October 27, 2015

One of the strongest and most interesting voices making horror films these days has to be filmmaker Anthony DiBlasi. After helping to produce Clive Barker’s MIDNIGHT MEAT TRAIN, and then writing and directing the next Barker adaptation of DREAD, he’s consistently continued putting out solid genre fare like CASSADAGA and MISSIONARY.

His latest, LAST SHIFT which takes place in a soon to be abandoned police stations, which may or may not be haunted by the ghost of a cult leader has just arrived on Blu-Ray courtesy of Magnet, and it could be his creepiest film yet! We caught up with him to find out the scoop behind the making of LAST SHIFT and the real life horrors that inspired it.

Blumhouse.com: What are the origins of this particular movie, LAST SHIFT? And the time line! Because it seems like the last several years you’ve been cranking out movie after movie! You co-wrote this one with Scott Poiley, whom you’ve worked with on your last few films, right?

Anthony DiBlasi: Scott was a producer on my previous films CASSADAGA and MISSIONARY. And around the time we were in post-production on MISSIONARY, I came to him and said “why don’t we do a low-budget, scary, contained film?” I had an idea for the dispatch thing. This was about 2 years ago. I really wanted to do something that was contained and dealt a lot with sound design. Putting a lot of the emphasis on the sound design. That all morphed into the idea of this rookie cop alone at a police station. And then we wrote the script after we found the location. This was the first time we collaborated together as writers.

BH: Was this idea always in the back of your head? Or something that literally came to be from your collaboration with Scott? Because I feel the Paymon character is an amalgamation of personalities like Charles Manson and his cult…

AD: It definitely was inspired by a Manson kind of thing, but that wasn’t there with the initial idea. I think once we found our location and really started fleshing out the kind of movie we were going to make. I knew what kind of scares I wanted to do, so it all stemmed from that. I really wanted someone that was similar to Manson and his family. There’s this great documentary called MANSON from 1973 that is amazing. Manson’s not even in it. It was after he was arrested and it takes place on the ranch and was made by a former family member and it was banned in the United States. It never came out. I bought a copy from one of the filmmakers. It’s really fascinating because you get this glimpse into a world that only existed for a really short period of time. He was in prison, but all of his followers were still at the ranch. That’s why it got banned, because Squeaky was arrested for trying to assassinate the president and she needed to get a fair trial. It got nominated for an Academy Award that year even though no one saw it. It’s really good, so I wanted to infuse that vibe onto it. Regarding the timeline, after the film was finished, it premiered at the Frightfest all nighter last year and then we were in the negotiation process, which is why it took so long to come out. Also, we wanted to wait to release it around October.

BH: We’re horror fans, and we watch a lot of movies, but it’s just a given that we tend to investigate true crime stories too, because it’s fascinating to people with horror tastes. Once you got started and created the Paymon character, were there other cults or true crime cases that you maybe looked at for influences? Or were you were going by what the public’s subconscious is when it comes to cults?

AD: The two things that influenced us the most when writing that character were Manson and Richard Ramirez. He’s just a fascinating interview. When you watch those interviews of him in prison, he says a lot of fascinating things but he was quite uneducated. Or at least came off that way. Whereas Manson in another time or place could’ve been a messiah. He was an influencer and actually said a lot of things that made sense. I showed that Manson doc to the cast and crew because I wanted everyone to see it. There are a lot of girls in this movie, so they were all there and while they were watching it, afterword’s they were like “he kind of makes a lot of sense.” (Laughs) They were all like, “if I met that guy, he’s convince me that it all sounded like a good idea.” It’s true that he had this way of inspiring people in a logical way that seemed bigger than the murders. Things certainly went off the rails with his message!

BH: Just a little bit!

AD: It’s interesting that Manson was jilted by the system. The system he was ultimately trying to take down. Yes, he committed a crime, but he didn’t kill do anything but use his voice.

BH: With a movie like this, it weighs heavily on the actress that’s tasked to be the lead in this movie. And what I liked about Juliana Harkavy is that she seemed so natural and real. She’s beautiful, of course! But there’s something about her that’s so honest and I believe that she’s a cop’s daughter. Was it difficult to find that quality in an actress when it came to playing Jessica?

AD: We actually didn’t see anyone for Jessica. We offered her the part. I had met her on another film that she came in to audition for. She was too young for the part at the time, but I really liked her. My first AD had just done that movie TO WRITE LOVE ON HER ARMS with Katt Dennings and Juliana is in that film and he mentioned her and said “what about Juliana?” And I thought oh yeah! I remember her and she was great. I remembered her from that earlier audition and she just stuck out in my mind for a while. So we just offered it to her. We talked on the phone and she loved the part. She’s on camera for the entire film, so it’s a very challenging role for an actor. She has that quality where yeah, she’s gorgeous, but in a real way. We trained her a lot with real police officers in terms of how her training would go down and how she would act?

BH: You get to see some pretty gnarly stuff in the movie and there’s some cool character designs and visual stuff. You’re a pretty visual director yourself, so was a lot of that stuff ideas you already had or part of the collaboration process?

AD: I had some rough sketches of Paymon. Which is what I usually do when I start any of this. I posted a pic on Twitter of my first sketch of him in the bag face with the pentagram in this leather coat. Then of course, it becomes a collaboration, but I knew essentially what it was going to be. All of this comes out of a progression of a collaboration and working with make-up artist Lee Grimes. Lee also did CASSADAGA for me. He just happens to live in Florida, where we shot. But Lee does a lot of big movies and recently worked on the show SALEM, as well as THE WALKING DEAD. He’s excellent and we knew the whole movie would only work if we got him on board because we had a lot of FX. What I really wanted to do was make FX that not only were scary, but cool in the sense of being memorable FX. Like what I remember about FRIGHT NIGHT when I saw that as a kid. Yeah, it’s scary, but there’s something cool about it and you want to look at it. I wanted to do FX like that.

BH: Whether intentional or not, I sensed a Clive Barker influence!

AD: Yes. And it wasn’t on purpose, but it happened in the moment. It’s less about the design but it’s more about the feeling of the moment. I know what you’re talking about. There’s a moment where the presentation of these characters has that HELLRAISER feel, and that was intentional, for sure.

BH: The location is pretty incredible. But when you’re working in a giant vacant place like that where the character thinks she’s seeing or hearing things, how much does that line blur in reality? I know I would’ve been creeped out shooting in that place! Did you hear or see anything weird during the course of this shoot?

AD: Well, I like to scare people constantly on set.

BH: Oh, so you’re the culprit!

AD: Oh yeah! I’m the culprit! At least once on every movie, you have to scare the lead actress with something she’s not going to expect. (Laughs) What was good about that set was we found it and wrote the script around it, so everything was well designed. I wanted to only do night shoots, which productions usually hate in general. We shot this movie in 10 days, so my argument was we can handle 10 days. It was creepy because we were there overnight. Oh, well here’s the scariest thing that happened on the shoot. We shot this in Sanford, Florida. It is not a nice area. There’s a quant downtown, which is nice and historic, but the rest of the area is gang ridden and dangerous. While we were shooting, there was a drive by shooting. It was a block away from us and we heard machine gun fire and we were on the front steps and there was a bit of a panic. We all ran inside and shut down production briefly because the gunfire was so close to us! It was a real life scary place, but a different kind of scary. A whizzing by of bullets scary!

BH: Well, I’m glad no one was hurt! And at least the scares in the movie are genuine scares. It’s a cool little movie and perfect for this Halloween season.