True students of Dead Lantern Pictures will know that The Grand Horror was not our first attempt at filmmaking. That honor belongs to a 13 minute short film entitled A Ripper Runs Through It. A film so rarely seen that only Steve has ever been granted clearance to see it. 2009 actually marks the 10 year anniversary of the film. I’ve been going through the DLP archives, looking at all the stuff that was made that has yet to see the light of day (The Eye of Faith, Codename: ZSF, TGH bts, etc.) and I stumbled across the file that I made a few years back, the “digitally re-mastered from crap” version. I had to re-watch it and it got me thinking of how and why it was made in the first place. Memories are getting foggy with time and I figured I might as well write a record of what I remember about the film before it’s gone forever.

That ribcage is real, by the way…

Binnie’s Bones. That was the nickname of the actual human skeleton that our biology teacher had in his classroom. I distinctly remember fudging the truth about what we were going to do with them. I certainly said we’d use them for the movie, but I never said what kind of movie and I left out the fact that they would be permanently dyed ruby red when we doused them with blood. So yeah, I guess we can actually say that some poor schlep not only wasn’t properly buried, but somehow made his way to the Aurora school system and, ultimately, into our film. Unfortunately, no cool Poltergeist type deaths occurred on set, so the spirit must have been diggin’ what we were using his frame for.

The idea to do a film had nothing to do with actually wanting to do a film. During my senior year of high school, I had somehow managed to con my way into three art classes (and one study hall, if I remember correctly). So my day pretty much consisted of drawing (I was always in competition with a guy named Ben Brill, who would end up starring in ARRTI, over who could draw the coolest stuff), plastering the internet with Quad Biscuits promo material (Deejay’s band the predated The Hot Carls), and dicking around. I was always big into creating art and having three classes to essentially do whatever I wanted was great. But there was one thing I absolutely hated: pottery. It’s not that I have anything personal against clay, it’s just that I find making pots to be fahking stupid. Hate everything about. I’ve always been good at convincing people to do things. It’s a talent and I convinced my art teacher to give me a special exemption and in its place I’d develop a short film instead. She agreed, much to the dismay of many others in the class. So while Deejay and the others were stroking clay and using the kiln, I got to the business of creating a film.

I had no goddamn clue what I was doing. Still don’t, in most cases. But I used that time to write a script. To show how unprepared and unrealistic I was at 18 years of age, the script involved a girl stuck in an insane asylum. The end of the film involved the asylum burning down in a fiery inferno of death and destruction. The script ended up having about twenty characters in it, all of them with speaking roles. One of my great regrets is in not saving a copy of that script. It’s long gone and only the outlines of what were planned are still in my mind, but I did fully throw myself into prepping it. I even built an asylum that was about three feet high to use as a miniature. It was fully operational and everything. Trees, cars, and I even used a string of Christmas lights to light up certain windows. My asylum was a thousand times more awesome than Deejay’s pot

The actual story was always intended to be a slasher. That’s what we all watched in those days. We’d go to NebraskaLand Video and rent anything we could that involved a mask and sharp objects. The plan was to film the movie over a weekend at Brady’s. I had no idea that the script, which was probably a good 30-35 pages, would take way longer than that to actually shoot. And I’m still trying to figure out how I ever thought Brady’s house could double as a thirteen story mental asylum….I also hadn’t planned on the actors and actresses not showing up. Only a handful actually did. Having no backup plan, I was in a panic. My grade depended on getting something done.

The film was ultimately shot over two days in March of 1999. I seem to remember shooting at Brady’s place over two weekends, though. Again, a little hazy on the exact time line (those who participated, help me out by posting a reply). In any event, we were forced to come up with a completely new idea from scratch. ARRTI is, literally, created, scene by scene, as we went. There was no script, no storyboards (I actually had many scenes storyboarded for the original idea. I forgot how much I loved to draw back then), and no idea as to what the finished film was going to be about. In fact, to get a bit ahead of myself, I distinctly remember the end of the film being created about 10 minutes before our main actor had to go home. It was literally “shit, I’ve got to go. What can we do? Let’s do this!” And that was that.

A few years back when I re-cut the film using the old master footage from the remaining VHS tapes, I noticed that there are actually two separate movies. Because we were making a slasher, the killer had to have some sort of costume. The only thing on hand was a Ghostface costume from the movie Scream that Brady had. Since we couldn’t use the Scream mask, we decided to use one of Brady’s paintball masks. Unfortunately, the dude who was originally cast as the killer (fahking Pat) was tall and the Scream costume was, um, small. Imagine a moment if you will, a guy a little over 6 feet tall, in a black Ghostface cloak that only goes down to his knees (and he was wearing shorts), wearing a paintball mask. That was our killer. It looked as retarded as it looks in your head right now. Anyway, we filmed a bunch of stuff with him. I remember one death scene that was filmed which involved a friend having his head decapitated when our killer slams it in a car hood. The head then rolls away as the killer stalks ominously toward Brady’s house. That’s the kind of shit we were doing. So there is all this extra footage…but none of it is in the finished product. Why?

