ALL THAT CREMAINS OF STEVE SESSIONS

By Mike Watt

"When I was little, [I] wanted to tear things apart to see how they worked. Same with the horror movies I saw on TV. I'd see them from a constructionist point of view, how they were made, what elements went together to create it. I wanted very early on to make them myself."

Steve Sessions is a micro-budget filmmaker living in one of those Southern States - "I'm in Biloxi, Mississippi, on the Gulf of Mexico. That's the spot red arrows point at on the weather channel during hurricane season. Its not like the rest of Mississippi here at all, very progressive, with casinos and such. But you can't move too far in either direction without drowning or being besieged by rednecks." - his latest film, Cremains, was recently acquired by E.I. Entertainment, to be distributed by their "Video Outlaw" label.

According to Sessions, Cremains is "an ultra-low-budget anthology horror flick like the old Amicus' pictures and (without the comic book approach) Creepshow. There are four stories and a wrap-around. The framing narrative is the interrogation of a funeral director by two off-screen voices. They're asking him about [his practice of] illegally "commingling" bodies - cremating two bodies together to save on time and costs. This exchange leads him into recounting some other stories he's heard of, which go into the shorts. One of them is about a serial killer, another has obligatory lesbian vampires, and then there's the final story, which relates to the funeral director's improprieties.

"I'd wanted to do the "Cremains" story for a while -- the commingling and its impact on someone's attempt to resurrect what they believe to be their loved-one. Would have made a nice feature. As originally conceived, though, it was pretty complex - the story and what I call "the cremainder," the commingled result. It was beyond my budget. So I decided instead my first no-budget flick should be an anthology, doing a few stories each with their own theme, exploring that instead. But I didn't want to give up on the cremation story so I re-tailored it and made it wrap-around and had it so that two bodies are commingled, not an en masse thing. ("The Cremainder" is a charred zombie thing in gaillo clothing, and I like him a lot.) The other stories just sort of fell into place. Some went through changes over the process of shooting - a location fell through, an actress couldn't make it, etc. The only story that wasn't written just for Cremains was the one with Jeff Dylan Graham, which was published in Agony in Black. They were looking for SE7EN-esque tales. But in Cremains, the twist ending is something entirely different."

Cremains stars the afore-mentioned Jeff Dylan Graham, Lilith Stabs, Kimberly Lynn Cole, and features the voice of b-movie diva Debbie Rochon - a pretty impressive line-up for a guy with no money.

"It was great having b-actors involved for a lot of reasons," Sessions says. "I can't underestimate how important it is to have people who are professional and who

like the material. There's that perfect balance of being realistic about the whole thing and having fun with it, but also being serious about the product. The first b-horror actor to join Cremains was Kimberly Lynn Cole. She'd been in Body Snatchers as a pod soldier, and in Joe Sherlock flicks like Monster In The Garage. Debbie Rochon was a "voice-over" role. Her recording was done one day in New York and sent down. It was amazing how well it worked with the footage of the person she's interrogating. She hadn't heard him, he never heard her, but it works great. It's an important part but it's still just a cameo since she's not really in the movie. When she was doing her internet radio show ["The Movie Guy" with Tim Reid and Debbie Rochon, on the now defunct eYada.com], she joked that she had done it topless. That might have been a good marketing approach.

"In the last story I needed the necromancer that attempts to bring the body of a cremated person back from the dead. In the script it was a male Voodoo Priest, but after seeing Lilith in Vampire Callgirls" and realizing she was in Atlanta, I got in touch with her. Lilith liked the idea. It was a perfect part for her and we shot it at a perfect setting -- the Westgate Gallery in New Orleans (aka "The House Of Death"). Jeff Dylan Graham was perfect. He's done a lot of b-films, and everything he does he's a different character, an entirely different personality. The rest of the cast, apart from two casino show stars here in Biloxi were either little theatre actors, local radio and TV personalities, adult entertainers, friends, family."

When asked what he does in his so-called "real life":

"I write horror fiction and some non-fiction (I debunked a famous 1973 UFO case for Fortean Times), and shoot much less-exciting events like weddings and depositions. I pursued [filmmaking] in college for a few years but got side-tracked and somehow convinced myself it wasn't that important, that I was fine writing and not dealing with the hassles of filmmaking. Only recently did it hit me that I still had to. I was working with a wedding videographer and he was always saying "you can take the equipment home, do whatever you want with it" and I'd say no, thanks, but he kept offering and finally I was like, 'okay, that's it, I'm going to do an underground horror flick'. It was pretty quick after making the decision to do so that I had a script and was shooting -- once I commit to something I have to see I through. We had to get our own camera and then, as things progressed, our own editing equipment, and so on. If I'd foreseen all that at the beginning it would not have happened, so I'm thankful for that."

The world of the micro-filmmaker is one of constant chaos. Lack of money, time, co-operation - all the elements are constant plagues to a production. The writer, director and producer are usually the same person - one who is constantly trying to produce miracles from thin air. Sessions agrees (as I knew he would). "At this level, when making an extra copy of a script can wipe out the budget, the smallest of problems - a twenty-dollar light bulb blowing out, etc - can be devastating. Cremains went pretty smoothly when we shot, nothing really out of the ordinary happening, but many little problems [have] far-reaching consequences when everything is such a house of cards. Getting locations to fit the script was an impossibility. The vampire story, for instance, was originally set at a hospital. No one would let us shoot at theirs and our budget made it impossible to convincingly fake one. No big deal - we changed the script. But the process of finding out we couldn't shoot at one was a long, inexorable ordeal that involved several different hospitals and weeks and weeks of working up through various chain of commands until we could get official "no"s. But the biggest adversary was being able to get more than two people in a room at the same time to shoot. When we did shoot, it went fast, and fun, and was casual, but the shoots were far apart."

In past articles, I have referred to independent no-budget projects as "the MacGyver School of Filmmaking". You'd be surprised what you can whip up with a C-Stand and some gaffer's tape. Necessity isn't just the Mother of Invention, she's the Whore of Filmmaking. "There was one scene in Cremains which has a fellow on a cell phone talking to his daughter," says Sessions. "It's supposed to be a tense scene. She's lost in the woods, at night, being chased by townspeople (You know how townspeople can be). The cell phone we were using as his prop was gone. So we took one of those disposable cameras and removed the label casing. The actor cupped it in his hand to disguise it while I shot it cropped tightly. Worked fine -- only people reading this will know. But there was one shot where he turns away from his mark and you see he's clearly talking into a camera with a built-in flash. Naturally that was cut. Thinking back on that now, actors are in a real tough spot. You hand them a Kodak camera and tell them that's going to be the cell phone tonight and 'don't worry about it, trust me'."

Another final aspect that defines the indie filmmaker is that they like to keep working on one project after another, often working on more than one at a time. Moving targets are harder to hit, as the saying goes. Sessions is no exception.

"We shot another flick called Malefic, starring Jeff Dylan Graham, Lilith Stabs, and Cynder Moon, about a group of corpse-kidnappers who hide out at a cabin in the woods which belonged to an occult author. A limited edition version is available on B-Horror.com. It's a smaller, darker project. I'm also working on another anthology with multiple directors. We're all figuring out the details now and will probably be shooting our various segments by the end of the summer. [And] I ended up doing a very quick score for Jerry O'Sullivan's Gut Pile when their original composer's computer crashed. That's available now from Sub Rosa Studios."

Thanks, Steve. I'm sure Sub Rosa appreciates the plug.

More information on Cremains or Malefic can be found at http://www.b-horror.com.