INT: Stevan Mena

Last Updated on July 28, 2021

The
Arrow interviews Stevan Mena


The buzz has been good on Stevan
Mena’s “old school” slasher
MALEVOLENCE
and I personally enjoyed it immensely

(read my review here)
. Mena’s flick
brought me back to the “Halloween” days of horror and I thanked him
for it with a standing-o in my living room. Stevan and I recently
got a chance to chit-slash about the flick

(now available on DVD through Anchor Bay)

and here’s what came out of it!

So,
Malevolence is finally out! It’s been a long process for you.


Oh man it’s been crazy, yeah a very
long time.


So, how did you feel when you heard
Anchor Bay picked it up?


I was actually completely blown
away, that was probably the last company I would have expected to
extend the invitation so it was pretty amazing, big shock!


Where you at all somewhat
disappointed by the theatrical release? I know I was from my end.


You mean as far as it went?


Yeah, it never came out in my neck
of the woods.


Well, yeah, I mean the problem with
the theatrical release was basically that we just didn’t have the
funds to back up what we wanted to do and it’s just very hard to
compete in the marketplace when Lion Gates were putting out films
with a $25-$30 million advertising budget and you’ve got half a
million, how do you compete with that?


Yeah, that’s true.


The answer is really you don’t. So
the theatrical release from a level it came about, just getting it
out there to as many people as we could to get the word out there so
that when the DVD is released people are aware of this film called
Malevolence and it definitely just didn’t go straight to video.


I saw the film finally yesterday and
I really enjoyed it by the way, good job. Friday the 13th
and Halloween big influences or not?


Oh yes, definitely, a huge
influence, Malevolence for me was basically kind of like the end of
Scream trying to hark back to the seventies and trying to include a
lot of things that I really loved growing up with horror films that
are missing today. I just wanted to point those out and remind
people of what’s missing today, which is why those films were so
great.


It definitely came out old school,
big time, I mean your score really sounded Carpenterish, it was
crazy.


A lot of Carpenter influences, a lot
of Charles Bronstein influences there.


I guess it was a conscious decision
to have the killer wear a Jason Part 2 circa type of mask?


Actually that was kind of a happy
accident because I wasn’t really thinking that until we were pretty
close to shooting and someone mentioned it and then I remembered
Part II. I was thinking about Jason with a hockey mask. We just
wanted to come up with something that Kurt would wear that would be
really simple, we thought it would be funny because everybody else
went out and got this store bought mask and this idiot just goes and
puts this bag over his head. So we thought it was funny and then we
thought more about it and yeah it was just like Jason’s pillow case
mask in Part 2. It wasn’t intentional but people make that
reference.


So let’s go back at the beginning,
how did the project come about? I mean what was the kick-in-the-nuts
that made you say alright, I want to do an old school slasher, let’s
go.


That was in my head all the way
from the beginning. I started writing the script like back in 96-97,
right around the time Scream was released. I just knew I wanted to
do a horror film, I definitely wanted that to be my first film.
Since I was always a big fan of slasher films, I looked back at all
my favorite slasher films, the ones that influenced me the most.
That’s what kind of got me started on that.


How hard was it for you to lock
financing for the picture?


I was mostly financed by my credit
card, ha-ha.


So how are you doing now? You OK
man?


No, I’m sure my picture is on the
wall at every Visa place in the country!


Creditors, hunting you down!


Yeah, I keep transferring balances
from cards to pay people off, I had a couple of friends and family
who loaned some money into the production and a couple of businesses
that we got to loan some money in to the production but for the most
part of it I would say more than half of it was just me borrowing
money and borrowing on credit cards.


Well the way you’ve gotta do it.


It’s a rough way to do it but I mean
if you have no other choice then when you gotta to do it then you
gotta do it, I had no other choice, I had to do it.


Did you try actually to get the film
done either via pre-sales, attaching stars to the script, pitching
it to studios…what not?


You know it is funny when we went
into production on Malevolence which was in late 2000, the horror
thing hadn’t really kicked into full gear like it is now. You could
just walk into a studio with a horror script and they’d “Oh good,
we’ll do it”. I mean now, it seems like they’re just grabbing
everything that just comes along to the point where they just can’t
get enough of it and now they are starting to remake the old films.


Yeah, unfortunately.


