which ACTRA Montreal is currently being investigated on.
During the script stage, we were getting notes from everybody and her sister, and I was forced to include them, especially the Scream-like references that Mariani was so fond of. For the love of God, I swear we were getting notes from the receptionist at Oasis who had screenwriting aspirations. The long and so boring let’s talk folklore around the stones scenes came from those notes.
We had problems with the weather. Ever heard of a snow storm in May? Even in Canada that doesn’t happen often.
Basically, any time we would shoot outside, it was freezing cold and/or snowing/raining, and every time we would shoot inside, it would be steaming hot. And of course we did not have any AC. Mariani was too busy stealing money from the show (he pocketed north of $400,000 from the official one million dollar budget) to make sure we could work without heat exhaustion.
We had temperamental star problems at times, usually linked to them wanting more money or more perks. We had one star with serious drug problems and a horny Mariani who desperately wanted to get in her pants and spent all kinds of production dough on this hardcore junkie. So much so that he eventually cancelled a film order I had requested in order to pay for a $3,000 spa session for the actress. We ended up shooting in the middle of the woods one weekend at night WITHOUT any 500 ASA film while Mariani was peacefully sleeping at home. Thankfully, Jean-Francois Fontaine, the DP, is a quick thinker and we found another solution using 250 ASA film that was left over, but it was still an intense technical challenge.
We had to lose money thanks once again to ACTRA who forced us to hire a stunt coordinator who would come, sign his sheet, and leave because he wasn’t needed yet that allowed him to collect two grand a day. And ACTRA was collecting all kinds of fees on that as well.
At one point, it looked like the junkie actress was stuck in jail back home, so they contacted Vivid to get a replacement and booked Taylor Hayes. But Mariani generously took production money to pay for the actress’ bail and she ended up in the film. But they never cancelled Taylor. I found out that Taylor Hayes was coming to shoot the day before she arrived, at the end of yet another hard shooting day. Mariani calls me and says that he has an actress coming tomorrow morning and that I have to write her a scene. I had no costumes for her, never seen her in my life hence no idea what she looks like, and we had almost finished shooting the film! So I had a quick brainstorming session with my buddy Alan Chou, called Maestro, to find out if they had something that could pass for an umbilical cord and he informed me he had also a dead baby so I said bring it all with lots of blood! I spent the night writing the scene and the next day, when Taylor arrived, I handed her five pages of dialogue. We found out that she had a plane to catch in five hours! So we had to shoot everything really quick. She was a sweetheart and a real trooper. She learned her lines while being made up. I had to tell her that since we had no costumes fitted for her she would have to play naked. I wanted to kill Mariani that day because this also cut down on our shooting day for the climax of the film by half. The man just did not give a damn.
That is just a sample of the many problems we had. It kept getting worse in post. Mariani, having pocketed almost half the budget, kept claiming we had no money to finish the film. Suppliers and employees kept not being paid for months then years. The whole she-bang ended up in courts where for the most part, almost everybody eventually got paid, with the exception of myself and a few others. To shut me up in court, Mariani tried to get my Russian girlfriend deported, sent the RCMP after me when the film ended up on the net (I wasn’t the one to leak it. Maybe it was the unpaid lab employees?), and countless of other savory ploys.
To this day, we are still having court appointments over this stupid movie. And it looks like the whole operation was a money laundering scam involving Mariani, a top Canadian bank, and a top governmental funding agency. But so far it is just rumors.
As for me, I just want to move on and never hear about this experience again.
UC: Who is ultimately responsible for all of the tinkering?
CV: I think the main culprit is William Mariani, the crooked buffoon behind it all. He went as far as getting himself a post-production supervisor credit when we all know he can barely boot up his laptop. Another big blame should go to Oasis and the moron behind it, Peter Emerson. Another thief and greedy imbecile who does not get his target audience. But since Lionsgate is releasing the steaming piece of crap Oasis served, they are taking the blame for it. Any way you look at it, it wasn’t a smart business move on the part of Lionsgate.
