My Lesbian Vampire Movie
I wrote the script in six days and made 15 grand. David Carradine starred as a flute-playing Van Helsing. Inside Toronto’s booming B-movie industry By David Robbeson
Bite me: despite the film’s winning
formula, one review called Sect
“a cure for insomnia”
Three years ago, I heard about some local producers who were aiming to make a dozen or more movies in and around the filmtropolis of Hamilton. Their company was called Peace Arch Entertainment. The movies would be primarily horrors—typically the cheapest to produce and, more importantly, a genre whose devoted audience has a high tolerance for low production values. Boobs and blood—that’s all you need, that’s all they want. It’s been a winning formula since the ’50s. With budgets of a couple million dollars apiece, each film would feature one “cast-up” (a mid-level American actor who’d receive as much as $175,000 for only 12 days’ work) and would be rounded out with local talent. Peace Arch planned to get started in a few weeks and they needed material—badly.
My conduit into the business was my best friend of nearly 25 years, Jonathan Dueck, an experienced production designer looking to make the leap into producing and directing. Jon saw this as an opportunity for both of us. “You could write a horror, couldn’t you?” he asked. The truth was, I’d always loathed horrors. But I was a struggling novelist and eager to make some cash. How hard could it be?
I decamped to Starbucks and banged out a one-pager I called MILF, which stood for “Mainly I Like to Have Fun,” a more innocent take on the dirty porn acronym for sexy middle-aged women. It had boobs and blood—and, I thought, brains. The story revolved around a sect of 35-year-old lesbian vampires who wore tight black PVC outfits, ran an Internet dating service and feasted on the mindless dolts who trolled cyber-space looking for easy sex. I summed up the pitch thusly: “Camille Paglia meets the Vampire Lestat meets the chicks from Robert Palmer’s ‘Addicted to Love’ video.” Could I write a horror?
I fired off the outline, and the next thing I knew I was writing my first screenplay. The project was given the green light, and the budget was set at $2 million. I had great expectations, convinced my movie would become a cult classic. But any hopes I had for the project were thoroughly obliterated when, a mere three months later, the cameras began to roll.
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