Horror film competition brings spooks to Delmarva
Matt Moore
Underneath yellowed and flickering lights in a downtown Salisbury office last week at 1 a.m, local filmmaker Trevor Taylor focused a lens on the fake blood dripping from his coworker's hands as sounds of heavy breathing spread across the cubicles.
"They came for me that night — followed me" his coworker said. "They know, they always know."
The blood-curdling scene is one Taylor created during a four-day shoot that would lead to his submission for "Oh! The Horror" — a horror trailer competition hosted by the film collective Revival House at the Milton Theatre.
The competition was first announced in an online video late September by Revival House co-founders Rob Rector and Rob Waters.
WATCH: Revival house co-founders announce contest
They explained filmmakers have seven days to create a trailer for a horror movie that will never be released. Each trailer will go before a panel of judges and then be screened at the Milton Theatre Thursday before a live audience.
The judges' favorite wins $1,000 and the audience's favorite wins $500.
The catch, they said, is each trailer must be three minutes or less, and contain one prop and one line of dialogue that was announced in an Oct. 5 video.
After that announcement, filmmakers will have seven days to finish their trailers before deadline on Thursday, Oct. 12 at midnight, they said.
By the start of October, Taylor, a news photographer for Channel 47 ABC, enlisted three of his coworkers and friends and began storyboarding a trailer he would title "The Deep End."
Taylor said he and his co-workers shot every day for nearly two hours in downtown Salisbury after work at midnight.
The dimly lit streets and his empty office proved to be the perfect backdrop for the type of cerebral thriller he sought to create for his submission.
Jessica Farley, an instructor at Del Tech, also began working on a submission before the Oct. 5 announcement, making it part of a class project for credit.
Farley said that she and another staff member, Chelsea Wooten, met with their eight-member class twice a week in the morning — time not exactly considered terrifying.
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"There was no shooting at night," she said. "It was really a hindrance on us being able to create a lot of fear — that was a challenge."
So, they had to get creative.
Farley said they shot on one student's dad's property that was tucked back into the woods outside Georgetown that had pieces of old or abandoned equipment.
"It created this surreal area that we were able to do this in," she said.
The result is a trailer for a supernatural film, "American Die," in which one of Farley's students suffers violent and vivid bouts of sleep paralysis that see him reliving the accidental death of his girlfriend in the presence of a man in all black, deemed "shadow man."
Farley said the inspiration for the plot came from an experience one of her students still deals with today.
"One of our students, on a field trip back in September, had mentioned this shadow thing — he had dreams, sleep paralysis," Farley said. "And there's this shadow thing that reaches out to him."
By the time Oct. 5 came and Revival House went live on Facebook for the prop and line reveal, Taylor and Farley were deeply consumed by their trailers.
The live stream showed Rector, Waters and Revival House co-founder Erin Tanner standing in a graveyard, flanked by faded tombstones.
With a impish smirk on his face, Rector held three notecards to the camera and read the line to be included in every trailer:
"I enjoy your mother's cooking," he said.
Rector then revealed from his pocket the prop: a fidget spinner — a toy that spins along an axis when flicked or moved.
"Get out there filmmakers and scare the hell out of us (or make us laugh if that's your horror comedy thing)," a post on their Facebook page read.
The main reason behind these rules is to ensure spontaneity, Rector later said. A fidget spinner is something cheap and accessible and "I enjoy your mother's cooking" is a line that can mean anything depending on context and emphasis.
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"Those are included because we didn't want anybody dusting off a film that they had been working on in their library for the past year and then just all of a sudden enter," he said.
When Taylor got word of the announcement, he was on assignment with his reporter — who also stars in the trailer
"I thought 'Oh god, how am I gonna fit this in the trailer without looking weird?'" he said.
In total, Revival House received 17 submissions, Rector said. The Revival House team, Milton Theatre owner Fred Munzer and a few friends will judge each trailer based on a rubric.
"We're gonna get together and drink a lot of beer," Rector said, laughing. "We'll judge these on everything from the creative use of the prop and dialogue, to the technical acumen, the ingenuity of the filmmaker's themselves."
After the trailers premiere Thursday, Revival House will then screen the cult horror classic "Trick 'r Treat," as part of the kickoff night for Milton Zombie Fest — the Halloween event spanning Oct. 19-21.
If you go
Revival House's "Oh! The Horror" Trailer Challenge
6:30 p.m., Thursday, Oct. 19
The Milton Theatre: 110 Union Street
Tickets: $5-10