How NOT To Make A Horror Film (Australia, 2016)

They went to a ghost town in the Australian Outback to film a horror movie for $30 thousand Australian which was probably $20,000 American. And that was in the 1990's. Went way over budget for various reasons. Filming in an abandoned, slowly collapsing hotel looked dangerous.

Shows the advantages of digital video. They filmed on Super16 using a camera the guy owned himself, but he hadn't tested it or hadn't tested it enough. The camera and light meter both malfunctioned and most of the footage was a total loss.

It had a crew of twenty which seems huge. For one thing, it cost a lot just to feed them for three weeks.

I'd hate to be responsible for people's safety taking them out to ghost town in the middle of nowhere. Two of the crew were injured in a car wreck which should have killed at least one of them.

The filmmaker talked about how he sank into a depression after the failure. He clung to the film for a couple of years thinking he could still making something of it. He finally went out and made a movie shot-on-video with little money about a naked lady who runs around the outback killing people. They didn't try nearly as hard and the results were better although it still didn't make its money back or lead to bigger things.

And they did finally salvage something from the first attempted film---they made this documentary about its failure.

One thing they talked about was the male lead who turned out to be a terrible person. The director thought it was a failure of casting, that he needed to get people who would be completely devoted to a difficult production. They had to camp out for three weeks. A couple of of years later, the actor started threatening the director by email and telephone.

The documentary isn't very good, really. It's almost all shots of the people speaking to the camera.

The location they filmed their movie in looked great. They filmed in a stone building which had been a hotel. The houses in the town were gone and there were old cars made in the '40's that had been abandoned there for years. I can see why they wanted to film there.

It's possible the horror movie would have turned out great. In that case, the real lessons from this are to make sure the camera works and to bring an extra light meter.