Exclusive Interview: Manny Serrano (Theta States)
What was the first film that you saw that made you want to get into filmmaking and how did you go from film fan to filmmaker?
I can’t for sure nail down a specific film that made me want to be a filmmaker. When I was young, my father got us cable TV for the boxing PPV’s and then for HBO. We had a few dozen CED’s, which led to a fairly wide bookshelf with a couple hundred VHS tapes, plus with a video store right down the street I would rent movies myself on the walk home from school. Plus, my brother and I must have gone to the movies with my mother at least once a month, maybe more. I read Fangoria and Gorezone regularly as a kid, and bought Tales From The Crypt Comics, I did book reports on movie novelizations. Movies were just always part of my life. I was also always into art, drawing, painting, etc. When I was a teenager, I got heavily into music, and it was just a natural progression to combine music and art with my love of movies to become a filmmaker.
My high school had a full broadcasting studio that went to complete waste as they never started a TV/Film program. Picture a public access TV station room, and that is exactly what they had. They had a full 3-camera setup in the room, just stuck in the corner under sheets and in my freshman year of High School I took an English class which used the “performance” space of the studio as a classroom. The teacher was young, in his 20’s, and I kinda made friends with him. He had never been in a TV studio before and thinking it was a complete waste of all this equipment, he started tinkering with it and incorporated the video equipment into his classes; recording students reading sonnets, poems, Shakespeare, etc, and then playing it back for everyone so they could hear their own pronunciations and cadence. He saw it as a fun way to get kids to want to read more difficult literature.
I eventually spent the majority of my spare time in High School (and cutting a lot of classes) sitting in that room, learning to operate the board. I’d sit in the control room in the dark, watching his English classes through the cameras, treating the class like a live-tv show. I’d switch between cameras, run effects, lower thirds titles, motion graphics, etc. Myself and a couple of other students who were just as curious did the same. We mimed music videos at the end of the day or when the room was empty. The teacher just let us kinda run free on it, within reason, and it absolutely changed my life. Eventually, years later in 2006ish, I made my first film with some friends, and I’ve never looked back.
VIPCO and BayView Entertainment have released your latest film THETA STATES (2017). Without giving away too much of the film what can you tell us about it to intrigue movie fans?
Theta States is about a long-term insomniac, Danny, who is the subject of an experimental sleep study. Torn between his girlfriend Nicole’s concern for him and his new-found ability to sleep regularly, Kelly (played by Erin Brown) seems to be helping to drive the wedge between them deeper as he begins suffering from blackouts, hallucinations, and recurring nightmares. Danny now has to figure out what is going on, whether Doctor Z is for real, and what does Kelly have to do with it all.
What separates THETA STATES (2017) from other science fiction films?
You know, I really don’t have much of an answer for that! It wasn’t intended to be a sci-fi film. It was written as a psychological horror with a lot more nightmares and supernatural sequences. The original script even had a small imp creature that would terrorize Danny, there was even a cult of people who were addicted to the treatments. Over a couple of rewrites due to budget, location logistics, scheduling, and the restraints of making it with such a small crew, the story changed to focus more on the relationship between Danny, Nicole, and Kelly. Once it was done, we called it a Psychological Thriller, but it really wasn’t until after our premiere and we had a few reviews come in that we realized we’d made a Sci-Fi film as well. It just kinda became that all on it’s own.
Another project you have out is DARK TALES FROM CHANNEL X (2021) which would appeal more to horror fans but also those who like anthology films. What was the filming structure like for this film e.g. linear or go from one part to another?
Dark Tales From Channel X was an amalgamation of ideas. Lindsay and I had made about a dozen short films between 2013-2019. Many of them were intended to be part of an anthology series, kind of a proof-of concept for a larger budget Creepypasta/NoSleep style anthology we wanted to do. As luck would have it, we made friends with a few of the folks who work on the NoSleep Podcast and we worked with them on some of the short films. Brandon Boone, first as foremost, did some incredible work on the scores for Beneath, I Waited For You, and Matryoshka. Phil Michalski was our final sound mixer, the super talented Manen Lyset co-wrote Matryoshka with me and easily became my favorite film I’ve ever done. We even had Peter Joseph Lewis lend his voice to I Waited For You becoming the single voice you DON’T want to hear answer the phone. Also being very low budget, doing a series just took so long to pull together a shoot for ONE episode, we decided against continuing the series format. So in 2019 Lindsay and I wrote a connecting wraparound story starring Michelle Nunez, who is now on the ABC series The Rookie: Feds and Tyler Perry’s Ruthless.
Sticking with DARK TALES FROM CHANNEL X (2021) for a moment, were you perhaps a fan of the original TV series The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits. Do you have a preference of the two shows and have you seen the new The Twilight Zone by Jordan peele?
The Twilight Zone is probably my favorite TV show of all time. The stories are the blueprint for every “twist” story ever told afterwards. We’re all trying to catch up to what Serling and Matheson did over 60 years ago. I enjoy The Outer Limits as well, but I mostly watched the 90’s Limits series and that will always have a special place in my mind. I wasn’t a huge fan of the Jordan Peele version. I think some of the stories were a bit too on-the-nose and felt less Twilight Zone and more Black Mirror-lite, which is funny considering Black Mirror is probably the closest any TV show has gotten to being The Twilight Zone. Peele’s was just missing something, and the commentary felt too on-the-nose. From a strictly story-telling perspective, it didn’t have the nuance of the original series and feels very rooted in the current political climate, whereas Serlings writing was more subversive. His social themes could be transposed to a multitude of perspectives, issues, and transcended multiple generations.
