Horror Favourites – Brandon Christensen

From the acclaimed director Brandon Christensen comes his latest horror Superhost. This Shudder Original gets its UK Blu-ray debut from Acorn Media International on 4 April 2022 and will also be available on DVD and digital. It’s one hell of a trip we advise you to watch.

Christensen is an American film director and producer, best known for Z (2019) – which saw him win Best Feature Film and Best Director at Blood in the Snow Canadian Film Festival, Still/Born (2017) and his latest film Superhost, earned the Best Director prize at Sin City Horror Festival in 2021.

Pack your bags and get ready for a fun-filled horror ride with travel vloggers Teddy (Osric Chau – The Flash, Supernatural and Claire (Sara Canning – Z, A Series of Unfortunate Events). Like and subscribe to their Superhost channel and share their adventures.

We join the Superhost influencer couple as they embark on their latest video review, and they’re hoping this is the one that can earn them more subscribers. A house in the woods could be the perfect opportunity to create new content and attract new followers. But is there more than meets the eye with Rebecca (Gracie Gillam – Scream Queens, Z Nation) their host with the most…?

Slowly they begin to realise that something isn’t quite right with Rebecca, and as they start to investigate, they discover more than they bargained for. It’s not just a five-star review she’s after, there’s something far more sinister at play… could it be toast for the Superhosts?

Look out for horror favourite Barbara Crampton in a bloody brilliant cameo in this wickedly fun feature – and DON’T FORGET TO LIKE AND SURVIVE.

Below Brandon Christensen goes deep into his love of horror:

“I’ve been fortunate enough to have the opportunity to talk to a lot of different publications, a lot of different podcasts – and with almost a near universal certainty, they’ll always ask what my favorite horror movie is.

For a long while, I wasn’t sure how to answer it. Films are such a diverse thing, and the horror genre is no different, so it took years to really figure out what films were the ones that impacted me the most.

As a child, I was fortunate(?) enough to watch the live airings of Stephen King’s IT. I was 6 at the time, and little did I know that miniseries would haunt me for another 8 years and I would feel its effects into adulthood.

I was definitely too young to be watching Tim Curry’s Pennywise torture the losers club, and for literal years I would have a recurring nightmare of my brother and I having to do battle with Pennywise, having to lock him back up in our closet until he would terrorize us again.

It wasn’t until I was in the 8th grade that I finally grew brave enough to watch it again – and I saw the seams in the production. The low budget FX, the campy humor, the things that my 6 year old brain didn’t see – and overnight the nightmares stopped.

From that point, there was a desire to recapture that feeling. That feeling of being scared. So I’d spend a lot of time at video stores, checking box arts for films that looked scary – asking the employees what the scariest film they had. I’d rent them with my friends to try and get scared like I was when I was younger. This feeling existed outside of the screen, too – going on late night walks in dark alleyways and try and scare each other. “What would you do if Jason popped out of that backyard and started chasing us?

It allowed my imagination to run constantly, and soon a film came out that really pushed my imagination.

In 1999, the news started covering this new documentary about a group of film students investigating a witch in the backwoods of Maryland. The Blair Witch Project it was called. This was early internet and VERY early viral marketing. But this film had a plan in place to trick the entire country into thinking it was real footage of real people who went missing. I remember not hearing much about it until I was visiting family in British Columbia, and they scored pre-release midnight screening tickets.

We looked up the website created for the film, and everything pointed to it being real. And that was the mindset I had going into it – I was about to see a real experience, shot by real people, and the entire experience was captivating. The final image of Mike standing in the corner, perfectly built up, and perfectly executed haunted me as the credits rolled.

I left that theater around 2am completely shaken and spent much of the night crying myself to sleep.

I soon found out the truth and it opened my eyes to the fact that not everything you read on the internet is real. That the internet can be used as a powerful marketing tool, and damn if it wasn’t perfectly done there.

A similar thing happened in 2009 when Paranormal Activity came out. This wasn’t a film marketed to be a real thing, but instead marketed the film by showing people reacting to the film rather than the film itself. It went viral, how can these people be this scared? Nightvision filmgoers screaming, crying, hiding behind their eyes. They even went as far as having the ability to vote to have your city get a screening before it went out wide. This built a fanbase for the film, allowing the fans to perpetuate the hype. When it released everywhere I went to watch it by myself unaware what I was about to see.

After the film, I returned to my house and felt completely unsafe in my own space. No longer were the noises my house made normal, there had to be some supernatural entity waiting around the corner. That feeling of your safe space being completely perverted stuck with me, so did the films meager budget.

At this point in my life, I’d gone to film school and was starting out my career in the video/film industry. I had ambitions to be a film director, but it seemed like an impossibly far off goal – so seeing that it could be ton with some ingenuity and $15,000 made it feel like it was actually achievable. I’d look back at the similar story of The Blair Witch Project, a small budget used to create something that focused on scares rather than big Hollywood productions – and suddenly it put things into perspective.

I could do this.

I was still several years away from doing my first feature but these two films cemented the do it yourself attitude that I deeply admired. Not waiting for permission, just going out and doing it. It was the right film at the right time, and it definitely scared the shit out of me.

That was the most important thing to me, finding a way to scare people the way I had been scared as a young kid. I have two sons now, both older than I was when I first watched IT – and both are not ready to be scared the way I was (nor would I want them to be). But I can’t wait for that first sleepover when they’re old enough to want to watch one of dad’s films – and they have an experience that I created for them where they’ll have trouble sleeping for a night or two.

To me, that’s what this is all about – having fun and being scared. And if I can scare just one 6 year old into starting onto their own path of horror, I’ve done my job.”

Superhost gets its Blu-ray DVD and digital release on 4 April from Acorn Media International, following its premiere on Shudder.