“Jason vs Michael” Filmmaker Trent Duncan Interview.
1/5/2016
Straddling the thin blurry line between, “Am I hungover or still rip roaring drunk?” in the post-New Year’s haze, Slickster Magazine caught up with independent filmmaker, festival organizer, and director, Trent Duncan. His fan film “Jason vs Michael” (#JvM) has grown to over half a million views in a less than six month’s time. We talked about some of the behind-the-scenes of JvM, the upcoming apocalyptic film festival, End of Days, the overall state of horror films, and a whole lot more.
Slickster: Anything you want to say upfront before we start the questions?
TD: How do I get the Girl of the Week from the website? (Laughs)
Slickster: You kind of look like Robert England. Did you ever get that before?
TD: I used to hear that quite a bit; not so much anymore, but most people don’t know who he is anymore. They used to say “Freddy Krueger,” but I was like, “Come on guys, he looks horrible!” Yeah, I used to get that.
Slickster: Well, if you ever needed someone to play Freddy Krueger, I guess you can cast yourself.
TD: (laughs) I actually met Robert at a horror convention here in Orlando. We got a picture together and I offered to be a stunt double for him.
Slickster: So, #JvM (“Jason vs Michael” fan film) is at 500k+ views on YouTube now. How did all that come about?
TD: Thank you. JvM came about because I have done several other fan films and I read a lot of the comments that are placed on YouTube. A lot of the fans have been bickering back and forth about who’s better at this and that, and a lot of folks are really into Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers. Those are the two most popular horror characters. People keep mentioning, “Hey, you should do ‘Jason vs. Michael.‘” Realizing that, outside of Freddy Krueger, they are the most popular and they haven’t been featured in any sort of battle together, other than a few small fan films, so I thought, let’s do it. Let’s do Jason vs. Michael and give the audience what they want. So, that’s how that came about.
Slickster: Why, in your opinion, is Jason Voorhees such a timeless slasher?
TD: I think that, just like a lot of movies that came out of the late 70s and early 80s, that was the first and most creative era in WIDESPREAD film-making. It started where you didn’t need a big studio. A lot of small independent people started making their own movies, and they came up with these creative characters that really stuck. They are iconic. This was the first time a lot a moviegoers could see variety in movies, and so some of these films stuck. It was Jason Voorhees, and the other iconic horror characters as well. I know he wasn’t even in the first one! The kid just kinda came up out of the lake at the end and that’s how they got the idea for Jason. So, sometimes people just relate and latch on to stuff. You never know how stuff catches, but when it does it’s there for a long time.
Slickster: As we’ve seen in the past thirty years! All the different incarnations, it’s amazing Jason has been around that long.
TD: It’s is! I think a lot of people who were younger back then are older now, and they are passing that old school horror stuff along to their kids. It’s kind of dying out a little bit and there just aren’t those classic horror movies or characters that there used to be.
Slickster: Among the new slashers, do you have a favorite?
TD: In the past decade? You don’t really have too many. I guess Jigsaw is kind of new. Scream and Ghostface were in the 90s, but you don’t have those iconic characters emerging like they did back in the day. Nothing that blows my mind right away.
Slickster: Right. Everything is just being remade.
TD: Yeah, there is something to be said about the creativity back then. They were the first go-getters for a lot of that stuff. Their creativity came from the early 30’s and 40’s kind of stuff.
Slickster: So, you’re saying that there just isn’t enough stuff being created these days for you to have a favorite?
TD: I worked on a feature with one of my friends called “The Laughing Mask,” and that was kind of cool and indie. I think a lot people are trying to come up with new characters, and there is a lot of creativity out there, but for one reason or another they just don’t stick or match up to a Jason or Michael Myers.
Slickster: I thought Hatchet had kind of a Wrong Turn vibe.
TD: Yeah, and those had a nice little spin for awhile. Where they had the mutated creatures… Hills Have Eyes, Wrong Turn… Then they got brushed to the side, and now everyone is on to zombies and stuff.
Slickster: Trent, are there any plans for you to get involved on the zombie bandwagon?
TD: Ahhhhhh (…long silence….) In some of my upcoming fan films I might play little bit with some zombies. It’s a cool niche to hit up, but I don’t have too many plans to expose that at moment, but I’m definitely not opposed to it, if something cool was to come along. Something fun.
