Horror Favourites – Reed Shusterman

From director Reed Shusterman, and in the tradition of THE OMEN, prepare for the birth of evil this summer in BLOOD BORN. Below Reed talks not only about the conception of his own film but the horror movies he loves more than his first born.

After struggling to conceive, Eric and Makayla hire a witch doctor from the Gravida Foundation to help them conceive. Ola moves into their home, taking over their lives as she puts them through a series of magical rituals.As the ceremonies take a toll on the couple, they discover that their baby might not actually be human, leaving them to decide how far are they willing to go for the family they’ve always wanted.

Antoine Perry (“Major Crimes”), Rosie Moss (“The Conners”), Melanie Haynes (Spider-Man : Into the Spider-Verse), Laurine Price (“American Crime Story : Versace”), and Cole Gerdes (“MOM”) star in BLOOD BORN, on Digital July 16 from Terror Films.

Says director Reed Shusterman:

“Having a baby is inherently irrational. It’s hard, expensive, potentially dangerous to the mother, and full of unknowns. In a best-case scenario, you end up with an expensive, part-time monster who, after 20-plus years, will hopefully be a moderately functional adult. But people keep doing it, frequently on purpose. And when they try and can’t, they’ll go to extraordinary lengths to get the family they want. It’s not a big leap to see why Eric and Makayla are willing to believe a weird old lady who promises them a magical solution to their problem.

I started development on Blood Born right when my wife and I had just decided to start having a baby. And, in a very literal interpretation of ‘write what you know,’ I wrote about that.

On one level this movie is about the general fears of pregnancy and parenthood, like what happens to you/your partner’s body and the physical space the baby will take up. But what really scared me into making this movie was how much a baby would change me. I’d no longer be the most important person in my wife’s life. Hell, I wouldn’t be the most important person in my own life. In a certain way, I’d be giving up myself, my being.

When this story starts, Eric and Makayla have already given up so much in their attempts to have a baby. Inviting a witch doctor to live with you for a week isn’t any more disruptive to your life than a round of IVF. But as the magic–and impending baby–get more and more real, Eric starts to question whether or not the sacrifices are worth it.

I’ve discovered that there’s a lot of overlap between parenthood and making your first feature film. They are freight trains of momentum that cannot be slowed down. They are chaotic, scary, and stressful. But there is discovery in both, of things you’d never expect through, respectively, genetics or a fantastically talented cast and crew.

Blood Born is full of things that are scary and gross, monstrous and joyous. I am enormously proud of this film. It’s a character driven, strange, off-kilter dive into a kind of fear that, to me, is far scarier than killers or ghosts: How, miracle of life or not, the beginning of parenthood is the end of everything you know. And as they say… All babies are monsters.”

Below Reed talks about his favourite horror movie:

“The best horror, for me, isn’t about pain and gore or the surprise of a monster jumping out of the shadows. It’s about putting fully realized characters through heart wrenching emotional torture, and letting the audience feel it. Which is why 28 Days Later has been one of my all-time favorite movies since I first saw it in theaters.

Danny Boyle’s high-intensity camera work is the perfect match for the movie’s fast zombies. The monsters themselves are scary and effective, and for someone who’d grown up questioning how people could realistically be killed by slow walkers, the rage monsters’ speed was a terrifying twist.

But the real horror comes from what these characters go through. Take the tunnel sequence. Our characters take a long, tense walk through an apocalyptic tunnel full of broken-down cars and infested with rage monsters and are able to make it through. The sequence is gripping, full of all your traditional tools to scare the audience: some gore, lots of scary noises and jump scares, a frantic escape. Then, after all four characters make it through, they take a moment to rest in the sunlight at the end of the tunnel. And it’s only there that Frank is infected as a drop of blood drips into his eye from an overhead corpse.

His transformation and death isn’t a long scene. But the horror of his realization, of telling his daughter he loves her, trying to protect her from what he’s about to become… The horror of his daughter unable to process the out-of-nowhere fate her father succumbs to… That’s what sticks with me from the movie. It’s not just that Boyle does such a good job making you care about the characters before the worst things happen. It’s that, when they happen, the emotional pain the characters feel is specific and visceral.

This is a fast-paced horror movie that teaches you that the moments to catch your breath are the most dangerous. There’s a reason this movie spawned a whole genre of rip-offs (and they copied a lot more than the idea of fast zombies), but even with two decades of copycats, it’s still electric.”

BLOOD BORN IS ON DIGITAL JULY 16