Unrestricted Views from Mark Kerins co-director of All the Wrong Friends

The amazing Unrestricted View Horror Film Festival is back for its second year, running from the 30th October to the 5th November, and so is our Unrestricted Views bringing you an insight to the people behind the fantastic fright fest of films on show.

Below we talk to Mark Kerins co-director of All the Wrong Friends which receives its European Premiere on the 3rd of November at 8.45pm. Get your tickets HERE

Love Horror: Tell us about your film?
Mark Kerin: “All the Wrong Friends” is a trainwreck movie, where who characters find themselves in a bad situation then keep making poor choices, digging their hole even deeper. It was made as a sort of test run for a summer feature program at my school (Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, USA), seeing if it was really possible for a student crew to shoot a no-budget feature-length film in two weeks. Turns out, it is, we wrapped in 12 days after a 10-day location shoot at a lakehouse in Oklahoma and then two days of pickups in Dallas.

Love Horror: How did you get into making horror movies?
Mark Kerin: Personally I work in a variety of genres: dramas, comedy, sci-fi. In this particular case given the aim of making a feature with limited resources horror was a naturally good fit. I had just directed a short horror film that was all set in one location, and proposed a similar setup for this project, which was where the initial idea for the script came from.

Love Horror: What is your view on horror in 2017 and how would you change it?
Mark Kerin: Horror, like every genre, has some good and some bad. The thing I like the least about contemporary horror is that a lot of it – not all by any stretch, but a lot – depends on jump-scares and gore more than on true suspense. The most memorable horror films to me are those where the horror comes from the characters and the dangers they’re in, not just from a lot of blood. The original Saw film, for instance, was inventive and genuinely suspenseful for the genre, but the sequels just became excuses to kill people in increasingly gruesome ways without the same actual sense of suspense or terror.

Love Horror: What is your favourite horror film and why?
Mark Kerin: In terms of traditional horror, it’s hard to beat the Carpenter’s original “Halloween” – it’s such a simple setup but it works and you’re genuinely concerned about what’s going to happen – and that simple piano score is still memorable. I also liked the first “Scream” movie, which I thought did a great job of being a legitimately suspenseful horror film on its own while simultaneously playing with and parodying the conventions of its own genre. Of recent films, if you can count Aronofsky’s “Mother” as a horror film that was one of the most creatively ambitious films I’ve seen in a long time, and I’ve been encouraging all my students to go check it out.

Love Horror: If Hollywood came knocking and gave you anything you wanted what movie would you make and who would it star?
Mark Kerin: I have a sci-fi time travel feature script in the works right now that I’d love to make as my next big project. Script’s still very much a work-in-progress, but I love the storyline, which is a character-driven drama at its heart, but with enough suspense and twists to be engaging on a purely plot-based level as well – plus it tries some things with time travel I haven’t seen done before. I started writing it for Brina Palencia, who plays Alison in “All the Wrong Friends” and was the star of the short I’m just finishing now, and would love to see her in it, though who knows what will happen by the time it actually gets made given how long a process that might be to get it off the ground.

All the Wrong Friends receives its European Premiere at the Unrestricted View Horror Film Festival on the 3rd of November at 8.45pm.
Read more about the Unrestricted View Horror Film Festival and buy tickets at www.unrestrictedview.co.uk/

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Alex Humphrey

Alex studied film at the University of Kent and went on to work for Universal Pictures in their Post Room gaining an inside look at the movie industry from the very bottom. Constantly writing reviews in everything from local magazines to Hip Hop sites Alex honed his critical skills even spending a brief period as a restaurant critic. Read more

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