The morning following the uproarious Midnighter premiere of wife & husband directorial team Vanessa & Joseph Winter’s supernatural monitor horror feature, Deadstream, I was lucky enough to chat a bit about the film (that was so well received by the way that it went on to be one of the highly coveted SXSW Buzz Screenings later that week).
Joseph and Vanessa, that was quite the film! A great way to kick off the Midnighters program for sure. As someone from Montana I guess it wouldn’t be a bad place to start…with Utah. I’m your neighbor to the north. What’s it like making films in that state?
Vanessa: There’s there’s a pretty healthy amount of a film community in Utah. Good professional crews, but I think it’s still small enough that the community gets excited around things filming. So that was helpful for our film I think We shot in a small town called Benjamin. Okay. And the next town over is Spanish Fork, but they, they were all very supportive. And helping us get things made
Joseph: Yeah, for me, one of the biggest benefits of making movies in Utah is with location. You have people that feel like having a film made at your house or at your business, there’s still a novelty to it. They’re really excited and welcoming. In other places like LA it’s just not that way. You’re always gonna pay a lot for location.
And you have some experience working in that industry, right? Before you made this film, you guys made some shorts. Some pretty successful things for Knott’s Scary Farms and and other things like that. But even before that, I think I heard during your Q&A that you ran like a genre film festival. Is that correct, and is that something that you did or still do?
Vanessa: Yeah, we did. How many years did we do? We did seven, seven years. Yeah. It was a very, very local festival. It was always meant to be four Utah filmmakers at Halloween. And the big gimick of it was just to play in the biggest theater that we could rent. So it was just a big event. And it was a contest and we had a ton of fun doing it. But it was so much work.
Joseph: Yeah, it was so much work that we realized that that was taking away from the main passion of making films ourselves. So after seven years of doing it, it, we just decided like, we’re gonna go all in with you know, features or television writing and, and just focus on the projects there. So, I mean, it was really fun and it got really popular, but we, we had to let it go.
Was filmmaking first or was your interest in film and the community, or did it happen kind of in tandem?
Vanessa: It was kind of in tandem because we actually started the festival while we were in college in film school. We met in film school and the first festival actually took place on campus.
So Deadstream, this is your first feature. Like I said, had so much fun. Shawn, he’s a, a real complicated guy. As an influencer, I feel like he kind of walks the line of being irritating while being strangely charming. How’d you find that character? How did you approach that that world? What drew you to it?
Vanessa: Right outta college. I worked I worked for a studio where my coworkers were a couple of guys with a successful YouTube channel. So I think that was kind of always in the back of our minds. Like, we were aware of the business side or kind of what went into having a, a successful YouTube channel. But I think for this film, we started writing the character for some of Joseph’s strengths. Comedic strengths. And so I think the idea of the main character as kind of a scary cat. Putting himself in these ridiculous situations kind of started the concept. And then I think we, at least for me delving into the research of actual influencers and vloggers, I really sort of discovered the art of it where I just, I think I was taking it for granted. How difficult it is to be entertaining for that long, for that many minutes. And the reality kept setting in like in the script stages. But then when we got into rehearsals, I think that we were also shocked at, maybe not shocked, but we were very aware of the challenge of just trying to make this guy watchable, but also not pull back too hard on his flaws.
You don’t, you don’t wanna kill like your likability. I mean, even though he is debatably likable…
Joseph: Yeah, it was really tough because I feel like the final step in developing Shawn was introducing the aspect of a controversial past. So when there was a big controversy with PewDiePie around the same time, and some other influencers getting in trouble for things, and we, were just thinking what if Shawn was like that? What if he was doing really controversial things and actually there was fallout from it. And he was trying to come back from that. Then that started to inform everything that we did moving forward. When we did the research on those influencers, we found that over time we started to kind of like them, like a little bit. You’d start to be like, this is legitimately really funny. They’re talented. And there’s a reason that people watch this content. So we started taking that role of influencer more seriously in the movie. We need to make this person, someone who could realistically be watched by an audience.
I think the way you open it the film, you create this hook of curiosity about like, what did he do? What did Shawn do that caused this six month break? I think that’s really interesting. Were you, Joseph, always going to play Shawn?
Joseph: Yeah. I mean, the main reason for that was the very first idea was let’s find a movie that we could just go shoot by ourselves with a camera strapped to my head. So obviously we would just use me. We could literally shoot it just the two of us in a house. But then as that started to evolve and become something else. We realized that it would be pretty uncomfortable filming this and probably not appropriate to try to get somebody else into the role to do some of these things. So we just kept it as me.
Yeah, it’s funny, like the, the whole rig, the setup, the two camera setup that, that Sean has like I’ve been watching a lot of MTV fear. Do you remember that show from the early 2000s? I’m just completely like, baffled about how they were able to carry these massive battery packs and all these hard drives on their back as well as a camera. But that for some reason was what I thought of when I was watching this as well. I was like, gosh, what a rig. What a setup! I know initially you said that you were gonna do it all with one POV camera facing you, right?