Yeah, they’re just doing everything
that they can to just…I guess to just basically squash it.


Well their going to milk it, milk
the cow.


Milk it you as much as they can. You
know there was a time where I didn’t really think it was feasible, I
just didn’t really think I could pull it off and I thought maybe if
I was a known director, if I had a couple of films under my belt
that’s a possibility but being a first time director it’s really,
really tough to do that. I knew that if I did go through a studio
there is no way they would let me do it the way I wanted to do it.


They’d want to put in lots of humor,
they’d want to put in a lot of fresh 18 year olds and stuff like
that and you know what? For me to pull this off I had to have
complete control. I wanted to do the music, I wanted to do
everything with the film because there was a very specific style I
was trying to emulate, go for and I knew the studios with their
mind-set they probably wouldn’t have allowed me to do that.


No, definitely not at the time,
that’s for sure. Well you succeeded man, you succeeded.


Thanks man, thanks a lot!


It came across big time; I felt like
I took a time warp machine and went back in time when I saw your
film.


You know when people tell me that,
that is the greatest thing you could possibly tell me because that
is exactly what I wanted, I’m not going to ask you your age or your
age group but..


Twenties to Seventies…pick between
there…


You’re in your twenties, OK. I was
born in ’71, I was 12 years old the first time I saw Texas
Chainsaw, I was 12 years old when I saw Nightmare on Elm Street. If
you talk to much older people the way they feel about Dracula, King
Kong…that’s the way I feel about Amityville (1979) and all… those
are my horror films. I wasn’t a fan the stuff that came afterwards.


It was like every script was written
by Kevin Williamson or was trying to be Kevin Williamson. I was
like, this isn’t what it was supposed to be man, their killing the
genre and they’re not even giving it a chance. The critics are like
horror is dead, you know Scream killed it, it exposed all the
clichés, and I am like wait a minute, it exposed all the stuff that
killed the horror genre, what about the stuff that made it good in
the first place? That’s why I wanted to go back to that and say this
is why these films are scary. They don’t build atmosphere anymore,
characters don’t have themes anymore. There are all these things
that they just don’t do in these modern films. Every time someone
gets killed, the next scene has jokes about it, you know letting the
audience off the hook, I didn’t want to do that at all.


I call them MTV genre candy


Yeah! Yeah!


It’s all quick cuts, no build-up,
character development is out the window, boo scares replace suspense


Absolutely, one of the negatives
I’ve heard about Malevolence is that the pacing is slow and I always
counter that with well, the pacing is the way it is because you have
to build up that tension and then let it explode in the end. If you
keep a steady pace or a fast pace throughout the audience isn’t
allowed to build up that tension…you have to do it slow. I think one
of the reasons why a lot of people think the last 20 minutes of
Malevolence is effective and very scary is because I’ve allowed them
to relax in those earlier parts, building up to it. If I were
constantly trying to hit them over the head they’d get desensitized
to it. It’s like when you’re watching a gory film like I saw a film
recently, I won’t mention the name but it was ridiculously gory and
after the second murder I was like I’m done, there is nothing more
you can show me, I’m already worn out!


I totally agree, I recently saw the
Amityville Horror remake and that was my main complaints about it.
Right off the bat, boom-boom-boom-boom, ghost-ghost-ghost-ghost so
at the half way point I was like I’m done here, I could go home.


Absolutely, it is funny because I am
actually going to be hanging out with Gunnar Hansen who will be
coming by to visit next week. We’ve become good friends because he
is a huge fan of Malevolence. He saw it in Boston and we’ve been
talking about it ever since, I even got him on camera talking about
it because he is a huge fan of the film we’ll be talking about stuff
next week.


That’s cool.


He actually expressed interest in
the prequel for Malivolence.


Oh, well, you just beat me to it! I
was going to ask, are a sequel or a prequel planned?


Malevolence was actually a 500 page
screenplay. But when I started shooting, I broke it up into 3 parts
and decided to do the middle first. The reason I did that was
because the prequel, the beginning of the story, really is all about
a young boy and how he becomes a serial killer, the environments in
his situation, what happened to him and how he was tortured turned
him into what he is. I felt that if I told that story first it would
expose the truths behind it and reduce the fear factor of him. I
think that one of the greatest things about slasher films is that
the unknown is what is really scary. Once you turn the light on in
the closet, it’s not scary anymore once you know what it is. I
thought him being an unknown character would be so much scarier and
now that you are scared by him, let’s go back and I’ll show you how
he got here in the first place. It’s much a different kind of story
than the current film, completely different kind of sale.


