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| The Heretiks |
With a lively script and some exceptional casting, The Heretiks is a small film with big energy, a natural crowd-pleaser which screened as part of this year’s Fantastic Fest. It follows a girl who is targeted by a coven of witches for a potential sacrifice which could bring about the end end of the world. Fortunately for her, not all the witches are on the same side, and one comes to her aid. Director Gregg Bishop and I had plans to discuss it for a couple of weeks before the screening, but ended up talking at the last minute, as he was still making tweaks to it very late in the day.
“We shot in March and so it was a pretty quick turnaround,” he says. “We worked really quickly and so you have to rely on your instincts a lot. You know, you can't second guess yourself. This is the story we're telling. You've got to be very linked and very decisive on the decisions you're making. And sometimes I think that, you know, we had an opportunity to test it a few times, but I feel like you get bad movies that way.”
His efforts have paid off, I assure him. It feels like the product of a singular vision – something quite instinctive.
“Yeah, very instinctive. Sometimes if you have all the time in the world, you second guess yourself to infinity. Sometimes you noodle too much and lose the story you're telling. [It’s better if] you just tell the story, with sound and with colour, with the effects, everything. You're just telling a unified, singular story, and it kind of helps when you have a deadline.”
So how did he come on board with this project in the first place?
“Believe it or not, it was ten years ago I sat down with the writers. I'm a huge fan of Ben Collins, who wrote the script. We did a movie called Siren together, which was a adaptation of David Bruckner's V/H/S segment called Amateur Night, and we got together and wanted to do a movie. I was asking them what scripts they had and they were giving me scripts, and they had a script called Red Hands, which was like witches attacking some kid in a cabin in the woods type thing. I loved the witch mythology. I thought it had a great movie monster in the witch and stuff.
“Their mythology was really unique and something I hadn't seen before, so I fell in love with that, but I just didn't want to do a cabin in the woods movie. I mean, I'm just never going to do a better cabin in the woods movie than, you know, Sam Raimi. So I thought it'd be fun to set it in suburbia where I grew up, and have it take place over Halloween. Just to kind of contrast – you know, the movies goes in dark places, but to contrast the light and the dark and hopefully come up with a unique tone for the movie.”
Getting Weapons star Luke Speakman on board was quite a coup, I suggest, but Gregg explains that they’ve known each other for a while.
“I cast him in a short film when he was eight years old. It was a short film called Howl At The Dead, which is about the family pets that can see ghosts, and I cast him as the kid in the family. I just thought he was great. He was missing his front teeth. He was eight years old and adorable. And I just – you could see the talent there with just an eight-year-old. Since then, he’s grown up and been in so many movies, and we were thrilled to work with each other again. He's 13 now. He was 12 when we did the movie and he's just a pro. I mean, he's sharp. He'll catch me on continuity things. He'll be like, ‘Oh, shouldn't the witch be right over there? That's where we are.’ I'm like, ‘Oh, you're right.’ He's just a sharp, sharp kid.”
The girl, Ava Mae Seidensticker, is also really impressive. Where did she come from?
“With our casting director, Jonathan Spencer, we scoured the entire southeast. We shot the movie in Atlanta and just looked at every possible tape. We had a pool of ten kids that were very talented, but she just rose to the top and embodied Mabel's rebellious side and. She just had this confidence. And I knew we'd be shooting fast, so I needed a kid I could count on to nail it when the clock was ticking. She was unreal.
“The biggest challenge this movie is, you know, having 12 year olds in the movie you have a certain amount of time to film with them. Most of the movie takes place at night and they have curfews, so you have even less time to film. So I remember one night we had five minutes with her and all her dialogue was so long, but she blew us all away. I got two takes out of her and just made a slight adjustment and she took the adjustment. I'm like, ‘Wow, what a pro.’ So I can't wait to see where she goes from here.”
I tell him that what I feel is essential to getting films like this to work is understanding children as fully realised individuals, characters with personality and agency.
“Yeah,” he agrees. “You know, they always say actors always have the missing pages of the script. So you have the script, you have the characters written and you try to find them, but you try not to cast puppets. People come in with a point of view and have ideas and ideas for lines, and what I try to do is cast the kids and everyone, just because that's 80% of my job: the cast themselves, whoever ends up in the movie.”
It feels like the other big bit of the job in this particular case is managing all the special effects.
“Yes,” he says. “I have an art background, so for all those complex sequences, I storyboard all those out. We tried to capture as much as we could on set. Because I'm old. I love practical effects.”
I could see that, I say.
“You just can't beat it. It's just the having something physical there and then enhancing it. It's always like the James Cameron rule – we’re never using the same trick twice. You do it one way in one shot, another way in another shot, and the audience hopefully forgets how the thing is being done and just enjoys the ride. But yeah, it was just really pre-vising those sequences out and then breaking down each shot and being like, ‘Okay, what is the best way to do this? How can we get this on camera, and then how can we expand it with visual effects?’ And then because we had that all worked out well before, since we had such a tight schedule, we'd be able to shoot what we needed and move on.
“Yeah, I sketched out the witches because I wanted them all to be unique and have that kind of unique look. And then our costume designer, Miracole Burns, took those concepts and just ran with them and embellished them and made them her own. For a lot of the mythology, what I did love about the script that I thought was unique is, you know, it's definitely not Harry Potter.
“They're not just flinging spells around. The magic's hard. You know what I mean? So you can tell that certain witches have trained in certain areas, and there's symbols, and you have to do spells, and you have to touch somebody to activate the spell on them. So they're not just playing, and I kind of love that. I hadn't seen that before, just that groundedness. I wanted to ground everything because I know we're making a supernatural movie. I wanted to ground everything around that and make the magic feel as real as we possibly could.”
He said that he didn’t want to do a cabin in the woods film, but a fair bit of the horror is set in a single suburban house. How did he find that location?
“The funny thing is that that is actually five minutes from the house I grew up in, in Georgia,” he says. “It was fun to shoot my home town, and the trick or treating scenes were literally where I used to trick or treat as a kid. For the house itself, we just did a location search the standard way, but the way we ended up with this house is I did a Facebook Post and one of my old friends from high school said ‘Hey, my dad lives up the street. You should check out his house, he'd love it.’ We swung by and the nicest person on the planet welcomed us into his home and just loved the idea. Thank God. He just was just the best, welcomed us like family while we were filming there. It was just a wonderful experience.
“We had high ambitions. We were really swinging for the fences and trying to make this a great experience for an audience. So I think our biggest challenge was the scheduling and the labour laws, which rightly say kids can only be on set for a certain amount of time, so we'd have to shoot all their stuff first and then go back and shoot all the other characters with doubles so they could be over somebody's shoulder. We used every trick in the book. It's not the best way to make a movie, jumping around in three different scenes in the same day, but it blows my mind how seamless it comes out at the end.”
Fantastic Fest is one of his favourite festivals, he says.
“I love this festival. I love being around like-minded people who just love movies, who love horror movies and are real genuine fans of it. I couldn't think of a better place to première than here with this kind of crowd and these kind of people. I love it.”
