Chelsea Stardust brings a very specific tone to her debut feature for Fangoria, Grady Hendrix’s Satanic Panic, out now from Arrow, starring Rebecca Romijn and Jerry O’Connell as members of a Satanic-worshipping community who need a virgin… Paul Simpson caught up with her to find out more about her influences…

How did you get involved with Satanic Panic?

Fangoria reached out to my agent and sent the script for my consideration to direct. I saw that Grady Hendrix was the writer and of course I’m a great fan of his. His books I love – My Best Friend’s Exorcism, Horrorstor – and when I saw his name on it I knew I was in for a treat. I read the script, loved the script, and I really wanted to be involved with Fangoria, so I pitched my vision for the movie to the producers there, told them my inspirations, the tone I wanted to convey and how badly I wanted the movie. Because I was very clear with my vision, and because I have a horror background and also have a comedy background, I think I was one of the only people that they were looking at that had both of those things. I pitched and they said yes.

What was your vision of it? How did you pitch that verbally?

I explained what my inspirations and influences would be. I was sending them screen grabs from other movies to show them what I wanted it to look like and I would send score references and song references and movie references. Jennifer’s Body was a big one in terms of the tone I wanted to convey, also movies like Evil Dead II, Deathgasm, Race with the Devil and Society, some of those that walked that comedy and horror line. Giving those references and showing the look of the movie by putting together images. I wanted to be very clear the kind of movie I wanted to make, what my version of that would look like.

I also had my cinematographer read the script and we talked about how we wanted to shoot it, what lenses we’d use, and our big picture for it. And they loved it.

Society and VIdeodrome visually were key to me; the other influence I felt was things like The Devil Rides Out, the late Hammer pictures, Satanic Rites of Dracula – are those movies you’re a fan of?

Yes definitely, that’s another great example. Another is Ty West’s House of the Devil – I think that is the other side of the coin of Satanic Panic, the more serious dramatic version of that movie. They’re very similar – I’ve done some double features of the two of them and it’s interesting how hand in hand they are, even though tonally they’re totally different.

So many movies inspired it and it’s very much my love letter to those movies.

You have the hell of a cast – Rebecca Romijn and Jerry O’Connell notably. How did you sell the movie to them?

I was talking to the casting director and we were looking over potential actors for Danica, and started talking about Rebecca Romijn. I said I hadn’t seen her do a horror movie before. Let’s find out if she likes the genre and let’s approach her. Sure enough, she read the script, she was available – that was the other big thing, that her schedule allowed for it – and I ended up Skyping with her. She said, “I love the script, I’m a huge fan of horror”, she read Fango, she watched every horror movie in the video store when she was a kid. She said she never had the opportunity to do a horror movie, and came aboard right away.

We were talking about the role of Samuel, her husband, and what if Jerry would do it? It’s a very tricky role to pull off and I immediately knew he could pull off that character – and he immediately said yes. Working with them separately was awesome but also watching them together was really cool and they were clearly having so much fun. What she does to him is so gross and so crazy and they had so much fun with it.

Did you have a problem with them getting the giggles from it because it is so far over the top?

They held it together pretty well!

Where did you find Hayley Griffith [who plays the central character, pizza girl Sam]?

Hayley was a self-tape audition. She’s located in New York. When I came on board the project we were looking through some self tapes of auditions and I saw hers and thought, oh my God, she’s our Sam. We were seeing other actors, and auditioning other people but we kept coming back to her. I told the producers, “This role belongs to Hayley, it’s her”, and they agreed even though she was an “unknown”. Production companies won’t necessarily take a chance on someone who hasn’t done a feature, they don’t know if they’re going to be able to carry a feature but we just kept coming back to her audition. The producers said yes and she carries the movie, this is her story.

Her counterpart, Ruby Modine, I knew from the Happy Death Day movies. I was a huge fan of hers. I watched their friendship grow both on screen and in real life. They’re best friends now and that was really cool to watch. They work so well together.

What for you was the biggest challenge of making this?

I only had 18 days to make the movie, so the shooting schedule was really difficult. We had six day weeks so only one day of downtime. The weather – we shot in Dallas, Texas: it was raining, it was very cold. That makes your shooting a little harder dealing with the elements, it’s all out of your control. You don’t have much time, you don’t have much room for error, you have to work very quickly and hope you got everything. You have to be very organised.

 

Satanic Panic is available to digital download and on Blu-ray™ and DVD now from Arrow Video.

Thanks to Louisa Buckmaster and Erin Mullis for their help in arranging this interview.