So where is that prequel at right
now? Development?


It’s on the fast track with
development; Anchor Bay has expressed interest in the entire
Trilogy.


Nice!


How well Malevolence is received in
the next week and in the following weeks is definitely going to have
an impact on probably the budget. I don’t think it will affect the
fact that it’s going to get made…just how big it’s going to be and
how much I’m going to have to work with.


Well, break a neck man.


Thanks! Well, you’re in the trenches
with me, you know how it is.


Oh, yeah, big time! It’s a rough
ride but worth every ounce of effort. So the Casting process, how
strenuous was that? For an independent film you’ve got a pretty good
cast. You often see some bad acting within your budget range… but
these guys were good!


Thanks, man, you know I really
appreciate you saying that because it has been a hit or miss with
critics on the acting and I really felt that considering this was
all their first film.


Oh, yeah? They were all first
timers? WOW!


Yes, all first timers never acted
before. Brandon Johnson did a few small parts here and They had two
takes per scene because we shot on 35 with a 200 000 budget so we
had no room for errors. We would rehearse and shoot. I think with
all those factors they did a great job. We cast for about 6 months
on this film and saw over 1000 people. We did it in Manhattan
through Backstage and we just saw head-shot after head-shot and it
is my fault because I knew exactly what I was looking for and I just
kept going until I got it.


The guy that play Julian,
Brandon Johnson, who looks like Ryan Seacrest, he didn’t come on
board until about a week before shooting, before principle
photography and I had someone else we were going to go with and then
he called us up and he had missed his audition and then we read him
and I was like WOW, this guy is great he made it in at the last
minute.


Was nudity ever an intention for
you? That was one thing that was missing from the picture in terms
of it being 100% old school?


You know that is a good question. I
thought about that a lot and I felt like there was a certain tone
that I was trying to achieve with this film and one of those was
that the female characters were heroic. I feel like the minute you
start exploiting the physical aspects of all that and start showing
nudity that you reduce the female characters in a way that I think
undermines their ability to be heroic in a film like this. So that
is why I kept the nudity out. I did think about it…went back and
forth, especially in the motel scene, but I just felt that at the
end of the day, the tone of this film, it was not required.


The fact that you don’t have any
female nudity hasn’t hindered your foreign sales in terms of
distribution?


Ha-ha I can’t say that it hasn’t
hindered but let’s say it is a question mark on everybody’s list. It
is kind of a mandatory thing but actually you know I shouldn’t say
that because we are being released on Friday in Spain on over 150
screens which is equivalent of a full scale US nation-wide release
here. That will certainly tell us if it gets received well over
there. I think the buyers will watch what happens in Spain and kind
of go from there. It definitely does come up, it is an issue but I
think at the end of the day, the more gore and the nudity usually
means the less in the script, less to say. I think if you have
something to say, you have a good story, it is unnecessary. It is
only necessary when you’ve got nothing going for the script and you
think, well I got to please them some how so let’s throw in some
nudity.


All that is Malevolence aside, have
you even started thinking of what you want to do next?


Actually, I have a couple of
projects that I am working on and I am not sure which one I want to
do next. I’m working on a supernatural thriller and that is probably
going to be my next project but again, I am not really sure, I have
so many irons in the fire I don’t know what is going to come next. I
want to get Malevolence out of the way, I don’t think I will revisit
Malevolence after the third picture. I do want to finish up the
trilogy and be done with it. I wouldn’t go back to it after that.


Not even if you were given 20
million and they’d let you cast Buster Rhymes?


Well sure if my arm is twisted, I
will make an exception!


Thanks for your time bro!

Thank
you John!

I’d
like to thank Stevan

for the horror gift that was MALEVOLENCE and for the uber pleasant
bla-bla session. I love doing interviews that wind up being about
two dudes shooting the genre shite! Keep kicking that genre ass bro!




READ MY REVIEW OF MALEVOLENCE




VISIT THE OFFICIAL MALEVOLENCE SITE

Source: Arrow in the Head

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