Horror Favourites – Sean Cronin

Actor-director Sean Cronin is back with Bogieville a bloodcurdling vampire feature that premiered at Cannes Film Festival and FrightFest and made its digital thanks to Reel 2 Reel Films in June.

Deep in the American South, a young couple on the run, Ham (Arifin Putra – The Raid 2) and Jody (Eloise Lovell Anderson – Villian), get more than they bargained for when they stumble upon the abandoned Bogieville trailer park. They bump into creepy caretaker Crawford (Jonathan Hansler – Axed) who convinces the pair to stay, but under strict instructions to not leave the property, especially at night…

Unfortunately, the couple don’t heed the advice and inadvertently make a terrifying discovery… Bogieville is inhabited by a pack of bloodthirsty vampires lead by the formidable, Madison (Cronin), who is embroiled in an eternal war with a rival vampire who will stop at nothing to take over
the park.

With the pair caught in the crossfire of a deadly turf war and with a suspicious detective following a trail of dead bodies leading straight to Bogieville, the couple are desperate to leave. But when the fearsome fanged creatures latch onto Jody’s scent, there may be no escape.

Below Sean Cronin tells us all about the horror movies that inspired him:

“I got the screenplay for Bogieville about 12 or 14 years ago from Henry P. Gravelle who is this very seasoned writer in his late 70s who lives in Boston, Massachusetts. I loved the screenplay because it was a different take on vampires… hillbilly vampires with black scleral lenses, horrible gnarly teeth and dungarees permanently covered in blood, living in trailers – something we haven’t done before. I loved the different kind of vampire take on it and I always promised Henry that I would make the film and then I moved onto a farm and thought ‘hang on a minute, I live on Bogieville’ and much to my girlfriends disgust, I dragged about 20 dirty, dilapidated trailers, that I managed to find on Facebook marketplace, placed them all over the land and filled them with horrible vampires after I managed to raise £300,000 to make it.

One thing that was alluded to in the screenplay that, funnily enough, my girlfriend advised me to enhance, is that our vampires can sense when it’s a woman’s time of the month, a bit like sharks sensing blood in the water. The idea of that is that it’s taboo, The Exorcist was very taboo, it was banned everywhere because it said things like ‘your mother sucks *BEEP* in hell’ and ‘let Jesus *BEEP* you’. It was just so shocking in the 1970s that it got banned everywhere and went on to make $441 million in 1975.

One of my favourite vampire movies is called Near Dark, which was directed by Kathryn Bigelow, who at the time was married to James Cameron, director of Titanic. She got the right hump with him, and she kept saying ‘oh I left him because he kept going on about a bloody film about a boat’ that film was Titanic (and it did do rather well). I loved Lance Henriksen’s character Jesse, and Severen, played by Bill Paxton, was just incredible. They weren’t hillbilly vampires but they were a bit rednecky so that was a wonderful influence.

Also, Salem’s Lot was another influence, I wasn’t influenced by Interview with the Vampire, although I loved it, and Twilight, these are not clean pretty goth vampires. These are nasty hillbilly vampires that don’t even want to be vampires, they’ve been condemned to eternal damnation, stuck in their trailers drinking blood. Other influences were The Hills Have Eyes and Deliverance, that kind of vibe as well.

So those were my influences for Bogieville, Near Dark, The Hills Have Eyes, Deliverance and Salem’s Lot also a little bit of 30 Days of Night, the first one, the second one was not so good, but the first one is great!”

Bogieville is out now.

Bogieville trailer