Something happened with Pat. I don’t know if he couldn’t make it back out to shoot or what, but for whatever reason, our killer couldn’t finish the rest of the movie. Which meant we had to junk everything we had shot up to that point and create and shoot a brand new story in like four hours, or some shit like that. I remember everyone being hungry and we decided to add a scene where a character called Pizza Hut and ordered a pizza. Although, for some reason we were under the impression that we couldn’t say “Pizza Hut” for an art class project. So our actor says “Hello, is this Pizza Slut”. And I remember that the person taking the order kept screwing up so the shot ends up being over 5 minutes long. I remember playing the part of a pizza delivery guy (and then it became Jeremy’s role when I couldn’t keep a straight face). I remember shaking a car in the driveway while we honked a horn and flashed the lights to indicate the killer was butchering said pizza guy. I remember filming Deejay’s band playing in Brady’s living room for the “party scene”. All of this stuff was cut.

A Ripper Runs Through It is literally a 13 minute stream of consciousness slasher film. It’s all spontaneous. We had no idea how it would start or how it would end. The only thing we did know was that we had to use the special fx that I created for the death scene in the screenshot above. The one thing I vividly remember about this project is creating those intestines. You might be surprised to know that they are one solid piece. I made them out of  foam expanding sealant and then painted them as bloody and nasty as I could. What happens to Jeremy right before this was also a high point of the film. His character has a headache and goes to the bathroom to get some aspirin. The killer then grabs him from behind, slams his head on the sink as hard as possible, and Jeremy blew fake blood all over the bathroom mirror. The scene ends with the killer picking up the aspirin bottle and saying “Fast. Effective. Relief.”, laughing as he leaves the bathroom. It’s the only death scene that is actually shown in the film (a young Spooky Mcphee appears and is killed in a bed while waiting to get laid, unfortunately, we cut away from the shot before you can see that his throat has been slashed to hell). I like the ending, as well. It involves the killer, after having dispatched everyone at the party, hearing a knock on the door and finding someone very interesting on the other side….

Immediately after we finished filming, I went to Jeremy’s house to edit on his VCR’s. I remember his mom yelling at us to leave and being under the gun to finish it. We probably edited the entire thing in an hour. I had to show it in class the next morning. It was utterly awful in every way. We had, of course, never edited anything before and trying to edit with two VCR’s in an hour was probably the dumbest thing we could have done. It had dead spots in the middle of the tape where you’d have long blue screens for ten seconds. Cuts were in the wrong places and doubled up on each other. Scenes were mixed up. There was no music. And to top it all off, I had forgotten to shut off the day and time stamp on the camcorders we were using, so all of the footage says “March 20 1999″ in the lower right hand of the screen. Incidentally, in order to film the movie we had to borrow a camcorder from the high school library. There is footage of my horrified reaction as whoever was supposed to place it on the tripod didn’t secure it. As I yell action, we have the footage from two separate vantage points. One is the school camera, which started out just fine, but then slowly starts tipping backwards until gravity has its way with it, crashing it into the floor. It was broken after that and we couldn’t use it (yet another thing that went wrong while filming, perhaps it was “The Curse of Binnie’s Bones”, after all). We did not tell the school that the camera was busted. Brady dropped it off at the library and was later told that it “worked fine”, or something.  We lucked out on that one, somehow.

So the film was a disaster, but I conned my way into getting an A in the class, so it was worth it. The experience left us pretty afraid to attempt filmmaking again, though. It would be another 6 years before we decided to, once again, do something on little-to-no preparation and make The Grand Horror. And then, a few years back I decided to fix ARRTI. I cleaned up all the bad edits and added music. It’s terrible, but better than it was. I sent it to Steve and was genuinely shocked that he was entertained by it. I guess it wasn’t a total failure

This is the 10th year anniversary of A Ripper Runs Through It. Ten years since we first decided to pick up a camera and make something. It felt really good to go back and watch that first film again and to remember those chaotic weekends. There might be a couple of you out there wondering “How can I see this?” The truth is you probably won’t be able to. There are actors in it who we have long lost contact with and probably wouldn’t want their 18 year old selves floating around on the internet. And frankly, some of us probably wouldn’t want that either. Hopefully this will give those who are interested some insight into the film. Believe me, it’s better as an ideal in your head than actually seeing the real thing

Then again, never say never. It could pop up somewhere one of these days.