Calgary movie became horror show.
Couldn’t get funding for initial project
Kruno Malnar and his Calgary filmmaking team had a plan. It was for a project that would address the topical problem of bullying. It was noble, it was ambitious and, unKept screens again fortunately, Friday at 2 p.m. at required Eau Claire Cineplex, money to part of the Calgary pull off. International Film So when Festival the expected
grants didn’t come through — sadly a common reality in the life of the indie filmmaker — Malnar and co. decided to move on.
The solution: Dash off a haunted-house script in two weeks and shoot it in the filmmaker’s parents’ house in suburban Calgary. The results: Kept, a lowbudget horror film that had its world premiere at the Calgary International Film Festival on Tues- day night at the Globe Theatre.
“We knew we didn’t have that much money, that much time and that much people,” explains Malnar, a former SAIT student with numerous short films under his belt. “We thought that genre would be best suited for that.”
“We just felt, with low-budget horror, you can get away with a lot,” adds Josip Condic, the star and co-producer of the film. “If there are things missing, it’s OK. It’s a horror film, it doesn’t have to be perfect. We were prepping for the bullying film and still had all the crew and stuff ready for those days. So we thought, we have a couple of weeks, let’s write a script and film it.”
For a Plan B, Kept is a fairly remarkable achievement once its starts rolling. It tells the tale of Taylor (Victoria Maria) who takes a house-sitting job for a creepy suburban couple.
She invited her boyfriend, Ben, (Condic) who has his own closet full of skeletons to deal with. Eventually, Ben and Taylor start to get harassed by an unseen menace. Cellphones disappear, door bells ring, loud thuds echo throughout the house and neighbours wander by in slow motion with scowls on their faces. A backstory slowly unfolds about the creepy couple’s family that involves death, suicide and, as with many horror films, a whole bunch of guilt.
“We were fans of Kubrick’s The Shining, (2008’s) The Strangers,” Malnar explains. “You have those moments in there that is a little bit of a throwback to the 1980s and late 1970s films.”
In what may be the film’s best scene — an unsettling dream sequence in the family living room — Malnar shows he has been dutifully studying the work of David Lynch.
While setting the action in a fairly common suburban home may have been done mostly for pragmatic reasons, this also adds a Lynchian “creepiness-of-thebanal” layer to the vibe.
“It turns into something a little more bizarre a little more surreal,” Malnar says. “That was something we were going for. That was definitely a Lynchian kind of scene.”