By MICHAEL GINGOLD
Two kinds of vérité horror are combined in the upcoming indie feature.
Horror Dadz Productions has SPLIT SCREEN, from directors Joshua Brucker (THE WOODMEN) and Dillon Brown (TAHOE JOE), coming to VOD this winter. It combines a pair of found-footage scary stories: Dillon’s “Greys: The Nevada Alien Incident,” in which a paranoid man who has had a frightening alien encounter is pursued by seedy government agents; and Brucker’s “The Illinois Valley Murder Tapes,” which follows a pair of on-line investigators on the trail of an unidentified serial killer who recorded his crimes on video.
“I had always wanted to make an alien-oriented found-footage film,” Brown tells RUE MORGUE, “as the subject seems perfect for the genre. And with all of the stuff happening currently with the government hearings and UFO investigations, it just seemed like the perfect time to jump on it. We did everything with the alien in-camera and practical, with no CGI at all, and it definitely feels like my best work to date. Knowing Josh was going for a brutal slasher, it was fun to take the opposite approach and do a creature feature for SPLIT SCREEN, so we can appeal to a wide audience range, and I think people are going to really enjoy it.”
Says Brucker, “I’ve been a fan of the found-footage subgenre for most of my life. It started all the way back when I first rented THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT from the video store, so naturally, I found myself producing these types of films. ‘The Illinois Valley Murder Tapes’ pays homage to older, more obscure found-footage movies, one in particular being THE POUGHKEEPSIE TAPES. My story follows two overly ambitious true-crime podcast hosts who stumble upon this collection of murder tapes, presumably filmed by the unnamed serial killer they’re pursuing. But it’s all told post-fact, so the story unfolds like a documentary. Dillon and I are offering two very different films in SPLIT SCREEN, but as a whole, we pay homage to a genre we love, and we hope found footage fans will love the movie too.”
