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Cut ’em up, boys
A new film genre — gay horror — is nascent in New England
BY TONY GIAMPETRUZZI

PORTLAND, MAINE — I’m in the basement of Zootz, a former dance club where, in my younger days, I would get really, really stewed along with a menagerie of Portland night owls, many of whom had embraced the so-called gothic subculture. This time, I’m not drinking, because Zootz is no longer. However, there are at least a dozen people milling about where the pool table once stood, and the atmosphere is decidedly goth.

It’s Wednesday afternoon. In the spot of the old pool table is a makeshift bed. Covered in a white sheet, the bed and other portions of the old Zootz are serving today as the set for a full-length movie tentatively titled Zombie, a low-budget, digitally filmed horror flick that has been in production in Portland for almost a week.

On hand are Alex Dove, the Boston-based producer, director, and all-around maestro of Dove Productions; Draven Gonzalez, the writer who last year served as company manager for Portland Stage Company; a handful of techies; and several semi-nude gay men who, wearing macabre makeup, are awash in red light and remain fixed in, shall we say, compromising positions.

"We’re wrapping up the final scene," Gonzalez whispers as I make my way to the hushed "set." The film’s screenwriter, Gonzalez — whose first name, Draven, in itself conjures something dark and foreboding — is also playing one of the main characters in Zombie, although he’s probably the oldest of the actors at a youthful 27. He is gay, and I assume that all the other actors on hand today are gay as well because, come to find out, this isn’t your garden-variety screamer.

Dove Productions, based in Boston, specializes in one type of film — gay horror — a genre within a genre that both Dove and Gonzalez say is the next big thing in cinema. More than that, it’s their raison d’être, and Zombie, Dove’s third full-length homoerotic, all-male slasher flick, is likely to be the one that makes its way to the coveted film-festival circuit next year.

To be sure, not many are aware that this full-length, direct-to-DVD feature is being filmed in New England. Casting was done mainly through Internet solicitation and word-of-mouth among those in the gay-horror know. Looking exhausted from round-the-clock filming (the 90-minute film has to wrap up by week’s end), Gonzalez and Dove take a break to give me the 411 on what has to be the most bizarre filmmaking, as far as we know, ever to go down in the Portland area.

I ask Dove what he’s filming today. "The main character, Christian [Jonathon Williams], is possessed, and he’s a zombie, and his best friend, Jason, is trying to find out what’s going on with him. So this is a good example of a traditional relationship in the gay community that involves a person and his best friend. Your best friend always knows what’s going on, always asks the important questions," he says, adding a caveat. "But the questions he’s asking are different — ‘Why are you coming home late at night all rolled up sleeping on my floor and covered in blood?’ So, that’s kind of the gist of the scenes of the film that we’re shooting here today."

Macabre? You bet!

But the actors who’ve been flown in from all over the country to star in Zombie are stunning, despite the blood — and that’s the point. As is often the case with his films, Dove has also employed a "name" actor to give the film a little boost. This time it’s Jason Tyler — at least, that’s this Boston native’s moniker when he’s making hard-core gay-porn films for San Francisco’s wildly popular Falcon Studios.

"Oh yeah, Jason is in the film, too. In fact, I think we’re killing him off tonight," Gonzalez tells me. Tyler’s death likely involves a hemorrhage of fake blood — most scenes do, and, as I sit speaking with Gonzalez about his involvement in this bizarre undertaking, a member of the crew arrives with a bag full of detergents.

"We got a little too much blood on the wall during the last scene," he explains.

Dove and Gonzalez’s films are essentially Interview with a Vampire, except this time, the Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise characters are actually having sex, and the yuck level is elevated; just check out www.deadguyscinema.com, where there’s little left to the imagination.

Still, despite the somewhat disturbing nature of his films (the short "Physical Education" carries the tag "this movie is not rated and contains graphic images of implied rape and murder"), Dove says he’s doing nothing more than providing a product to a niche market. His product? Scream kings, a tongue-in-cheek answer to the scream-queens genre that began in the 1950s and remained popular right up through the low-budget — but very high-visibility — ’80s. And Dove has assembled a talented stable of like-minded filmmakers who are bent on bringing the product to market before, he says, mainstream high-budget efforts eclipse his homegrown projects.

Gonzalez is a native of Texas and has a degree in theater from Southwest Texas University. He says he initially became involved with Dove Productions after doing some death-and-homoeroticism writing as a treatment for an adult film in Los Angeles. "It was a little too much for them," he says of his story, which oozed sex and gore. Toned down significantly, Gonzalez’s work caught the eye of Dove, who had already made a number of short and full-length homoerotic horror films. He’s serving as writer and production manager for Zombie.

Q: Will people be seeing Zombie on the marquee at the local cinema?

DG: No, but it is a full-length feature that will go direct to DVD. We are gonna send it through the indie circle and hopefully get it included in some festivals. This is a whole new genre right now that’s bubbling up: gay horror movies. They are starting to surface everywhere, and we’re gonna try to beat it before it becomes too mainstream.

Q: What’s Zombie about, from your perspective?

DG: Ultimately, it’s about redemption. The main character is struggling with all these emotions that are coming back to him. It’s mainly my metaphor for a numbing of sorts of a person, you know, people get numb, they have no emotions. That’s the type of people the guys in this film are, that’s why they’re zombies. I mean, they’re not dropping bits of flesh or having eyes drop out.

Q: So audiences shouldn’t expect anything like, say, Michael Jackson’s "Thriller" video, which, being a Jackson project, is frightening on many levels.

