Exclusive Interview: Director Richard Burgin and Writer/Creator Sean Sullivan Discuss ‘The Slaughter Brothers Dime Circus’

Interview
David Gelmini
April 16, 2025
0
1639
12 minutes read

Director Richard Burgin recently stunned audiences with his debut feature, Fang, with the film earning numerous awards throughout its festival run before arriving on Amazon Prime. His next feature project will be The Slaughter Brothers Dime Circus, which is now raising funds on Indiegogo. The fantasy horror film will focus on a mysterious traveling carnival, with the talented performers hiding dark secrets which will ultimately refuse to remain hidden under the surface.

The Slaughter Brothers Dime Circus will serve as an adaptation of a stage production of the same name, which needed to be closed down due to the pandemic, before it was turned into a radio play. Richard Burgin will direct the film, and the screenplay was primarily written by Sean Sullivan, with contributions from Eris Thomas, Stefne Mercedes, and Burgin himself. Thomas was the director of the original play, and Sullivan was the play’s writer and creator, so the film will certainly stay true to its roots. Sullivan has previously appeared in Back to the Future Part III, Wayne’s World, and The Umbrella Academy, and he will soon be showing up in Guillermo del Toro’s adaptation of Frankenstein. Longtime fans of Sullivan’s work might also be aware that he acted alongside Paul Feig in a film called Ski Patrol in 1990, with Feig going on to create the show Freaks and Geeks, in addition to directing Bridesmaids, The Heat, Spy, A Simple Favor, Last Christmas, and Jackpot!, which Sullivan memorably appeared in. Feig recently came onboard The Slaughter Brothers Dime Circus as an executive producer, and it will certainly help the production to have such a popular and renowned filmmaker involved.

Shooting on The Slaughter Brothers Dime Circus is expected to begin later this year, and the confirmed cast will include Lynne Griffin (Black Christmas, Curtains, Thanksgiving, and Priscilla), Tim Fitzgerald Walker, and Matthew Reid, with Sullivan also playing a role. If you would like to become involved with The Slaughter Brothers Dime Circus, you can head over to the Indiegogo page now in order to make a donation. You can also enjoy our interview with Burgin and Sullivan below, in which they discussed the film in detail and gave us a strong overview of what we can expect when it eventually arrives on our screens at some point in the near future.

Love Horror: Can you give us an overview of The Slaughter Brothers Dime Circus?

Sean Sullivan: The Slaughter Brothers Dime Circus is a very dark satire.
The Slaughter Brothers Dime Circus is a horror revenge drama.
The boss of a rundown carnival is a bully and a sexual predator.
The cast have finally had enough. Cosmic horror and revenge ensue.
The bad are punished, the good are rewarded. But no one gets out unscathed.

Richard Burgin: Clowns turning into insects. The Slaughter Brothers Dime Circus tells a twisted story of transformation and magic spells that get cast for not very wholesome reasons.

Love Horror: How did the project come about?

Sean Sullivan: Almost 8 years ago, I was the unlucky recipient of giardia, a parasitic infection. On and off for 3 weeks I was pretty sick, going in and out of a semi-hallucinatory state. One of the fever dreams I had was of a man sitting in a café with his parasitic illness as his date. A breakup date. It was so unusual and interesting that I managed to write the essence of it while still quite out of it. From this unlikely source began the journey. Plus I always wanted to write about a circus with strangely charismatic characters who do some awful and magical things.

Richard Burgin: I first got involved with The Slaughter Brothers Dime Circus when I had a momentous Zoom meeting with Lynne Griffin and Sean Sullivan back in October 2024. Sean overheard me talking to Lynne, brainstorming movie ideas, and he said, “I feel like we’ve already known you for a long time, even though we just met.” That was when I officially came on board to direct The Slaughter Brothers Dime Circus, and it’s been a weird, wild, and wonderful collaboration for me so far, taking The Slaughter Brothers from the world of live theater and turning it into a movie. I feel very creatively inspired by it, and I keep coming up with new scene ideas for this beautifully dark and fantastical world. Hearing Sean’s story, how he went through all of this, survived it, and channeled this parasitic infection into The Slaughter Brothers makes me feel deeply honored to be directing this movie!

