“We put a grand total of five minutes of thought into it.” When Miska asked them for a name, their inside joke about the sorry state of their careers leapt to mind. “And we’re like, ‘Well, it’s all of us,'” Bettinelli-Olpin says. After they turned in their segment, “10/31/98” - about a group of friends (played by Villella, Bettinelli-Olpin, and Gillett) who accidentally stumble into an actual haunted house on Halloween - Miska asked the group who should be credited as the director. Then in 2011, Brad Miska, founder of the genre website Bloody Disgusting, invited them on the strength of their YouTube shorts to contribute a segment to “V/H/S,” the found footage horror anthology film he was producing. Radio silence.’ It was such a joke among us that, basically, nobody wanted to work with us.” The way that we dealt with that kind of like rejection was to just be like, ‘Hey, have you heard from so and so?’ ‘Radio silence. “When you’re trying to get started, it’s nothing but obstacles. “We used to always say it to each other,” says Bettinelli-Olpin. Even their group’s name is a kind of prank on themselves. It’s the first hint of the shared comedic sensibility - and humility - that has sustained the trio throughout their career. Things you buy through our links may earn Vox Media a commission.“A Voltron of anti-style,” says Villella, 44, which only makes the three laugh harder. Thus, a found-footage, modern-day, Frankenstein-esque film wasn’t merely likely it was inevitable. Fox’s Chronicle and Warner Bros.’ Project X both cost just $12 million to make, and grossed over $123 million worldwide and just shy of $80 million worldwide, respectively.
In the last few months, we’ve seen a glut of ultra-low-cost movies ranging from the execrable The Devil Inside (January) to the exceptional Chronicle (February) to the merely inebriated, like Project X (March), and all of them did insanely well at the box office: The Devil Inside cost Lionsgate $1 million to acquire and made $100 million worldwide.
And Universal is not only developing a Frankenstein with Battleship producer Scott Stuber and Pan’s Labyrinth director Guillermo del Toro, but also a Bride of Frankenstein with Limitless director Neil Burger.Īlso still in the midst of a moment are found-footage films. Simultaneously, Fox is developing its own Frankenstein with Neighborhood Watch producer Shawn Levy, as is Columbia Pictures, which has put David Fincher on the reanimation tale being produced by The Amazing Spider-Man producer Matt Tolmach. Stuart Beattie’s I, Frankenstein is set in the present day and seems equal parts Frankenstein and Underworld, with the monster caught between warring factions of gargoyles and demons. We are, of course, in the midst of a massive Frankenstein moment in Hollywood. We hear exclusively that Radio Silence, the directing quartet behind this year’s found-footage Sundance horror flick V/H/S - ironically, picked up for distribution on VOD by Magnolia Pictures for a million bucks - is in negotiations with Lionsgate to direct The Reawakening, another found-footage horror script, this one from screenwriter Luke Dawson ( Shutter) that’s equal parts Flatliners and Frankenstein. Henry Frankenstein, in the 1931 Universal film.Įvery once in a while, Hollywood’s pathological fear of innovation collides head-on with its neurotic need for imitation, often resulting in a bizarre, modern-day Frankenstein’s monster of a hybrid.
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