Falling into The Void

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This article was published 30/03/2017 (3351 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

This week, former Winnipeggers Jeremy Gillespie and Steven Kostanski are in their new hometown, Toronto, working in the field they love. Kostanski is toiling for a company making practical special effects for the Netflix series Shadow Hunters. Gillespie is preparing motion graphics for the art department of the upcoming series Star Trek: Discovery for CBS.

These are good gigs in the realm of popular entertainment: not bad for a couple of guys from the Winnipeg filmmaking collective Astron-6, makers of ultra-low-budget, but ultra-inventive B-movie feature films such as Father’s Day, Manborg and The Editor.

Falling between the serious mainstream and the Astron-6 exploitation pastiche is The Void.

https://youtu.be/JAcknEyohpE

Shot in late 2015 in and around Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., it’s a film that dares to take tongue out of Astron cheek and shoot for serious horror in a tale that essentially pits a cop and a handful of people stranded in a remote, near-empty hospital against a supernatural onslaught brought on by a group of hooded, unkillable cultists.

Co-written and co-directed by Gillespie and Kostanski, it’s a film that, on the surface, pays homage to horror auteur John Carpenter, combining the siege plot from Assault on Precinct 13 with the mutating monstrosities of The Thing.

Behind that premise, Kostanski acknowledges, is an homage to the “cosmic horror” of pioneering horror author H.P. Lovecraft, whose genius wasn’t really appreciated until after his death in 1937.

It was a departure for the filmmakers, whose Astron-6 films tend to be made on the fly over a period of months or years, whenever the five members (or any combination thereof) could fit in some shooting. For this shoot, they had a professional cast and crew and a time limit of a few weeks.

Kostanski says they had a plan where he would work primarily with the practical effects and Gillespie would work on the stuff with an art-direction component. But as the day-to-day demands of filmmaking took hold, both had to do whatever was required, when it was required.

“We certainly both got our hands dirty on all the facets of the movie for sure,” says Gillespie, who says it was ultimately just as difficult as the Astron projects.

“This was a very complicated film and the amount of time we had to do it was really pushing to the edge of reason,” Gillespie says. “It certainly offered many obstacles.”

For his part, Kostanski was especially grateful for the civility of a craft service table where cast and crew could nosh at will.

“It sounds like a silly thing, but when you’re doing an Astron (project), you get accustomed to having to go for McDonald’s hamburgers in the middle of the night because no one has eaten all day.”

Prior to its release, the film’s visibility got a bit of a boost courtesy of comedian Patton Oswalt, who tweeted about the film’s trailer: “I have NO idea if this film is any good but HOLY F— THIS TRAILER. What… IS… this?”

“That was funny,” Gillespie says. “I would love for him to see the movie. His ‘Holy F—’ is something I’d like to put on the poster.”

A more nuanced factor in the film’s appeal, Gillespie says, is that Lovecraftian horror, encompassing both slimy tentacled creatures and deeper, existential terror, happens to be hot in the horror genre just now.

“That was the mandate going into it,” Gillespie says. “That was where our interest combined. We’re both big fans of Lovecraft and he’s very big right now, which is cool, but weird in a way.

“His stuff is so esoteric and it’s been around for so long. It’s taken on a weird, pop-culture version of itself.”

Gillespie says he still dreams about making a movie with the ultimate luxury for a filmmaker.

“The greatest resource in film is time, so when you have more money to make a film, what that’s buying you is time,” he says.

“This was a very low-budget movie, so we didn’t have a lot of time. But we kind of made the best of the time that we had.

“We got lucky with a really great cast, and a really great camera team.”

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @FreepKing