Ahead of the world premiere of Cheat at next month’s Frightfest, we caught up with co-directors Nick Psinakis and Kevin Ignatius to tell us more about the project.
What can you tell us about Cheat?
A lot of our inspiration for Cheat derives from our nostalgic film experiences from childhood. Movies that were fun, terrifying but also had a moral dilemma at its core. Thematically we wanted to explore the idea of what it means to cheat. Is it simply black and white? Is there ever a situation that would justify it? Are all monsters bad? Could a monster be justified in their killing? These are just some of the questions we asked ourselves when developing the concept. Our hope is that the audience is asking themselves a lot of these questions long after the credits roll.
Was the aim to create a small-town urban legend story?
It certainly was. We referenced much of those old curse-laden tales to develop this film’s particular circumstances that lead to a monster terrorizing college students and townsfolk of Silvercreek. While urban legends can take on a life of their own and become exaggerated over time, they usually stem from some small grain of truth. That was our starting point. What if there was some truth to this urban legend? We then needed a logical way for the community to explain what was happening. We decided on a town that had the highest suicide rate in the country. This gave us a way to ground it in reality. All these deaths look like suicide so no one would question it let alone believe it was some crazy ghost story.
How important were the filming locations for the shoot?
Locations were a poignant piece of the world we envisioned. We wanted Silvercreek to feel like a quaint, somewhat sleepy college town that offered historic architecture and Warren, Pennsylvania offered just that. Warren’s historic downtown coupled with the University of Pittsburgh Bradford campus brought that vibe to life. And then of course, a few scenes from the late 1800s occurred in a neighboring farm where we were able to film in a large barn from that era that still stands today. In general, we always prefer to shoot on location. This helps to have the environment feel lived in and not manufactured.
Tell us about crafting the character of Clara Miller?
We wanted to create a female supernatural monster – pulling from some of our favorite beings—The Ring, It Follows. We focused on a psychological terror that gradually takes over the mind of our characters and indirectly the audience. Having Clara be an innocent daughter of a farmer from the 1800s made sense for us to incorporate and build upon. In a way, she’s a bit of an antihero. She was brutally murdered by her own father because she was trying to do the right thing, stop her fathers infidelity. She’s now haunting the town where she was wronged but despite killing, she’s a bit of a vigilante. She kills based on her moral beliefs. Hopefully this really makes the audience think about how they feel about her and throws them off. It’s hard to know who to root for and we like that uneasiness it brings throughout the film. Like most things in life, it is far from black and white.
Would you say this is close in tone to something like It Follows?
The tone of It Follows, John Carpenter’s Halloween and The Ring are all definitely influences for CHEAT and also films that we admire very much. We are fans of Richard Vreeland aka Disasterpeace and his work—and taking the approach of scoring our own films as Carpenter has, we tend to utilize modular synthesis quite a bit to meld both soft and aggressive tones within particular scenes we are working with.
To create the visual sense of those older childhood films that inspired us, we used 1970’s anamorphic lenses. This helped to create the feeling and mood we had associated with those films. The wide anamorphic lenses, paired with longer steadicam shots, help to achieve the feeling of being isolated, uneasy and that danger can come from anywhere. Someone or something is always watching.
How excited are you to be screening at Frightfest?
We are extremely excited to be screening at Frightfest. It is the World Premiere of our film and we are very grateful to show the film for the first time there. We have never been to the festival before but have heard amazing things. The festival has a great reputation and is held in such high regard within the film community. A good portion of our team will be attending so it’s very exciting to screen in front of what we anticipate to be a very enthusiastic audience at a great festival.
What are the plans for the release of Cheat beyond the festival run?
With all of our films, our hope is to reach as many people as possible and entertain them in some way – whether they laugh, cry, scream or just use it as an escape from their world. We are extremely independent and we prefer to make movies that way. Hopefully, we find a great partner in a distributor that understands us as filmmakers, our film and our audience. It’s always been a dream to have one of our films have some sort of theatrical release. While it has become rare for indie films, we are hopeful that we get the chance to explore that option.
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