“The film’s got a pretty darn good amount of gore,” producer Ian Moore of Full Fathom 5 Productions tells Fango of his flick SIBLING (see pics below). “Each kill is amazingly intense, and we were really, really lucky to attach Paul [TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE: THE BEGINNING] Molnar for the effects. He comes from KNB, and did stuff like create a beating heart that’s exposed in one kill, and an underwater throat-slit that happens in one shot on camera and looks amazing!”
Written and directed by Matt Farnsworth (whose previous credits include the Rosanna Arquette flick IOWA), SIBLING stars Federico (THE SOPRANOS) Castelluccio, James McCaffrey, Diane Foster (who also produced) and Karen (THE BOY WHO CRIED BITCH) Young, and tells the story “of a guy named Marcus who witnesses his parents’ murder as a child,” says Moore. “After that, he’s brought up by very harsh nuns while his sister, who also witnessed the slayings, is adopted and raised in a good home.” Sounds like a recipe for some Michael Myers 2007-type pathos, and said suspicions are confirmed when Moore adds, “Marcus grows up to be a violent psychotic with a beef against his sister, as well as the nuns who were less than supportive of him during his formative years.” Held in an “involuntary mental hospital, Marcus escapes to exact revenge on the world.”
Filmed over 35 days this past August and September “in and around the shining metropolis of Union Township, New Jersey,” Moore says that the production received unprecedented access to city buildings there, according to Moore, as that is where SIBLING actress/producer Foster grew up. “We were allowed to shoot in a public school there for two weeks,” Moore says, “which is pretty wild for a horror flick.” And he couldn’t be more pleased with the production value such locations offered SIBLING. “The hook-up with Union is a big reason why our relatively modest budget film actually looks like a $4-million feature, and it was pretty satisfying for Diane to go back to her elementary school—this time with a deranged psycho running wielding an ax on the payroll!”
Writer/director Farnsworth clues Fango in as to what carnage said psycho unleashes in SIBLING, and he apparently approached the mayhem with a glee equal to Moore’s. “Nailing a nun to a crucifix and stabbing her open, beating heart does have its downside while you’re shooting,” the filmmaker says wryly. “It’s hard; you have to hoist the actress and mount her to the wall take after take. Same thing goes for cutting a nun’s throat while she is submerged underwater. But man, it’s worth it when you see the dailies; you remember why you wanted to hang a nun in the first place!”
Farnsworth is quick to point out that SIBLING doesn’t have an ax to grind with Catholicism, regardless of the grisly fates the flick’s women of the cloth meet. “I have no grudge [against the church],” he says, “and in fact wasn’t even raised Catholic, although I like the beauty and Gothic appeal—the romanticism, if you will—of the church as a backdrop.”
Citing Stanley Kubrick and Alfred Hitchcock as directors whose styles informed his approach to SIBLING, Farnsworth says that he wants the movie to have an “old Hollywood feel and to suggest violence, but keep the audience guessing [as to what might happen], and then really go for it and give them the gore in a way that Hitchcock never did.”
T&A is on hand as well. “Yes, we have a hot chick naked,” the director laughs, “and we have a masked killer too. We hit a lot of the conventions, but my aim with SIBLING was to keep all the kills as realistic as possible, and to hit a lot of classic horror genre moments, and to always do it in a way that makes you feel like this is something that could happen, rather than go with too much suspension of disbelief.” You can see SIBLING’s MySpace page here.
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