Film: Bloodbuzz
Director: Daisy Bata
Writer: Daisy Bata
Starring: Beth Taylor, Johnny Vivash, Ed Hartland
Producer: Michael Shon
Synopsis – Amid a bug-infested heatwave driven by climate breakdown, a troubled, conspiracy-obsessed teen on the run is taken in by a reclusive farmer. But when her manipulative stepbrother arrives, it’s not just the mosquitos she will have to survive.
Bloodbuzz will be playing at Dead and Sudburied on Saturday, 18th October at 10:20 AM.
Q. Your film Bloodbuzz has been selected for Dead and Sudburied, can you tell us a bit about what we can expect from the film?
A. We are so excited to be coming to Subury as our film was shot in Suffolk! Bloodbuzz is a blend of sci-fi and psychological horror. Lost in the Suffolk countryside, a paranoid teenager called Lianna insists humanity is under siege by climate-mutated mosquitoes. As reality fractures, she must fight to be believed — or face the swarm alone. It’s a low budget film with lots of twists and turns and some
funny moments too.
Q. How did the idea for the film come about and what were your inspirations when writing the script?
A. In my day job I’m an investigative journalist and documentary producer. I was working on a series for Channel 4 and we went to New Hampshire in the US, to film with some libertarian gun enthusiasts at a festival. So many of them were completely obsessed with the idea of the world ending – they were kind of excited by the prospect. And I wondered what that would translate to in the UK. We see a lot about
preppers in the US and I wanted to explore what a young, UK prepper would be like – especially one raised on social media and watching zombie shows and being a teenager during Covid. The cognitive dissonance between the kind of romanticised apocalypse you see on TV and the reality of the pandemic which, for a lot of teenagers, was scary but also really dull. So we wanted to create a world where the
impending apocalypse wasn’t cool but was kind of weird and gross.
I was also really inspired by the original novel I Am Legend, and the book The World Without Us which I read a long time ago and was apparently a big influence on The Last of Us games. I’ve played Part 2 of that game way too many times and it was only after we finished the film I realised that Lianna was dressed a bit like Ellie!
Q. What were some of your influences for the look and style of the film?
A. The biggest influence was a short film that I watched many years ago, when I was about 15 at a film festival with my dad, called “Bugcrush” directed by Carter Smith. It had such a profound impact on me – because it was creepy and ultimately quite disturbing, but also really visceral and emotional and original. He did some creative, cool stuff in the film which I don’t think had a huge budget, but had such a massive
impact on the audience. The lead villain has a bandage on his arm (I won’t reveal why!) and I wanted to include that as a reference in Bloodbuzz, so that influence was there even from the writing stage. I made everyone who worked on the film watch it before we started shooting.
Bugcrush has this really gritty aesthetic that feels tangible. It makes the horror really creepy because it’s not polished at all – it feels real, like a documentary almost. They also did this brilliant thing with the sound design that we were hugely influenced by, where they used this constant, increasingly building bug noise throughout the film, instead of music. We wanted to try and do something similar, so Sam Mason our incredible sound designer, essentially ended up creating the score of the film through nature sounds and bug noises. We also brought Tammy Clark-Barrett on board who did some amazing original sound recordings for us – she went out into the woods at sunrise and captured some incredible stuff that hopefully you’ll get to hear at Dead and SudBuried!
Q. Did you make any changes from the original script during filming?
A. We didn’t! But the producer Michael and I did go through 13 drafts of the script before we even thought about going into pre-production. We wanted to be as prepared as possible so that shooting went as smoothly as possible. Having your producer essentially be your writing partner at that stage in the process saves you so much time later on.
Q. What were some of your favourite memories of making the film?
A. There’s this one shot, I don’t want to give too much away, where Lianna ends up covered in blood. We did it in one take, with Beth Taylor, our incredible lead actress, saying the line over and over, and powering through for several minutes, just repeating it so we had a lot of versions. We had built up to that scene all day and it was the final shot of the day and if we got it wrong, it would have been an absolute nightmare to try and do it again. But Beth absolutely smashed it, and she kept going for so long – it ends up being such a powerful moment in the film and I still get goosebumps every time I watch it. She really gave everything to that moment and it felt like magic on set!
The rehearsals with our superstar actors Beth, Johnny Vivash and Ed Hartland were a highlight too. We did a lot of improv building the relationships between the characters, not working on the script but on scenes that happened before the events of the film, things like that. We also did this with Joe Golby, our stunt co-ordinator, and those were fun too. The best moment on location was when one of our actors (I
can’t say who!) arrived on set in their prosthetics, created by our amazing SFX artist Rebecca Wheeler. Not only did it scare the crap out of the resident horses, it scared the crap out of us too!
Q. Did you experience any issues during filming?
A. Our on-camera vehicle broke down in the middle of filming a night shoot, so we couldn’t use the headlights as a light source. This was on a farm with no access to electricity except through a battery. And because the car had broken down, we had to stay late into the night to try and get it working again by boosting it from another car. This was after we had turned up to discover the field we wanted to shoot in was full of horses (that hadn’t been there on our recces). On another farm we hired a generator, as again there was no power, but the day before discovered they had described it incorrectly – so we had to do some last-minute fund raising to cover the cost of buying one (which we then sold on eBay). The biggest lesson on all of this was that you can be as prepared as possible, but things out of your control will still
go wrong. So you need to have emergency cash! And patience.
Q. What makes Bloodbuzz stand out as something different in the horror genre?
A. I think it’s quite political without telling you what its politics are. Our lead character is a conspiracy theorist and Beth did a brilliant job and worked really hard to make her as complex as possible, so that even though you might have preconceptions about the character from her beliefs, she still manages to surprise you. We pack a lot of ideas in there and I think while it does scare some people, hopefully it makes the audience think about it afterwards too. We didn’t just want to scare people, we wanted to explore the current state of the world.
Q. What do you hope people take away after watching the film?
A. That even though the world feels like it’s ending, we aren’t as polarised as it seems. We can still make friends across the divide – we can still find commonality with people that we initially think are our enemies. Without giving anything away, that was one of the intentions of Bloodbuzz – to create characters that initially seem so different from each other but find camaraderie in adversity.
Q. Do you have any other projects which you are currently working on?
A. I just got back from shooting a feature documentary in San Francisco. I’ve decided to take some time off this winter and focus on writing, so I’m really looking forward to that. I’d like to direct again soon!
Q. If someone was looking to get into filmmaking what advice would you give them?
A. It’s my first narrative film, so I’m still new to this. But what I used as a mantra was: story is everything. Every choice we ever made on Bloodbuzz, from using handheld or a tripod for the camera, to the poster, was about serving the story. Not what looked coolest or had “vibes” or whatever but what fit the story and served the story.
And sticking to that makes it a lot easier to make choices in the moment when you’re on set and there’s a horse in your field and the car has broken down and everyone is looking to you to make a decision. What decision here will best serve the story? Our poster, from the brilliant Charlie Gould, is a great example of this. It really stands out in line-ups with other posters because it looks kind of strange and unusual. And that’s what our film is – it’s low-budget horror, about a girl who pieces together her own reality in a scrapbook. It’s strange and hard to put into a category! That made us get creative and design something that is unique to our film. A glossy, sleek
Bloodbuzz will be playing at Dead and Sudburied on Saturday 18th October at 10:20AM.
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Find out more about the festival and purchase tickets for Bloodbuzz here
Published in various websites, Philip is a reviewer who is best known for his interviews and media coverage of independent projects including; films, books, theatre and live events. Always on the lookout for something different to cover!
