Hot off the heels of the lineup for Frightfest 2023, Bloody Flicks caught up with director Raymond Wood to talk all things Faceless After Dark, which has its world premiere at the festival.
What do you think attracts us to killer clowns?
I wish I had a good answer for that! Murderous clowns are a well-worn trope – we even pay homage at one point to Pagliacci, an opera from 1892 about a clown who murders his wife and her lover – and I think it has something to do with the unassuming nature of a character who is generally associated with being harmless and docile, who is then unexpectedly recontextualized as a threat. There’s also the element of anonymity, which feeds into our universal fear of the unknown: nameless, ageless figures in a familiar human form, lurking in the shadows. Of course, I also can’t help but wondering if it’s all the result of a covert marketing campaign by companies who want us to buy their generic Halloween masks…
In this age of toxic fandom, how cathartic was it to direct a story like Faceless After Dark?
“Cathartic” may be a strong word, but I was certainly very interested in exploring how things like social media empower ill-intentioned, abusive individuals with the ability to show their true colors without having to face the consequences of their actions or the people whose lives they negatively affect. That phenomenon is exacerbated when you’re talking about celebrities, or people with high visibility online: they become prime targets for people who recreationally insult and degrade others.
That’s why the killer clown trope felt like the right effigy to burn – today, we use technology as a mask to inflict harm on other people, and maintaining anonymity means we never have to interface with the negative effects of that harm. In fact, if you look at the film’s credits, several of the character “names” are just their online usernames, which was a fun cherry-on-top of that idea for us.
Were there any themes or films you took inspiration from for the film?
If I get too specific I might risk giving away the key twist in the film, but Repulsion was definitely looming in the back of my mind at lot. Funny Games was also a big influence. I find that I’m most excited these days when I genuinely don’t know what is going to happen next in a movie – and as someone who watches movies incessantly, it’s very rare that I’m unable to predict the next move – so anything that subverts expectations or takes a turn I don’t see coming tends to have a profound impact on me.
Tell us about putting the cast together.
Honestly, most of the credit for casting has to go the Jenna Kanell, the star/co-writer of the film! She and I have both been working in Atlanta for many years, a place with a surprisingly strong talent pool (thanks to all the massive shows and movies that shoot here in the Southeast), so we basically cherry-picked some of our favorite people to work with, and for some reason, they all said yes! Everyone in the film was our first choice.
We also couldn’t afford to hire stunt doubles, so we cast a handful of actors who were also trained stunt performers, which was a huge benefit on my side of things because I’m not having to design sequences around not seeing a stunt double’s face.
How excited are you to premiere at FrightFest?
I’m incredibly thrilled and humbled to be a part of a festival like FrightFest. I’ve always felt that the wit and dry humor in the script was more suited for UK/European audiences than US audiences, so I can’t imagine a better place to premiere. We started developing the script back in 2019, so it’s nothing short of surreal to finally have something to share with the world… and something that other people are excited to see as well!
What are your plans for a wider release post-festival run?
We haven’t sorted out our wide release quite yet, but the most important thing to me is that the film finds a home where it’s presented directly to fans of horror and genre films, because that’s who we made it for, and that’s who we want to celebrate. The last thing I want is to end up on a platform where we get buried underneath a mountain of reality TV or “gourmet cheeseburgers”…
Find out more about Frightfest 2023.
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