Slickster: At Slickster there is an ongoing debate if the zombie fad is over. Is it overplayed?
TD: Personally I think it’s overplayed. The Walking Dead is pretty cool, but I’m not a die-hard fan. But hey, a lot stuff in movies is where we are in life as a society, and how people are feeling that. So, what’s popular now depends on a lot of things. Personally I like the rage zombies from 28 Days Later. Those are freaky ones that can chase you down and do some real damage to you. Those are my favorite zombies.
Slickster: Anthony Giovanni Elias was the fight choreographer on #JvM. How did you approach staging the fighting styles of those two iconic slashers?
TD: Ahh, great question. Anthony is a good guy and we’ve worked together on some other projects. So, I wanted to bring a fight choreographer along just to add an extra dynamic to it. You know, think outside the box and see some things I couldn’t really see. We had a chat about these two guys and thought, “These two characters aren’t little fast ninjas. They are big juggernauts! They can take a punch and they can give a punch.” We needed something where they could go back and forth with some really solid strong hits. Plus none of this really phases either of them.
You can also say that Jason is a little bit of the bigger and stronger of the two, but if you pull stuff from Michael’s movies he’s pretty relentless too. He’s been crushed by cars and run over and shot. So he can take a beating as well. So we thought, let’s not do fast quick stuff. Lets do heavy, hard hitting… they’re not even trying to block it, they are coming after each other. We wanted to kind of approach it from that angle and Anthony did a great job exploiting that.
Slickster: Yeah, you don’t want them to be moving extremely fast and that. They are slower, walking, intimidating type of guys.
TD: Yes, and it’s kind of tough too, to do a long fight scene with slow fight stuff. You’ve got to space it out a little bit and do a couple of different things to make it work. The fast hits stuff can be fun, but that’s not what we we’re going for here.
Slickster: It looks like it was actually raining during the fight scene, how did that effect production?
TD: It was raining off and on, more like drizzling, and it did effect production. But I thought, “You know what? Let’s add the rain as a element.” I did have to add some special effects rain in post production as well to make the continuity through the whole fight scene even. We worked through it and made the best of it.
Slickster: Throughout the #JvM you were using the classic music themes of Halloween and Friday the 13th. Did you have to go through any copyrighting issues to use that music?
TD: I’m glad you asked! Kenny Marshall, a really cool guy, does some composing for me. He grew up in the era and knows the horror genre really well. He is able to recreate the sounds of the original themes with a different kind of tune, so we don’t get hit with the YouTube copyright infringement. So what Kenny did was create tunes that are the same but different. Does that make sense?
Slickster: Yeah.
TD: So basically, we made our own music that sounds like the original music.
Slickster: It’s uncanny.
TD: Yeah, I got hit with some (copyright) stuff from my original fan films. I knew Kenny could create something like that for #JvM. I mean, if you listen to it without the sound effects and no video you can hear that it is different, but with the movie going on it totally blends in. Yeah, so music copyright is tricky and that is one of the biggest things you will get slapped on, especially for YouTube. I’ve had to be creative and sneak my way around it.
Slickster: Awesome. Yeah, YouTube has this thing about “censorship,” but in horror movies there has to be a lot boobies! Do think there will be any nudity in the next “Jason vs. Michael” fan film?
TD: (Laughs) I would love it! I realize that it is part of the genre and totally fun. As far as #JvM goes, the scene with the bachelorette party, it wasn’t as fun as I would have liked to make it. It was originally intended to be a lingerie bachelorette party.
Slickster: Hell yeah!
TD: But we didn’t have the extras and I needed to get some lingerie, so we just were like, ‘we’ll do a regular bachelorette party’. So that kind of sucked, but I’ve had some visions of some really cool types of on screen slasher deaths with erotic stuff.
Slickster: Like Sorority House Massacre?
TD: Exactly! You’re on the right track, but I don’t want to give away too much. You know, lingerie pillow fights can be very dangerous.
Slickster: Anything could happen at any time.
TD: You never know! But I realize that it’s like, “Oh my gosh, we’re exploiting these women,” but that’s what all these old films did to attract people to horror films, the partial nudity and that kind of stuff. So it’s kind of a Catch-22. You know it still works today, but you do it in a fun way. Where it’s much more over-the-top, like, “That’s ridiculous and would never happen.” But it’s part of slasher movies and it is what it is.