What would you say is your dream project that you have created or perhaps is still waiting to happen?
Ooh.. I have a couple of ideas.. I dig the idea of remakes and I enjoy a lot of them. I would have loved to be part of the Flatliners remake. Being one of my top 5 films of all time, I have been throwing ideas around for years on an Altered States remake. But what I would love to do, a real DREAM project, would be to adapt William Martin’s (FKA Poppy Z Brite) novel Exquisite Corpse into a film. It’s a not-so-well-known book about two serial killers who plan to kidnap, kill, and cannibalize the same beautiful gay man in New Orleans. I have lost count how many times I have read it over the last 25 years. It’s one of those books where you can open it, pick a page and start reading. No matter where you begin, within one paragraph you will be intrigued and want to read the rest. Its sexy, provocative, graphic, sleazy, grimy, romantic, violent, erotic, and absolutely BLEEDS 80’s/90’s goth culture. A soundtrack with everyone from Sisters Of Mercy, Siouxsie And The Banshees, and Wolfsheim, Nosferatu, and Nine Inch Nails with a doomy industrial/synth score by someone like Graeme Revell or Mitch Doran, or go wholly original music with Tangerine Dream. It would live somewhere between The Crow 2, Cruising, The Hunger, and a pre-1996 Nine Inch Nails music video, if you can imagine that combination.
I do have a couple of CK Walker (Rebecca Klingel) stories in mind that I’d absolutely kill to direct one day, but Exquisite Corpse is my dream project, hands down.
Do you have a specific genre of film that you feel pulled to doing or as a filmmaker do you like to spread your wings and see how far you can take your talent for filmmaking?
Horror is what I’m drawn to, but not just one genre of Horror. I’ve done a slasher film, Theta States was a sci-fi kinda-horror film, with the anthology we have body horror, a monster movie, a stalker, a demon, multiple supernatural entities, we even did a 1950’s Ed Wood-Meets-Night Of The Living Dead nuclear-age sci-fi spoof in 2013 called The Attack Of The Brain People. I want to run the gamut of all genres of horror; cursed objects, hauntings, more body horror, a giant insect film would be so much fun, a survival horror, a folk horror, a satanic cult, a witch story, I even have an idea for a Brides Of Dracula film! I’d like to do it all eventually.
When working on a project what do you find hardest personally to bring to the screen?
I’m very music heavy in my thoughts and writing process. I can hear music in my head when I’m writing a scene, I can hear it in my head when we’re shooting, and I can hear it when I’m editing. So the biggest challenge is getting the music that I hear in my head into the film, and music licensing is EXPENSIVE. So I spend a lot of time working out the soundtrack and the score because if it doesn’t sound right, I can’t leave it alone.
I’ve been very lucky in being able to call some AMAZINGLY talented musicians friends. Brandon Boone and my own former bandmate, Ramon Inoa, have done all the original scores for my films over the years. Somehow they are both able to, separately, understand what it is I’m looking for in the project. Tibbie X lent us two songs from her former band GASH for Theta States, as well as D. Catalano who allowed me to transpose a few of his songs into the basis of the score for the film. We have two songs by Tobey and Mitch of Mojave Phone Booth in Dark Tales From Channel X, and even a good friend of mine Patrick Devaney had a band called Romeo Penguin, and he and his old band mates got together to re-record one of their songs for our first feature film, Blood Slaughter Massacre, which is set in October 1984; coincidentally the same month they had originally written and recorded the song! I’ve been very lucky in the aspect of finding music within our budgets.
Physical media will still be around for a long time and for quite a few people this is their preferred medium to watch content. Of course now with the ever growing amount of streaming platforms there is now even more content for people to watch, so much choice and so little time. How do you as a filmmaker make it so your project stands out from the rest?
I don’t have much of an answer for that either. You can’t control whats going to catch on or stand out. You just kinda have to hope you can tell a story that reaches people and connects with a few of them in one way or another. It’s all in the hands of the audience, BUT physical media is something I still love. I own thousands of horror films on disc and as a child of the 80’s during the video store boom, I think it’s all about the packaging. I always try to have that one central iconic image for our releases. Blood Slaughter Massacre had art done by Joel Robinson and, no joke, the distributor took it on the art alone. I did the art for Dark Tales From Channel X myself and it has the wall of TV’s which I think really does capture the feel of the film. Impressive poster arts, especially for horror films, is making a comeback and I’m here for it!
Finally, what film projects do you have coming up that you can tell us about?
I’m working on what the next feature is going to be, hopefully I’ll have something substantial written in the next few months. I’ve been working on a bunch of short film projects with filmmakers in the NY area like Angie Hansen, Bec Fordyce, Louie Cortes, Phil Kral, Debra Markowitz, and a few others. You’ll see those projects hit the festival circuit by the end of this year. I’m also a part of the Long Island International Film Expo (LIIFE) team, and our main fest just ended so I’m taking a bit of a breather as we move into our sister horror festival, Scared For Your LIIFE on October 21st in Huntington, NY.
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