September 7, 2011

A few weeks ago, it was announced that filmmaker Paul Solet would be tackling his next directorial feature film THE FACES from a script by Eric Reese. We’ve been waiting to hear word of how he’d follow-up his well-received & critically acclaimed debut feature GRACE (which he also wrote) for a while now. But backing up even further, we at Icons Of Fright/ Massive Hysteria have had a long term relationship with the writer/director and can attest that no one works harder at genre material than Paul.

The entire Icons crew first met Solet along with Jake Hamilton back in September of 2009 for the Fangoria Weekend of Horrors convention in New Jersey where the duo were promoting their short film “MEANS TO AN END”, which appeared on the FANGORIA BLOOD DRIVE VOLUME 2 DVD. Other promising filmmakers on that collection included Adam Barnick, William Rot and Steve Daniels and the entire lot of us formed a friendship that weekend over our love & respect not only of each others work & passion, but mainly over our love of all things horror.

What stood out that weekend about Solet was his showmanship. In the short film “MEANS TO AN END”, both Solet and Hamilton play struggling FX artists trying to get their big break in the movie biz by creating the most real FX they can come up with. Frustrated by the constant rejection, they decide to take things one step further and actually harm themselves on film for the sake of making a better horror movie. Black comedy at its best, their tagline proved true, “Pain is temporary. Film is forever!” When all the filmmakers from the BLOOD DRIVE DVD took the stage at Weekend Of Horrors for a panel discussing their contributions to the collection, Solet & Hamilton arrived completely in character, orange prison suits and bandaged up from the damage they’d done to one other. Solet continued to bleed uncontrollably on stage during the panel making for some fine on-stage theatrics.

A few years later, Paul had shot a low-budget short film version of GRACE to raise interest for the feature length version. And in the same vein as his previous on-stage appearances, he showed up with a bloodied version of his films’ star, baby GRACE herself. His reputation for doing these kind of unexpected theatrics at conventions & film festivals caused event holders to put plastic sheets on the floor under the podium for fear that Solet’s appearance meant that something involving a lot of fake blood was bound to happen.

The entire ICONS crew were thrilled to be there for the majority of the festival screenings of the GRACE short film and to see it make the transition to a feature length film. (We had intro-ed Paul to Adam Green at Aeriscope and the rest as they say is history!)

So as we eagerly await whatever sick shit Solet has in store for us with his latest feature THE FACES, we wanted to take a minute to reflect back on every thing we’ve been able to see from the filmmaker since our introduction. Back when the GRACE feature hit DVD & Blu-Ray, we got Solet together with former ICONS writer & FX artist Jason Alvino to do a commentary track for the original GRACE short film. We thought now was as good a time as any to revisit it. So below, enjoy the original GRACE short, complete with commentary!