DG: No. It’s ultimately about Christian-the-main-character’s redemption because he’s having all these flashbacks and he doesn’t know why he’s having them, but, all of a sudden, all these memories keep flooding back to him. Every victim that he has ever killed is coming back to haunt him. But what he doesn’t know is that a rival zombie, who was once the favorite of the devil, so to speak, is the one releasing his soul. He’s pulling out all these memories, releasing all these barriers that are holding his memories in, and Christian is just wigging out.

Meanwhile, within this zombie nation, all the other zombies are starting to rival against each other. Basically, it’s like a mutiny within the family. And ultimately, Christian’s goal is to get out of this completely because he’s becoming more human now, and he wants to get the hell out of the situation.

Q: Sounds like you gotta see it to understand it. But it does seem to be an allegory for young gay life in the new millennium — getting caught up in stuff, going through the motions with blinders on, eventually wanting out. No?

DG: Yeah. Exactly!

Q: How did you cast the film?

DG: For the most part, they are actors whom Alex has worked with or I have worked with. We had some closed auditions, we called in some specific people whom we saw and whose looks we liked. We had a lot of video submissions because we announced the casting on the [DeadGuysCinema] Web site. We just got a great response from that and we were fortunate, extremely fortunate, to find our lead [Jonathon Williams] through the videotape submissions. He’s phenomenal.

Q: What’s the deal with gay horror films? I’ve been covering gay culture for years, and I’ve seen some really scary stuff, most of it right out in the open. But this is really underground and genuinely creepy. You’ve got to love a genre within a genre, right?

Alex Dove: When you think about what’s popular or what’s really marked horror films for years, well, it’s always been a genre that’s had a lot of beauty. They’ve always been populated by lots of pretty girls. There’s lots of really great horror moments in them, but what also attracts people to them is that everyone always looks really nice. But for a lot of people, there is always something missing.

Gay men, for years, and some straight folks, too, have always tried to find the hot guy in the horror movie, and they would fast-forward to try to find the one or two that might be in there. So we finally figured out that there were enough people out there who really want to see standard, good old-fashioned horror with just men populating the film. So that’s what we set out to make as our product. They are specifically gay-oriented: they have gay actors, gay story lines, everyone looks really good. And everything is here — there are horror moments, scares, shower scenes, guys being hunted in the woods, vampires, and all the men look amazing. You know, amazing-looking guys and amazing plot lines and characters and situations.

Q: What’s your background? How did you get into this?

AD: I’m from the Boston area. I have been involved in haunted houses and have been interested in horror films for years. My director of photography and my business partner, Todd Russell, from New Jersey, made some of the original Men in Peril films, and a film in the early ’90s called Psycho Sisters. We met at a horror convention and we knew that we could do things better than what was out there, and we decided that we needed stronger actors. So we’ve been collaborating over the last two years, working with his technical prowess and my background working with actors and scripts to make these films. Last year’s film was Das Hause, and we cast Draven as the lead and we found out that Draven had some amazing writing skills. He submitted the script for Zombie, and it’s just an amazing script.

Q: How many films have you made?

AD: This will be our third feature-length, and the first one shot entirely on digital, so it will be really high quality. We just released Das Hause, which is about a bunch of guys participating in a reality-based television show spending a weekend in a haunted house. Our first feature was made two years ago, and it’s called Dead Guys, which was filmed in Boston and Los Angeles. It’s about a bunch of gay serial killers. If John Waters ever made a horror film, well, that’s what Dead Guys is like. Das Hause was more of a traditional story that anyone might rent at a video store. You know, they might walk in and say, "Oh, let’s get this. This looks like a really cool horror movie." Whereas, if a gay guy is watching it, he’d be thinking, "Oh my God, this is so homoerotic."

Q: Well, when guys make up the entire cast, it’s probably a sure bet that people will catch on. What’s your take on Zombie?

AD: Zombie is clearly all about taking good gay characters and great plot lines and turning it into a horror movie.

Q: Those qualities sound great and might entice someone to pick this film off the shelf at your local video joint, but what about sex? I mean, these are films with a bunch of gay guys! These guys must be doing more than running around conjuring poxes and stabbing one another.

AD: Any good horror film always has some implied sexual situations.

Q: When I was a kid, I watched all the Friday the 13ths, Nightmare on Elm Streets, and, of course, I had to sneak I Spit on Your Grave into my parents' house because there were sure to be some gratuitous tit shots. Now, you’ve got some fairly well-established porn stars here and some very cute guys running around the set — is there any nudity in these films?

AD: Yes.

Q: A selling point, I’m sure, considering your target audience. How do you get this stuff out to market?

AD: Well, one place to go is our Web site. We are self-distributing the early films on the Web site to sort of build modes of distribution. Also, we’ve spent the last few years building a library, getting at least a couple of really fine films ready to go.

Q: From my perspective and without going into detail, there are some portions of the gay community that are kind of dark, but this stuff may be viewed by some as really fringe. Do you think that the greater gay community is going buy into it?

AD: Well, I hope they do. I know that we really enjoy making the films and everyone tells us that they’ve been dying to see this. The key is we’re not pandering to an audience. The actors are broadly drawn, and there’s none of that TV crap about gay characters. You know, sketches of what some straight person thinks a gay person is. These are ordinary people, normal gay people, and we are trying to reflect the gay community in what we’re doing.

Q: So they’re not so out of the mainstream that there’s a chance they’ll hit the festival circuit?

AD: Well, we’ve just started submitting these films to both the gay-film-festival circuit and some horror-film festivals. What’s interesting is that we are seeing articles in magazines like Fangoria where people are starting to talk about their first gay horror movies, so people are starting to wake back up to all this now. You know, they all had to have a hit sooner or later.

Tony Giampetruzzi can be reached at amg207@earthlink.com


Issue Date: August 8 - August 14, 2003
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