Horror movie with school connections premieres
Horror film fans packed the Buskirk-Chumley Theater on Sunday night to see Headless, a ‘70s-themed slasher about a skull-faced killer struggling with inner demons and an insatiable bloodlust.
“I want you to remember what you saw on that screen,” said Nathan Erdel, the screenwriter of Headless and a Media School senior, during the Q&A after the premiere. “You saw cannibalism, you saw necrophilia.”
Headless, the sequel to Found (2012), was shot entirely in Indiana by Bloomington-based companies Forbidden Films and Gentleman Monster Productions, which was founded last year by Erdel and his wife, Kara Erdel. Other Media School connections are videographer Leya Taylor, BA’09; cast member Matt Keeley, BA’14; and graduate students Javier Ramirez, gaffer, and Joshua Coonrod, production assistant. Headless also featured a cameo by film professor Joan Hawkins.
The film was inspired by 15 minutes of footage in Found, which tells the story of a bullied fifth-grader who discovers his brother is a serial killer and finds a tape in his room called “Headless.”
In Headless, The Killer, the central antagonist played by Shane Beasley, is tormented by the memories of his abusive mother and sister. He hallucinates a boy in a skull mask who points into the distance whenever he demands another life to be taken.
The creators of Headless wanted to salute the slasher genre by creating a hyper-violent, realistic depiction of 1970s culture.
“I have a love, and I know Nathan has a love, for that era of film, and the idea of mysterious, taboo film that you’re not supposed to see,” said Arthur Cullipher, the director of Headless and the owner of Clockwerk Creature Company. “We went through an awful lot to get it back to 1978.”
After 90 gory minutes of film, the burning question at the Q&A session was “Was there anything that you didn’t put in the film because it went too far?”
“They wouldn’t let me kill a puppy,” Erdel said, referencing a scene in which a rabbit’s head is chopped off, “because they said the audience would hate us. You can’t kill a puppy.”