Q.The second film is a sequel to the slasher film Cleaver: Rise of the Killer Clown (2015) entitled CleaverS: Killer Clowns (2019). What can we expect from the film?
The first Cleaver movie was a bit of love letter to Halloween. I wanted to write something that felt like it could have been released in the slasher boom of the 80’s that was very much rooted in the tropes of that kind of thing. With the sequel CleaverS I really wanted to open that world up and so after Tobe Hopper died, I decided that it would be my love letter to another of my favourite movies The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974).
I’d been wanting to do a road movie for long time and this seemed like the perfect opportunity.It’s not really the kind of film you get to do when you’re working on a no budget film, so it took some planning to figure out how we could even pull it off, but as a result it’s one of the most expansive movies that we’ve made yet.
It’s also a very different side of Cleaver this time. We get to see him as a father and how that dynamic works in a world of slasher villains, with the usual gore and violence thrown in and, of course, lots of humour.
Q.What were you influences when creating the original character for Cleaver and why did you decide to base the events in America?
Cleaver was originally written, as I said earlier, as a one note joke. The biggest cliché I could think of for Slasher House was the classic killer clown trope that I’d seen in countless slasher movies. However, because he was slapped allover the cover and marketing for the film, he became an instant favourite. I was off planning Thorn’s next outing and a solo film for Nathan (that eventually became Hollower (2016)) and we were getting demands for a Cleaver solo film. Another film we were working on got delayed,leaving us with a couple of weeks free and so we decided to give it a shot.
The American thing was an accident really, because we weren’t sure we’d ever see Cleaver again, Andy Greenwood, who played him in Slasher House (2012), came to me the night before we started shooting his character and asked if he could test a Texan drawl out. I really liked it and we decided to go with it, he wasn’t in the movie long, so if people didn’t like it, they only had to deal with it for a short amount of time. Instead he ended up being a stand out character.
This, of course, meant that when it came to solo outing, we had established him as an American character and so we felt like this was a great opportunity to see if we could pull off an American setting on a no budget film. It was way harder than I expected though and it was really a pain in the arse. I have no idea why we didn’t move the action to a Southern English suburb for the second movie,but instead we doubled down and went for back road Southern State America as a setting instead.
Q.The original film Cleaver: Rise of the Killer Clown had a classic slasher feel, can we expect the same with the sequel?
The sequel is just a completely different animal, we almost tried to ignore the fact it was a sequel at all. There are elements that connect the two, such as Cleaver, now played by Paul Rogers and Mary Beth (Holly-Ann Dodkins) and Howells (Georgie Smibert) and references to things that happened in the first film. But it was written to be completely its own thing that anyone could watch and get it if it was their first Mycho movie.
We wanted to do something that wasn’t just teen characters ‘trapped in a something’, no,instead we wanted to explore the Mycho Universe a little bit more and take some of these characters on the road and so CleaverS ended up being much bigger than its predecessor.
It takes cues from the Texas chainsaw movies mainly, but also stuff like The Hills Have Eyes (1977), Wrong Turn (2003), Motel Hell (1980) and especially one of personal favourites The Hitcher (1986) as well as just about any other movie that sits in that backwoods slasher kind of genre. The film itself take on a more action orientated feel, with a lot of influence from westerns in there too, but we were careful to make sure it was, first andforemost, a horror.
Q.With the events being based in America did this cause any additional challenges when making the film?
Too many ha ha. Yeah, the first film was a real challenge, and that’s as just a case of shooting in a couple of houses, we found that really challenging because UK and US homes just look very different. The choice to take the films scope much wider just made those problems even worse. We decided early on that houses were difficult to cheat and so we’d make conscious efforts to keep the location bit more universal, but that proved to be even harder than we thought it would be. Everything in England just looks so goddamn English! We found a place in the South of England that looked the part and even had a desert but getting everyone there and housing them on our budget just wasn’t possible.
We just started scouting the local area and working out what we could find that could cheat the fact that we weren’t in the USA.We found some farmland that looked the part and eventually got permission to use that and we built a lot of sets at the school that we’d used in our last film Mask of Thorn (2018). We also had a crazy heatwave which kind of helped sell the whole tone, except for the days when it was cloudy and raining, which was a lot of them. We also knew of a series of Roadside American Diners that were independently run in the area, so we got permission to shoot in one of those which really went a long way to adding that Americana feel to the film.
Cars and vehicles were also difficult, because not only did they have to be American,but they had to be era accurate as the film was set in the late 90’s. We called in a lot of favours, especially for the family’s van which was loaned to us by Local scare actor Mikey Dee, who sadly died since we finished filming. We also ended up owning a cheap, rusty,old, Japanese sports car that hardly runs as a result of trying to find, rent and borrow vintage vehicles, we called it ‘Swipey’.
Q.Were there any elements in the two films which changed from the originals script?
With all of our films, I usually start with a few takes on the idea and pick one that will be budget friendly and the best fit for the way we work.
Bannister Dollhouse was originally a little more in line with a Twilight Zone (1959- ) story,that had the family trapped in the house by Molly, it was a little close to the classic Twilight Zone story though and so I decided early on to move toward the more melodramatic approach. There was originally planned to be a doctor character who was mentioned in the script a few times, but our production schedule got shortened and so that was the first thing to go. Apart from that, the first draft and the final film aren’t massively different.
