By MICHAEL GINGOLD
BDSM meets AI in this science-fiction shocker.
Scooter McCrae, the cult underground filmmaker behind SHATTER DEAD and SIXTEEN TONGUES, has completed shooting on his new feature BLACK EYED SUSAN, and is currently in postproduction. It’s a co-production of Not the Funeral Home, Vinegar Syndrome Pictures (following their collaboration on EIGHT EYES) and Little Cannonballs, produced by Justin A. Martell, Aimee Kuge, Seager Dixon and Maureen Costello. Shot in Brooklyn and upstate New York, it stars Yvonne Emilie Thälker in her feature film debut in the title role, along with Damian Maffei (THE STRANGERS: PREY AT NIGHT, WRONG TURN), Marc Romeo and ex-WWE Superstar Scott Fowler. The synopsis: “Desperate for work, Derek [Maffei] accepts a job replacing his recently deceased friend at a tech startup. Continuing to develop the company’s innovative project means working intimately with Susan [Thälker], a bleeding-edge BDSM sex doll meant to receive and appreciate punishment as an integral part of her evolving AI. Derek will soon test the limits of his own desires and explore the nature of man and woman, pleasure and pain, and life and death in a morally uncertain future world.”
As opposed to his previous shot-on-video features, McCrae and DP Anton Zinn lensed BLACK EYED SUSAN on 16mm. “My so-called ‘career’ seems to have been built upon shooting on whatever format is least fashionable at the time, hence shooting on analog and digital video when film ruled the Earth, and now shooting film stock while the rest of the world has comfortably settled into digital-capture mode. I guess I’m only comfortable when I’m an iconoclast.”
Other members of the BLACK EYED SUSAN team are makeup and effects supervisor Ashley Thomas (EIGHT EYES, A WOUNDED FAWN) and Italian composer Fabio Frizzi, renowned for his scores for Lucio Fulci on the likes of THE BEYOND and CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD. “I think the driving force behind wanting to make another movie at all was to have another chance to work with Maestro Frizzi,” says McCrae, who previously collaborated with the composer on his award-winning 2015 short film SAINT FRANKENSTEIN. “I’m incredibly lucky to count him not only as a friend, but a collaborator, and the music he conjured for SAINT FRANKENSTEIN was so hauntingly beautiful that I wanted another opportunity to create more sonic magic together.”
Stay tuned for updates and release news on BLACK EYED SUSAN as it comes to us!
