Haunted House:
Director Conrad John
by Kevin Lindenmuth
During the first ten minutes of viewing this movie I kept on thinking "Damn, another self-reverential Blair Witch rip-off"-BUT as I continued to watch, and the characters became more developed, it quickly transformed into a very captivating and creepy film. Two filmmakers videotape the reactions of their friends in a local haunted house-and set up some cheap gags to scare them-but when their makeup man is found dead, his hair turned totally white, events take a more terrifying turn. All chaos breaks loose and the threat of the haunted house becomes very real. The sense of dread is very well conveyed.
Conrad John - the producer, writer, and director - is a graduate of Writer's Bootcamp and it's invitation-only graduate program, Think Tank. Conrad has written six screenplays, one of which (Alien Kids, a family film) has been optioned, and another of which (Jane's Secret, a psychological thriller) is currently in pre-production with named actors attached. He has written, directed, and produced two short films, "One Dalmation" and "Ace and Deuce Ventura, Sport Detectives," both family comedies.
GC: What are you influences and aspirations and what got you into wanting to make movies? Are you a fan of genre films?
CJ: I'm not a fan of genre films and, when it comes to horror, I tend to like films that are more suspenseful and subjective (i.e., the fear comes from within the eye of the beholder) and tend to dislike horror that shocks the senses with gore or quick cuts or sudden sound effects. I love Hitchcock and have been influenced by him more than any other filmmaker. The home video camera got me into making movies. I started by making shorts with my son and his friends. I wrote, directed, selected the music, operated the camera, did the credits; everything. I had a ball and noticed that everyone who saw them laughed and was entertained by them, which gave me an additional thrill. That's when I started thinking about doing a feature. Selecting a genre film as my debut project was, frankly, a practical choice. I knew that that type of film had the best chance of finding an audience and getting recognition, given the limited resources I had to work with and the inability to hire "named" actors.
GC: An obvious comparison is to Blair Witch�but when I was watching it kind of became a sly commentary against that movie, not a spoof but a kind of a "ribbing" to the viewer.
CJ: The first script I budgeted to make into a movie (which is now in pre-production) had a $2 million budget. This is before I knew what caused a budget to be high or low. I knew I couldn't raise that much money on the strength of my two shorts, so I budgeted out a family film I had written and a production company had offered to buy from me (so it must be good, right?). $1 million. Better, but still too high. By then I had an even better idea of what made a budget go up or down. I needed a story with minimal locations, no helicopters or major special effects. That's about the time that Blair Witch hit the screens. I went to check it out. The points I seized on were: no costly locations, no named actors, and a story line that called for digital cameras and mainly master shots (with little coverage). Two incidents from my childhood came to mind (one a ghost story I had heard and the other a real life experience I had while camping in the woods with a group of boy scouts). Now, I had a story that could be low budget. By the time I got home from the theater, I pretty much had the story written in my mind. The comparison to Blair Witch was unavoidable so I intentionally created the "ribbing" as you call it to sort of give a wink of an acknowledgment to those filmmakers and to also, hopefully, distance Haunted House from that film in the minds of the audience.
GC: How did you go about casting the movie? Talk a bit about each actor.
CJ: I hired Fourth World Productions, which at the time consisted of two film students, Jonathan Engel and Scott Pearlman to help me. (Later, I brought them into the project as co-producers). We ran an ad in Back Stage West and received about 100 headshots for each role. The three of us went through each of them and decided which ones to call in for each role. We erred on the side of inclusion and only discarded those who clearly weren't right for the part. An example: we asked for college-aged students but got a picture from a guy who was at least 40 years old. His headshot sailed into the trash can - or least in that direction.
We then ran each of the others through a very quick interview that was designed to get to know the real person. We asked unexpected questions that had no right or wrong answer. Like, "What was the scariest experience you ever had?" I wanted to match the personalities and looks to the characters I had created as much as possible, especially because most of the roles called for at least some improv and spontaneous reactions to things not previously revealed to them. We got some bizarre responses, some funny, some weird, you name it. We filmed them and have talked about putting some of them on a DVD as an extra feature, if the film goes that far.
After we narrowed the candidates down to a manageable number through that step, we called in the selected ones and gave them sides to read and also had them improv. We then narrowed the list further to 2 or 3 per role and called them back. At that final audition, we mixed and matched them. At that point, I was mainly looking for chemistry.
Finally, prior to making a final decision, I interviewed each of them one-on-one. The purpose of that interview was to go over my basic on-set policies and approach to filmmaking to see if we were compatible as co-workers. I had a very tight budget and schedule, so I wanted to make sure the actors would take a professional approach and not view the set as a big party or a singles event; that they would be prepared; on time; etc. I promised them all a big wrap party at the end of it all, a promise I kept. By then we were a closed-knit group and we were able to party down, have a lot of fun, and make up for the hard work and low pay.
GC: How long did it take to make Haunted House, from pre-production through the final edit.
CJ: Fourteen months, is the short answer. But not all of that time was committed to actual work on the film.
I wrote the Script in a 3-week period in September, 1999, which included several re-writes. (But later worked on it some more.) We putzed around several months trying to find a location and ended up in Sacramento in the Spring. March to be exact. We verbally agreed on a deal for a house, but then the owner talked with someone who "knew" the value of film locations and the guy tripled his asking price, which was a deal-breaker. As I walked away, he said he would negotiate, but I said, "No, thanks. I negotiate before I make a deal, not afterwards." Which is just as well, since we found a better house in the LA area, after all, so we saved on travel expenses.
We did the casting during January and February, of 2000. My fund-raising efforts went into high gear in March. That is when I stumbled upon a method of fund raising that showed some real promise. And we shot in June, for twelve days.
I took a vacation and started editing in July and finished a rough cut in a just a few weeks. I took another break and went back to raising funds before doing the final cuts, which took another 3-4 weeks. Sound and music took another month or so. I finished all of that in early November and then set about screening the film before a test audience, doing promotional material, etc.
GC: Weirdest thing that ever happened while shooting the movie.
CJ: Ah, sounds like one of my first casting interview questions. I would have to think about that a minute. Oh, I know. Actually, it's something I just heard about. Marcus' buddy Sean, from Sacramento, freaked out some of the actors by killing a rat out in an adjacent field and then bragging about it, with a weird gleam in his eye, or something like that. I got most of my information at the wrap party. Apparently, he was also packing heat (but he was a professional security guard and was licensed to do so) and displayed the gun at a point when some already felt uneasy around him.
GC: What are your future projects? Talk about Jane's Secret...
CJ: I actually have several on the board. Jane's Secret is the first one. It is in pre-production and fund raising is proceeding nicely. We are in negotiations with a distribution company that is talking about putting up nearly half the budget and we have two others in the wing that are interested in a similar arrangement.
The story is a horror/psychological thriller about a psychopathic killer on the grounds of an island mansion filled with vacationers while a detective on shore pieces together the evidence. There are a number of unexpected twists, especially relating to the killer and his story (I don't want to give too much away, but will add that the story is actually the second part of a trilogy that explores the subject of mind control, sort of a modern Manchurian Candidate crossed with Halloween. The trilogy explores actual mind control experimentation that has been publicly revealed that had been conducted by the CIA in projects like MK Ultra, Project Artichoke and Project Bluebird, in addition to my added speculation about un-revealed projects). But Part 2 of it, Jane's Secret, is a stand-alone horror story that just happens to fit into the broader story.
Go to: http://www.hauntedhousemovie.com/index.html
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