‘Classy’ horror director set to shoot in city

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This article was published 16/12/2001 (8683 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

BEACH Babes from Beyond. Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama. Voodoo Academy. Test Tube Teens in the Year 2000. Creepozoids.

David DeCoteau directed them all, and, by his estimate, 50 more. Sometimes they were credited under his own name, sometimes under of a handful of pseudonyms.

The 39-year-old director is planning to start shooting a new film in town in mid-January for under $1 million. As of Friday afternoon, he doesn’t know exactly which script he’ll be directing.

He has a choice of three. All will be made under the banner of DeCoteau’s own production company, Rapid Heart Pictures. One, or possibly two, may be shot here.

And if this seems like flying by the seat of your pants, bear in mind DeCoteau’s first legit work in the movie industry was for exploitation grandmaster Roger Corman’s New World Pictures.

“I was actually hired by a Canadian for my first film job,” DeCoteau says. “I was hired by Jim Cameron, the art director at New World Pictures at the time. He hired me for Galaxy of Terror.”

The Oregon-born DeCoteau continued to have fateful meeting with Canadians, including Christopher Plummer, whom he directed in an HBO thriller titled Skeletons. Plummer encouraged him to move to Canada to make films.

“I became a landed immigrant two years ago,” he says.

DeCoteau checked out Winnipeg when he was originally slated to direct Wishmaster 3, the micro-budget sequel shot here in the summer of 2000. But the gig came at a point in DeCoteau’s career when he was no longer content to churn out meaningless celluloid.

“I wasn’t empowered and given the control I needed to make the kind of film I wanted to make,” he says. “To me, it’s all about the movie. And if I feel I’m not the right director for it, I’ll leave.”

The reason DeCoteau came back here is to add to the library of films he’s made under the Rapid Heart logo. Titles include The Brotherhood, Final Stab, and The Frightening.

“The kind of films we make are very high concept, teen-oriented thriller/horror movies,” he says. “I don’t want to say they’re politically correct but we try to approach them with a classier viewpoint. We don’t have excessive violence or sex or smoking. There’s no gunplay among the teenagers.”

This kind of sentiment is not quite what one expects from DeCoteau, given all those movies he’s made emphasizing what drive-in movie critic Joe Bob Briggs called “The Three B’s” — breasts, beasts and blood.

“I directed my first feature when I was 24 and I was much more of a cowboy, much more of a risk-taker with excessive violence, excessive nudity and more of an exploitative angle,” he says.

But while that kind of film found an audience when the ’80s video market was booming, the market was soon glutted. In 1991, DeCoteau found himself burning out. Around the same time, he had come out of the closet and resolved to make a black and white art film with a gay sensibility titled Leather Jacket Love Story.

“I had done 11 films in 16 months and I was just really burnt,” he says. “I felt that if I didn’t make Leather Jacket Love Story, I was leaving the business.”

When he finally made the film, “it really cleansed my palate, and got me back into the process again because it was such a fun experience,” he says.

Some Internet critics have noted the films in the Rapid Heart library have a homoerotic undercurrent, as they are far more likely to feature half-dressed men than half-dressed women. DeCoteau disputes this.

“There are no gay characters or even bisexual characters in the movie that I’m aware of,” he says. “But gay audiences have discovered the films because they found images that are appealing to them.

“It just so happens that I’m openly gay, so maybe it’s just my own personal tastes,” he says.

“Really, the films are kind of horror movies for girls,” he says. “Girls really like the films.”

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