I have a special treat for all my ghouls and boys out there, lucky little me got to sit down and have a chat with All Cheerleaders Die creators Chris Sivertson and Lucky McKee, and talk about their newest flick and what drives them to make scary scripts for the silver screen!
A hilarious, grind house, cheerleading zombie extravaganza, All Cheerleaders Die is now available VOD, and will be released in theaters on June 13th!
Ruby: All Cheerleaders Die is a remake of your first movie, what brought you two back together to remake it, and how does it differ from the original?
CS: It’s a lot more complex than the original one was, but we’ve talked about it over the years. We made it as our first feature together, and just kind of learned how to make a movie together doing it. Over the years, it was such a fun experience, we talked about revisiting it either in sequel form or kind of taking the concept and running in a new direction with it, in addition to helping each other on our own projects, and writing other scripts together and stuff, so it’s kind of been an ongoing collaboration that’s never stopped. It’s just time to revisit this particular story. The timing was just perfect after Lucky worked with Andrew Van den Houten on The Woman, and we had the perfect Producer who could make this happen for us.
Ruby: In the movie, like a lot of Lucky’s movies, the main character is a lesbian, which is really cool. You don’t see that in a lot of main stream horror, without that character also being mentally deranged like in High Tension, what prompts you to include girl/girl love in this, and so many of your flicks?
LM: It’s just a type of dramatic territory that’s not explored much in mainstream film, y’know, so it’s interesting. It gives us a chance to show those kinds of relationships in a normal way. Play them out in just a frank real fashion, without having it be what drives the story, or what the movie’s about. It’s just something that is.
Ruby: Revenge seems to be the underlying theme to all of your movies, what makes that your go to topic? Is it some personal score you didn’t get to settle, so you take it out on film, or does it just make for good cinema?
LM: I don’t know, Chris, what would you say? I think it’s partially a personal thing, and it’s a ripe subject for drama.
Ruby: You both focus on horror, apart and together, and I know that you Lucky have recently worked with Jack Ketchum on The Woman, who generally is known for not having any lines he wouldn’t cross. Are there any taboo topics for you guys, anything you wouldn’t be willing to explore?
CS: There’s a lot
LM: (Laughs) Yeah, I agree with that.
CS: Frankly as I get older, yeah, there’s just a lot of stuff I’d rather not deal with.
Ruby: This movie is a lot of fun. The question is prompted from just having watched The Woman, which is just a really raw film that caused a lot of controversy, and you guys bouncing back and forth between serious horror and funny, light hearted horror like All Cheerleaders and Sick Girl, so I was curious…
CS: Yeah, we both spent a lot of time working on dark, heavy, serious stuff and that was part of the appeal, to revisit the Cheerleaders concept. It was because it was so fun to us, and it was a chance to try new things cinematically as well, and kind of embrace the world of the popcorn movie and try to make something that’s fast moving with a bunch of magic and effects, and hopefully within that deal with some serious human stuff as well, but just have it be moving at a fun pace. Just shake things up, creatively for us as film makers too.
Ruby: I really liked the supernatural element of your zombies with the stones being their life force, it was a really cool, different take on the genre. The Romero type of zombies has been done so many times, so it was really neat to see a different perspective on how the zombies were created.
LM: When we were writing the script, that was something Chris made a really good point on. He was like, y’know, we’re going to take a half hour to set up all these great characters, and then we’re just going to turn them into mindless zombies? We’re kind of shooting ourselves in the foot. So he landed on the idea that they don’t have to be rotting corpses that are just hungry for flesh. They can still be the people that they are, even though they’re dead and have been brought back by this wiccan magic, they can still be going through their kind of character stuff. Still have to deal with going back to the first day of school with this thing hanging over them, it just made it more fun.
Ruby: I know that my readers would love to know, since you make horror movies, what scares you guys?
CS: What scares me I think in some movies is when the horror goes beyond just the horror of getting killed. Psychic horror, like David Lynch explored in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. It’s beyond just, “oh, I don’t want to die”, I don’t want to f*cking loose my mind and go crazy. Kind of the same thing with Mulholland Drive, there’s parts of that movie that just totally get under my skin in that way, so I think that’s part of the trick for me, when it goes beyond the simple fear of death.
LM: For Me, it’s when someone is in a situation where they don’t have the ability to defend themselves, and it’s done in a real way. When you have a person that’s in a situation where someone has some sort of physical or mental advantage over them, and is exploiting that, and enjoying exploiting that. That’s some pretty scary stuff.
Ruby: And for my last question, what can we expect from part 2 of All Cheerleaders Die, and when can we expect it?
CS: Hopefully soon, we really want to get this thing out in the water and see that people really dig it and hopefully they dig it enough to be kind of clambering for a sequel, which we have a really solid plan for, so we’re just sitting here waiting to see how it does out in the open.
LM: There are tons of clues and hints where it’s going peppered through out this first film, and a lot of unanswered questions, so maybe if you look at some of those unanswered questions, you might start figuring out some of the answers.
CS: The culmination of the relationship stuff in the first one, particularly between Maddy and Leena, it’s definitely just the first act of their relationship that we’ve seen, and there’s a lot of other fun stuff to explore still between those two.
Starring Caitlin Stasey and Sianoa Smit-McPhee, you can now catch All Cheerleaders Die on VOD, and check out more info on the film at www.allcheerleadersdiemovie.com