CleaverS went through a lot more development, l’d been working on it since the end of the first films shooting and originally, I looked at a straight follow up that involved a return of The Cleaver to Still Rivers looking for revenge, but it felt too close to the original and so I decided to move away from it. There was also another version in development that was more focused on Cleaver and Mary Beth as the protagonists, which is a lot like Logan (2017) meets The Devils Rejects (2005), but with more killer clowns. It was really cool, but at the time we could only have Andy (The original Cleaver) for about 4 days total, and only for 2 days at a time, there was no way we could have done what we wanted in that time.
We wrote the final and current version based on his availability, then 3 weeks before shooting he had to drop out because of health issues. But by then it was way too late to go back and pick up that idea, and I liked what we’d come up with and the cast we had and so we pushed forward. The lost idea might end up in a book or as a short, which is the wonderful part of having a shared universe,because you can adapt your lost ideas in other places.
Q. What were some of your favourite moments from the two films?
For Bannister I think my favourite part was working on the opening for the film. We shot that and the Molly short film over three nights and just hung out with Chloe Badham. We just had more time than we’d had on the rest of the film and just had fun shooting very slowly and taking the time to get what we wanted, the rest of the cast came in over the few days to do bits here and there. It was really nice to just see everyone in such a relaxed shooting environment.
On CleaverS the shoot was way more hectic.It was boiling hot and there was so much to shoot some days and then so little to shoot other days that it was really hard to ever get into the swing of things. The one day that went very well was the factory scene, where Howells first finds Misty, we put the set together from scratch in the morning and spent the day shooting slowly but surely and it was a good balance of fun and good, hard work. I also really liked working with the family in the house,doing some of the kills was good fun, if a little stressful.
Q. Do you have any new projects which you are working on?
There’s a project based on another of the Killers from Slasher House 2 that we’re currently working on, although it doesn’t have a proper name yet. I find that’s the least important thing these days, just making the ideas fun and good is what I’m interested in.
Outside of that, there are sequels to most of our bigger films in development for the next couple of years, but my focus currently is getting the next couple of films ready and then I think we’ll look at making more varying stories in different mediums.
Q. Both films are produced by your production company Mycho Entertainment Group. How did the company come about originally?
Mycho really started as a label for the short stuff I was producing in 2004. I’d just left my home town to start my career in film making and I wanted a new identity to go with my stuff. I spent the next five years just making short films and trying to get to grips with the complex language of cinema, although I’m not sure I ever did lol. In 2009 after I won some awards for some short film stuff, I decided to take serious stab at my first feature. That didn’t work out great, and post production was pegged to take months, I didn’t want to wait 18 months to make something else, so I dusted off the script for a film that I wrote in 2005 called Slasher House and the real journey began.
Slasher House had been an idea that was part of a shared Horror Universe that I’d sketched out when was a college student and I saw the potential to make it a real thing and just kind of decided to go with it, before I knew it I dug out years’ worth of MychoVerse (Before it even had a name) ideas and stories dating back to when I was a kid and just started piecing it all back together.
We’ve now made eight movies set in that Universe as well as shorts and it continues to grow more and more every year.
Q. As Mycho Entertainment Group continues to grow do you have any other projects which you are working on outside of the films?
We try to keep things interesting. I knew that we wanted to expand into other mediums early on, but from day to day stuff it really just myself and my wife Anna working here so it’s hard to find the time, funding and resources to branch out too quickly.
Two years ago we finally release Mycho Comics Issue 1, which was a huge milestone for us and the start of expanding the universe even further. It’s a great medium to tell stories in as we don’t have budgetary constraints for a start, but it also means we can tell smaller stories about the established characters we have. The second issue is coming later this year and we’re hoping to get one or two issues a year out going forward in-between movies.
Aside from that we’ve also been launching RETRO VHS releases of our titles in special edition Limited releases. It’s great because it’s a such a fun way to experience the films we make and its really suits the aesthetic of our Universe. Then there’s also the T-Shirts that we release for a Limited Time, they are usually designed to coincide with our releases and are available for 14 days and then gone forever,which makes them real instant collectors’ items.
The biggest thing we’ve been working on are the Mycho Action Figures, based on the popular characters from the movies. It’s been a long road making them a reality as that kind of thing is something that we have created and designed in house from scratch and it was like learning a new language. I actually saw the first ever prototype today and we’re hoping that we can have them ready for a limited release in the New Year. The plan currently is to release a new one at the beginning of every year, with a Halloween variant every Autumn. It’s very exciting and something that I’ve wanted to do for along time, so finally seeing it come to life is amazing.
Q.A good horror movie starts with a good story and strong script. What advice would you give to someone who is looking to write a script for a horror movie?
The best advice is ‘learn to trust yourself’, I wish I could count the months I’ve wasted worrying that my story made no sense or that it wasn’t complex enough or simple enough or too daft or not funny enough or…. You see the problem. Don’t spend too much time thinking, get it down on paper, once you have it down you can think about it all you want, but you’ll have a better idea of what’s wrong with it and, more importantly, WHAT’S RIGHT!
Another good piece of advice is to know your genre, I can’t tell you how many times people have brought a film to me with the line “it’s never been done before” for me to point them in the direction of several titles that are almost exactly the same. Knowing your genre is essential in making fresh new work and being able to take the tropes
You can find out more about the feature films playing at Horror-on-Sea Film Festival and details of tickets on the website.
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!
