Making your own horror movie

by Carl Falcon

Mac Pohanka ‘08 and Carl Jennings ‘08 show off $10 bills before making their budget horror movie, The Duck of Doom, in Bucksbaum.

“What can we do with $10 … that’s legal?” A question that I’m sure burns in the mind of every poor college student … But this time, it was an assignment, and it couldn’t be stupid, well, as stupid as college students can usually be.

My friends and I toyed with a couple ideas at first. Would we manipulate people into amusing? Would we give people $2 and see who could buy the object that would get the highest splatter radius?

The answer to both of these was no. We were too lazy to organize the first and the second could result in much more than $10 in fines. We needed to know what we could do that would require very little effort and no potential extra expenses, because as everyone knows, effort and losing money are not fun.

After much deliberation, some might say procrastination, we decided to make a movie with a $10 budget. We could check a camera out from the AV Center and borrow props from people on our floor. All we needed to buy were the tapes. We even managed to get a digital camera from the lab so we could edit our film on my computer.

We went searching for ideas last Saturday, and then I saw it: my roommate’s rubber duck collection, and in it, the demon duck. We now had all the ingredients for an excellent B-Movie.

We went of to Wal-Mart and found them for $6 a piece, leaving $4 for props at Goodwill (in case you aren’t lucky enough to have a bunch of weird stuff lying around your room).

And think: one tape is 60 minutes of raw footage, which is easily an hour and a half long B-movie, even if you do a silly thing like use dialogue. We only filmed about 15 minutes of footage and our movie is half an hour long. Remember, budget isn’t bad. Nor, apparently, is lack of quality—think how much money the Blair Witch Project made.

With a plot and props, all you need is a place. I ask you, what is better for a B-movie than overdone scenes of someone walking or running down long empty hallways? And what is better for that then our very own Bucksbaum Center for the Arts?

If you haven’t been in the basement, you should check it out. Then picture lame horror movie characters running through it. It’s quite entertaining, especially if a bad mix of orchestral music is being practiced in the background.

When making your movie, just fill your head with bad horror clichés and corny dialogue. You can write a script in 10 minutes or work without one like we did.

Filming the whole thing only takes about two hours, plus a little time to edit in looped scenes and make bad sound effects. You can easily finish before the other weekend recreational activities start.

The confused looks on people’s faces when they see you running from your friend holding a camera and a duck through the narrow halls of Bucksbaum’s basement are a huge plus too.

With a promo like this, who could help but want to make their own horror movie?