Independent women
Ozark Foothills festival focuses on ‘Female Face of Indie Film.’
Some of the chills at this year’s Little Rock Horror Picture Show film festival came from gruesome weather: brooding clouds and the icy rain of a dark and stormy night. Vampires, zombies and psychopaths on lonely roads did the rest.
Produced through the Little Rock Film Festival, the second annual horror show screened 28 features and shorts from Arkansas and abroad March 22-24 at the Argenta Community Theater and The Joint coffeehouse in downtown North Little Rock.
“I think people like to be scared,” festival director Justin Nickels says. Horror movies confront the audience with “something people don’t have to deal with in real life, hopefully.”
Besides, “I think there’s more movie magic,” he says, “than when everything takes place in town, and people are just driving around in cars.”
These are films on the fringe, many are — pieced together like Frankenstein’s creature from whatever resources happened to be available, made on the fly for scraped-up thousands of dollars as opposed to
Hollywood’s millions.
They come with behindthe-scenes stories about making do with a couple of lights in place of a flying saucer, a few zombies to suggest a staggering epidemic, and how to sneak around a police rule of no filming.
Escaped from big studio supervision, they arrive with the possibility that, once the lights go out, nobody knows what could happen.
“Some of them might turn up in theaters,” Nickels says. Some play a circuit of other film festivals and some, shudder to say, might find an audience on home video.
The festival showcased several entries made in Arkansas, including director Neil Osam’s feature, The Eureka Incident, about a good time gone bad in the woods outside Eureka Springs.
Volunteering to help with the Little Rock Film Festival “was my way of getting in, networking, meeting people in the film community,” Osam says. “That was how I met my crew.”
They filmed the story of strange lights, a baby gone missing and extraterrestrials to blame in 11 days in August.
“It was intense,” Osam says. “We scared ourselves doing this.” The movie’s fear of a lost baby made him worry about his wife’s pregnancy in real life, and “everyone was waiting for a UFO to come along and snatch us up.”
The 35-year-old Little Rock marketing consultant came through with his first movie for $65,000 and the loan of his in-laws’ house for the setting. He showed it for the first time to the festival’s audience that included his parents and both grandmothers.
“The sex scene — I heard from a friend that one of my grandmothers covered her eyes,” Osam says, “which is understandable.”
“Pie in the sky is to get a distribution deal,” he says. Better still, he hopes for “a sequel with a bigger budget, so I could show the aliens and the spaceship.”
LEFT IN THE LURCH
The odds may be dreadfully against a little movie made in Arkansas. But George Romero made Night of the Living Dead (1968) much the same way, on the cheap, and critic Leonard Maltin rates it “the touchstone modern horror film.”
Jason Zinoman’s book, Shock Value, tells how other monstrously big names emerged from a spatter of low-budget horror movies: Wes Craven from The Hills Have Eyes (1977), John Carpenter from Halloween (1978). Zinoman appeared at the 2012 Arkansas Literary Festival.
Russellville native Eric England, 25, showed his new thriller, Roadside, at this year’s Little Rock Horror Picture Show: “Terrific,” according to Arkansas Democrat-Gazette movie critic Philip Martin. England’s Madison County, as in Northwest Arkansas, was the crowd favorite at last year’s festival.
“I don’t know about you guys,” England said to a panel of fellow directors during the event, “but I get a lot of ideas in the shower.”
For all the menacing shadows and bloody doings on screen, the gathering was as smiling as a dentist convention, and the dress style of jeans and sneakers more than casual enough to accommodate England’s backward ball cap.
Filmmakers attended more than a dozen of the screenings to talk about their work and answer questions. Comments included:
England on researching horror movies: “I know some filmmakers, if they’re making a movie about a serial killer, they’ll go out and stalk people.”
Osam on why he cast himself in the traumatized lead role in his movie: “I needed someone who is goofy and zany and able to break down. And I thought, ‘I’m goofy and zany and good at breaking down, and I’m on a tight budget, so —’”
Director Zachary Leazer on his short, Apocalyptic Delight, about two guys who start a zombie outbreak in Arkansas for the fun of it: “It’s the upside of a zombie plague.”
Jesse Burks, Little Rock foot surgeon and moviemaking hobbyist, on his short film, The Donor, in which a man wakes up to discover someone has snipped off part of his big toe: “There is one organ or body part stolen in the world every hour.”
But why a toe?
“It’s an everyday thing for me.”
FRIGHTENING PROSPECTS
Also among shorts made in Arkansas, director Danny Bradfield’s The Last Vampire stirs up a blood feud among neck-nippers in Conway. Toby Venable’s Moderngrumble takes an art-house approach to the travels through Arkansas of a white-faced, blueeyed, head-biting zombie, as if he might be a poet.
Eric White’s Tomahawk is a revenge tale that brings sharp-edged retaliation to Greers Ferry, Jasper, Carlisle and North Little Rock. And Matt Owens’ La Petit Mort shows the misbehavior of two singing maniacs, the bearded one wearing a dress.
This year’s choice of movies came from 200 submissions, Nickels says. The horror festival, like the Blob, “is getting bigger and bigger.”