When we were promoting our movie Pain Shack, we were advised by some friends in the “indie horror scene” to take the film to Cinema Wasteland, a small underground movie convention held twice a year in Ohio.
We posted in the DVD trading groups on Facebook that we would be giving away free copies of the film at the convention and people went nuts. We didn’t realize that it was totally unheard of to give away a film. We were coming from YouTube where everyone gives everything away. This indie horror thing was a niche community of filmmakers who sold DIY DVDs of their $2K movies to each other for $20 apiece. To us giving away free copies was a no-brainer since this was our first film and a lot of people didn’t know who we were.
Someone asked us, “How are you going to sell any copies if you give it to everyone for free?” The way it ended up working was that the free copies created so much positive word of mouth that everyone, including a bunch of the people who had gotten the free DVDs, wanted to buy Pain Shack once we came out with an official release. Imagine that.
When we walked into Wasteland, people recognized us and immediately formed a line to get a copy of the movie. We didn’t have a table or anything. We’d just made some Facebook posts about going there.
Wasn’t the most welcoming atmosphere from the other content creators.
Marissa went up to a writer guy at one of the tables and handed him the movie. He said, “I saw a pirated copy of this movie online.” He hadn’t really seen the movie. He was trying to fuck with us, because that’s what you do when you meet new people at a convention, right? Not sure how it was supposed to mess with us though considering we had posted the whole movie on YouTube and we were handing out free copies. “Awesome,” Marissa said to him. I noticed that the guy had written an article about a friend of ours who had made an underground movie. When we told him that we were friends with the director, he seemed to get especially bent out of shape. His eyes went in two different directions and I thought he was going to have a stroke so we left him alone.
We were outsiders, you see. You have to sell your short films for $20 apiece and wear Hot Topic clothing exclusively or else you’re a weird outsider who’s just coming in for all the glamour and riches provided by shot-on-video horror movies.
The convention did a lot for us in the eyes of the fans as we instantly shot up to the same level of recognizability as just about everyone who had paid to be there. It was pretty clear to us that this is one of the reasons some of the other content creators acted so territorial.
Whenever I get caught up in a scene it ends badly because I write something like this, making fun of the scenesters, and then I’m labeled the bad guy. When some people in the horror scene got mad at me and “cancelled” me, these were literally the reasons I was given:
I told someone that this one director used silicone and cotton balls to make his homemade DVD covers. The director got very angry at me for this and messaged a bunch of people telling them not to be friends with me anymore. He was totally open with me about how he made the covers, going so far as to walk me through the process of making them and even making covers for my movies, and he never told me to keep anything a secret until after he thought other people had been stealing his methods. This was all just a contrived reason to cover up the fact that his wife wanted to swing with me and Marissa (lol gross) and the guy must’ve gotten mad when his wife tried to talk to him about it. That is just a theory of mine but I have several reasons for why I suspect that it is true. One reason is that I’d given her a copy of a book by a former porn star that I had read. I had mentioned the book when I was hanging out with them. Soon after, she messaged me asking me to send her a digital copy. She read the book over the course of a couple days and then messaged Marissa all excited about it. Then like the next day her husband hates me for something I said about his DVD covers. They had been trying to initiate plans with us to hang out like every weekend for months (I remember they wanted us all to get together to have a Father’s Day barbecue) but suddenly we were no longer friends. He wouldn’t give me a reason for why he wasn’t talking to me. He just stopped responding to me. But other people told me he told them it was because I’d revealed to one person - a mutual friend of ours - how he made his DVD covers (before I was asked to keep it a secret). It’s worth noting that he’s had a falling out with just about everyone he’s been friends with.
I wrote a mean blog post making fun of Ryan Nicholson, one of the most famous underground directors. He had developed a reputation for taking people’s money for DVD orders and then never delivering the products. A lot of people had started calling him out on his erratic behavior. He behaved weirdly toward me, running hot and cold, which in retrospect must have had to do with multiple people running his social media accounts pretending to be him. I didn’t mention him by name in my blog post and it was on my crappy tumblr blog that I never posted about but someone messaged Ryan’s assistant (guy who did free work for him) with screenshots of the blog and they treated me like I had written a hit piece for the New York Times. Everything made sense a few years later when Ryan tragically died from brain cancer. It was a wake up call because you never know if a person who’s acting unusual is just unwell.
I told a guy he couldn’t come stay at my house for a week because a police officer friend of mine sent me a link to a news article about the guy getting arrested for buying heroin. The guy freaked out at me and used the Ryan Nicholson drama and the drama with the silicone guy to do further damage to my reputation. This was the guy I had told about the silicone DVD covers in the first place, which supposedly was the catalyst for all of the trouble, so you can see how this was some sort of inside hatchet job.
There you have it. I would love for someone to challenge me on this (I know at least one of you freaks is reading this). I’d get into a live debate at the drop of a hat. I have all of the receipts. I have many more stories. This just scrapes the surface.
So that’s why some people in the horror community don’t like me. The whole scene consists of like a few hundred people anyway so you get thirty people against you and it’s over. They weren’t welcoming to begin with and then they forced me out. Someone posted a Ricky Shore DVD a couple years ago on Facebook and some guy in the comments was like, “They’re pieces of shit.” I didn’t even know who he was or what he thought we did. If someone in the indie horror community feels this way, it stems from the reasons I listed above.
I’m not the only person they treated like this. They’re famous for treating everyone like this. When I got cancelled I heard from a lot of the main directors. “Don’t worry about those broke bitches,” the president of one of the bigger releasing companies messaged me.
Nobody wants to make indie horror movies anymore because the people can be so annoying and that’s why the only content creators who are able to make decent money from indie horror are corporate entities like Bloody Disgusting that don’t exist within the scene but merely exploit it.