Jeremy Kasten, director of THE ATTIC EXPEDITIONS, THE THIRST and the new WIZARD OF GORE remake, told Fango about his plans for a youth-oriented chiller called SHUDDER, and he also spilled to Fango about another, more unusual horror project he’s got cooking. “It’s sort of a race against the clock to see which happens first,” he tells us. “This one is called BLOOD BUBBLE BATH, and it was born of the desire to make a film where I have absolutely no constraints. I hope it’ll be a really scary movie, but I couldn’t tell you what it’s gonna be yet, because we’re just in the gestation phase of getting writers involved.
“The idea,” he explains, “is to bring on 10 scripters—half of them very seasoned pros, the other half young, brilliant people who are doing really interesting things with the genre—and have them each write 10 pages, starting with the first writer, then moving to the second, so they’re all reading each other’s pages. The tone, hopefully, will shift dramatically every time; there’s no telling where each succeeding writer is going to take it. But we don’t want to make a film that just a collection of shorts; we want the protagonist to continue throughout it, or the antagonist or whatever. The idea is not to give them any kind of guidelines—it’s like a drinking game of scriptwriting. It’s a big experiment, but we really trust that bringing on seasoned people who understand the beats and know the genre has a very specific rhythm—whether they choose to fly in the face of it or use that to their advantage—will make it exciting. We want to make a movie where these writers put their most insane, dangerous, interesting, outrageous ideas into one project.”
While Kasten isn’t ready to announce any of the scribes just yet, he does promise that some “earth-shattering” names are in talks to take part in the project, which will be entirely self-financed. He also reveals that the concept for making a film “where I have absolutely no constraints” has its roots in one of his very first horror credits. “Years ago, I cut a movie for a friend of mine named Matt Jaissle called LEGION OF THE NIGHT,” he recalls. “The film was bought in advance, based on a trailer, by a company called Cinequanon, and part of that deal was that they agreed to pay for whatever his next script was going to be, and would finance the film for like $60,000, $100,000, whatever. It seemed like a great situation, but Matt was so unhappy with them by the time we were done with LEGION OF THE NIGHT that he wrote a script called MINIMUM VENGEANCE, which was a ’70s-style exploitation cop movie in which the buddy cops were a normal guy and a hand puppet.”
Yes, you read that right. “There was no acknowledgment in the whole script, except to say on the first page that one of them is a white guy in his 30s—he’s grizzled, an alcoholic, blah, blah, blah—and the other one’s an orange hand puppet with a bright purple nose. And certain beats in the script would acknowledge it, like he could never drive because he couldn’t see past the wheel, and he was real bitter about it and would fall behind in chases. And of course, Matt did that as a screw-you to Cinequanon, like, ‘They’re never gonna pay for this.’ When I’ve told people about it, they’d say, ‘You should get your hands on it and make that movie.’ And I don’t know if I want to make MINIMUM VENGEANCE, but I’d like to make my own completely out-of-the-box film. That’s sort of where BLOOD BUBBLE BATH started: The idea of making a film where nobody can prevent me from doing something that’s absolutely entertaining in whatever direction.”
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