Joseph: Yeah, it wasn’t gonna be a good movie by the way. I mean, when I pitched that to Vanessa, she was like, “that’s bad”…
Yeah, I thought a lot about that after the Q&A. There certainly could have been some cool things you play with in the background of course, or moments where the camera gets knocked in other directions.
But I think the flipping between basically portrait and selfie was really interesting. You don’t see a lot of found footage/monitor horror that gracefully shows the equipment setup. Going from room to room, positioning the camera without making it feel super exposition. I really appreciated that.
The house though, where you’re placing these cameras. You spoke a bit about it, saying it was completely trashed. Can you talk about that? How long does it take to clean up a location like that? Like you said, there was inches of dirt, and you had to completely restructure the second floor.
Vanessa: Yeah. It took us a couple months. We were lucky enough to have some friends to help us clean it out. But that was we probably had 15 people for eight hours. To get all of the clay off of the floors. So that was a pretty big undertaking. And then on the second floor it was so dilapidated that a lot of the roof was exposed and there was, I, I think there was just a couple walls that were still standing. So we had to recreate the four rooms and the main hallway that we showed in the film. But yeah, I think it took a couple months.
Plus I read in the press release that it was purportedly haunted? What’s the history of this house?
Joseph: The locals genuinely fear the house and because of that teenagers break into it every night. So that was a big hassle dealing with that, but did you read about the cop that wouldn’t go in the house?
I didn’t. No.
Joseph: So there was this time where there was a break in, Jared called the cops, our producer, Jared, because he lived about 25 minutes away. And so the cops are supposed to come to the house and be the first people to deal with it. Then Jared would come and like clean things up. But when Jared got there, the cop was still sitting in his car and he went over to the cop car. The guy was like, “I’m too scared to go inside”, because he had grown up there in the town and was always afraid of the house. So he just wouldn’t go without someone being present.
Did the story they believed, was it similar to the story that Shawn was telling in the film? The deaths in the house?
Joseph: The story with that house was that it was a pump house where you would go inside to switch over the irrigation water, and a boy drown while doing that. And his brother tried to save him and drown as well. So that’s the legend. That’s where it came from.
Huh. Interesting. And he was so scared of these little drown ghost boys that he wouldn’t leave his car?
Joseph: That’s just how it started. But over time, the lore has become…you can see a woman standing in the window upstairs and it’s like a whole bunch of other things.
Vanessa: Yeah, our contractor was the same way. We hired a contractor to come and reinforce some of the walls. And he claimed when I was a teenager, he broke into this house and saw a woman standing in one of the windows.
Joseph: He was dead serious. You could tell that he at least believed it.
That’s so wild. So, there’s a couple of movies that I go to “spooky seasonally”, annually and they’re WNUF Halloween special and, Ghostwatch. The UK film? Have you seen that? Ghost Uhhuh ghost watch.
Joseph: No.
Absolutely check it out. I think it’s on Shudder and I mean, you’re good friends them now. Congratulations, by the way. I’m happy to hear that even before the premiere Shudder grabbed you for distribution. That’s very exciting. Was Deadstream always going to be a Halloween film like the films I mentioned?
Vanessa: You you’ve just made Joseph stay by saying that. He wanted it to be a Halloween movie so bad. I think that was a big part
Joseph: I wanted to do everything I could to declare this is a Halloween movie. And like, if you’re gonna buy our movie, you can’t release it in January. This is a Halloween movie. And we’re fortunate that Shudder plans to, I don’t know, I don’t think we can announce this yet, but but I think that’s their plan for release. I mean, all of the movies that I ever create would take place on Halloween, if it were entirely up to me
It’s going to be one that I watch a lot, and yearly, with friends on a couch, you know? That’s the kind of film that I think this is. I mean, it’s amazing in a theater, but I’d also love to sit down with a group of friends on a packed couch with this film.
We’ve talked a bit about Shawn, but how about Crissy, played by Melanie Stone? she brought a lot of really infectious energy to this. How did she come to the project?
Vanessa: She’s somebody that we’ve worked worked with before, and I think having her in mind in the early stages, I think also really helped the horror comedy aspect. Because she’s got such good range. She really brought a playfulness to the villain that helped define personality of the movie. We brought her on really, really early. She’s in Utah. Sometimes she’s in LA. She’s kind of a globetrotting type.
There’s something about her manic energy. Something behind the eyes with her character that I just love. Very similar to Gracie Gillam’s character in Superhost. I’m so happy that your film has found such success already, and I can’t wait to tell my friends about this. I guess I’ll ask that annoying question. I know it’s very early on for this film, but are you working on something next?
Vanessa: Yeah, we’d love to shoot another independent film and I think we’re gonna go more demonic.
Joseph: Yeah, it’ll be more. I mean, if our plans go with what we’re thinking, it’ll be a more straightforward, serious horror.
Check out the prosthetics that were on display at the premiere, and keep your eyes peeled for an October ’22 release of Deadstream, exclusively on Shudder.