UC: What were you trying to accomplish with Samhain?
CV: I was asked to deliver the goriest film I could come up with within our limited means (a $600,00 CAD budget eaten in half by porn stars’ and B-movie stars’ salaries and the cost of shooting on 35 mm!). I wanted to deliver a film that was tongue-in-cheek and over the top yet appealing to the fans of gore flicks. I have succeeded on some levels and failed miserably in others.
UC: The ending of the version that has been released is a filmed after the fact, slapped on convoluted mess complete with the heroine’s hair being a vastly different length. (Couldn’t they at least have gotten her a wig?) What was the original ending you had conceived?
CV: The new ending was written by Warehouse Film’s gopher boy Jason Yearow and directed by Roger Cardinal, a local hack producers call in when they need something done quick and cheap or when a film gets taken away by the completion bond. Roger shot the extra scene over a year later during the filming of another fiasco where to this day, most people haven’t gotten paid. They did it with little care or interest, you can even see film equipment not even remotely hidden in some shots. Trying to match hair would have been very far on their list of priorities.
The original intended ending involved Shae getting out of the Shape’s lair to bump into its brother. You can find the ending in script form here. Basically, we find out that Shae is back home and pregnant with the creature’s deformed baby.
It was to have involved Mark Borchardt (who had other scenes elsewhere in the film as Gary’s twin brother – part of a rewrite we did when it looked like Borchardt could be in the movie after all). Unfortunately, Borchardt never came to Canada to shoot his scenes because of union issues with ACTRA, the Canadian equivalent of SAG.
UC: Is there any chance we’ll ever get to see your cut of the film, or at the very least an uncut version?
CV: No. It looks as if some of the footage has been lost by Oasis as none of the shots appear in the cuts that they’ve made, even the non gory ones. I remember them asking me about some film rolls that we had dropped at Deluxe. They must be somewhere gathering dust in a vault. The original cut list is lost to the times, and I doubt anybody will want to shell out even more money to reconstitute the film. The only “uncut” version to speak of are some bootleg versions available on the net. And even at that – there are to my knowledge at least 5 different versions circulating in various lengths and stages of completions, including a version with no gore at all!
UC: This had to have been a very frustrating experience for you. Has it motivated you in any way?
CV: It has been frustrating but mostly annoying. It showed me how mismanaged and corrupt the financing of movies is in Canada. It is a sickening form of welfare that encourages all sort of abuses. It discouraged me from working with “stars” as for the most part, despite their claims, they are only in for the paycheck. It gave me the impetus to produce my own movies, with considerably less money perhaps but with much more integrity. I have produced, directed, and edited three features in two years while I only managed to make two in almost 15 years the “conventional” way (i.e., getting screwed by crooked producers and distributors and waiting for the gods of financing).
UC: How do you feel about modern horror? In your opinion where has it gone wrong, and what is it doing right?
CV: I think we have lost our edge in modern horror. Casting Buffy in a horror film may be good for box office on paper, but it doesn’t contribute much more than money in the coffers. The audiences know all the tricks now. We can’t scare people anymore. At best, we can still shock them because there are a lot of taboos left. But other than that, it’s pretty mild fare out there. We have become boring and predictable… And I am guilty of that too. I think horror is played out, at least the way we do it. That is why the Japanese and Korean movies seem so fresh and invigorating. That is until they get remade with TV icons and once again lose all their edge. The genre is slowly dying again, and the North American producers and directors are the guilty culprits. I include myself in that lot, and that is the reason why you will not see me do horror again any time soon.
So there you have it. A truly horrific tale about filmmaking gone awry and a cautionary one at that! Making movies isn’t always fun or glamorous. There is something scary lurking in the woods. Something more terrifying than the inbred mutants that populate our nightmares – Producers!
Big thanks to Christian for taking the time to set things straight.
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