Love Horror: What kind of characters will we be introduced to throughout the film?

Sean Sullivan: Misfits, sideshow superstars, and wondrous outliers.
A horrible boss and a funny clown.
A harassed snake charmer and a fierce female insect.
A clown mother.
A musician named Rocco.
A charming ringmaster and a non-human wizard.

Richard Burgin: The human characters all work for the circus, but it’s not a very successful circus. That’s the showbusiness life: magical and brutal at the same time. The magic of getting to perform on stage for a living wears thin for the cast when it’s the same old routine that doesn’t pay the bills as well as they want. It turns into a Lord of the Flies kind of situation, where the people in this confined circus world start to turn on each other, screw each other over for scraps, and give in to their worst primeval impulses.

Love Horror: Since the film will focus on circus performers, will we be seeing their acts onscreen?

Sean Sullivan: Yes! There will be aerials with silks! Extreme sideshow acts including nails hammered into noses and mousetraps snapped on tongues! Funny and disturbing clown acts! A girl made of gears! Belmont Murphy and his Toasted Face! It goes on and on!

Richard Burgin: I want The Slaughter Brothers to feel very theatrical, in terms of how we show all of this. We’re only going to use practical effects in the movie and our plan is to try to stick to the kinds of techniques that magicians and circus performers use in live shows as much as possible.

Love Horror: Can you discuss the visual and aesthetic style of the film?

Sean Sullivan: This is really a question for Richard. I will say that we intend to embrace the gloriously extreme visuals and color palette of old Hammer Films along with the unsettling ‘Banal meets Surreal’ aesthetic of the dearly departed David Lynch.

Richard Burgin: Thanks, Sean! You summed it up beautifully: that’s totally what we’re going for! My vision for The Slaughter Brothers, for creative reasons and keeping the budget low reasons, is to have all of the “insect people” clearly just be actors who are wearing costumes. I want all of the costumes to look artificial, but in a very weird and unsettling way, like you’re seeing homemade costumes that were produced by a strange, abusive family. I want The Slaughter Brothers to be like a high school play that feels like it’s being directed by David Lynch at David Lynch High School. We want to channel the style of Old Hollywood, film noir, and 1950s musicals for The Slaughter Brothers to make it feel like these characters live in a heightened theatrical reality, while still keeping that sense of realism. A day in the life of a dying circus…

Love Horror: Without giving too much away, can you discuss the horror elements and how they will come into play?

Sean Sullivan: Mutation and transformation to punish and empower the evil and the innocent. Extreme insect behavior.

Richard Burgin: You’ll never hear “Honeysuckle Rose” the same way again…

Love Horror: What do you ultimately feel helps to make The Slaughter Brothers Dime Circus into a truly unique project?

Sean Sullivan: While circus and horror have often been joined together, The Slaughter Brothers Dime Circus uses this model to unmask toxic workplace bullying and sexual misconduct and deal with it through the embrace of cosmic horror. And in the end, that same surreal horror will transform the losers into winners. A horror revenge tragedy with an off-beat happy ending.

Richard Burgin: I want The Slaughter Brothers Dime Circus to be a different kind of clown movie. These clowns aren’t like Krusty, they don’t give much comfort or joy to kids like Bart Simpson, and they aren’t like Pennywise or Art the Clown, either. There’s something naturally weird about live performance, getting up on a stage and pretending to be someone you’re not. For The Slaughter Brothers characters, they start to lose track of where their performances end and where their real lives begin, or if they even have a real life, or if they’re actually human, or some other kind of creature that looks weirdly familiar. You took the pill. You were frozen on stage and now you have insect wings. There’s no waking up… Or is there? The spotlights come on. The curtains go up. It’s showtime!

We’ll share more details on the release nearer the time.