Back to Back: How We Made Two Feature Films for Dirt Cheap

By E Stuart Marlowe

From Evan and Kerry Marlowe, the couple who produced the indie films, Blood Rush and Horror House, comes a tell-all diary on the shooting of these two productions. Evan describes the financing, preparation, production and distribution of the features, including their work with legendary Troma co-founder Lloyd Kaufman. Brimming with production stills and screen grabs, the book is a quick and informative read.
Chapter One describes how the two developed Blood Rush from an idea for a short film, bringing in friends and ultimately running casting calls. In Chapter Two, Marlowe discusses the post-production of the film. The two rolled from the screening of Blood Rush into production of Horror House within a week, and this is described in Chapter Three. Marlowe end the educational book with a list of recommended reading, books he has used as the basis of his directorial self-training.

• Language: English
• Publisher: E Stuart Marlowe
• Release date: Mar 21, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310414480

E Stuart Marlowe

E. Stuart Marlowe is the bestselling horror novelist of Menagerie, Splatter, Pauper King and Gone is Gone. He is also a screenwriter and filmmaker. His most recent feature, "Abruptio," is in production and stars James Marsters, Jordan Peele, Sid Haig and Robert Englund. He and his wife co-own the production company, Sweet Home Films, LLC. They live in a downtrodden part of Southern California.

Book preview

BACK TO BACK

How we produced two feature films for dirt cheap.

Evan Marlowe

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2014 Sweet Home Films, LLC

All Rights Reserved.

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Cover photograph courtesy of David Freid.

Chapter One: shooting Blood Rush

In the beginning, it’s just us. Two people shooting a scene. Looked good, edited easily. Must not be all that hard to make a movie. Let’s try it. Call up some actor friends (thank god Hollywood is just down the road).

Sure!

Everyone’s excited to dive right in. But we don’t have a script. Not a problem, Kerry (my girlfriend at the time) will write it as we go. Eventually it’ll all sort itself out, I’m sure. The date is…

9/7/11

We don’t have a plan, just an idea. So we shoot the first shot. I mean, one could spend months – years – talking about and planning one’s first movie. But that’s really not our style.

A woman runs into focus and it looks like she’s been beat up, taken a tumble down the stairs or some such nastiness. She’s got a torn piece of shirt wrapped around her bruised arm serving as a tourniquet. A black eye. She hops the fence, knife in hand. Walks stealthily to the kitchen window and peeks in.

I tell Kerry what to do and she does it. I hadn’t held a camera since high school, when I made short films as my main hobby (largely in lieu of having friends). That was a Super 8mm and this is now a Canon T3i DSLR. A step up in quality, way up, but the principles of filmmaking and storytelling remain the same.

I built what’s called a Snoricam out of PVC pipes, strapped it to Kerry’s body with rope and a pillow to reduce pressure over her belly. Put our T3i on it and voila, we had a home-made Snoricam. I learned while shooting Horror House that a light-weight tripod would suffice, but for now this seems like the best way to get the shot. And it does look cool (the shot, not the overly intricate cluster of garden pipes jutting from her body).

Kerry’s character considers using a shovel as a weapon, but keeps the knife instead. She creeps into the house, sees her twin sister on the floor covered in blood and chewing on a bowl of guts.

All of it is shot in one or two takes. No need for more, since we’re just fiddling around. I play it back on my puny ten-inch laptop. It’s great for lugging around but doesn’t provide much detail since the playback area is as wide as a playing card if that. Nonetheless, I wound up editing most of Blood Rush on it.

Surprisingly, it all looks like a scene from a movie. No lights, no audio, but it comes out fine. The T3i has a lot of features. Things like ISO, shutter speed, white balance. Hmm. Over my head. I don’t know what any of it means and I don’t care. In fact, it wasn’t until Blood Rush was completely wrapped that I cracked open the instruction manual. If a scene was too dark, I played with the ISO or shutter speed until I could see things better.

And people go to film school for this stuff?

When I made movies in high school, there was maybe one dial for exposure settings, but primarily you popped in the film stock you needed. Indoor or outdoor shoots called for different ISO film. Otherwise, I never needed to know any of these fancy terms.

9/11/11

At some point in the past few days we decide there’s a feature-length movie somewhere in here. We don’t know what the premise is yet – probably something to do with zombies – but we’re sure we will in time. Let’s finish the scene.

Kerry puts on the same make-up and we mess up the backyard with Halloween props: a plastic brain,