The Vicious Brothers crashed onto the horror scene with the found footage film GRAVE ENCOUNTERS, which owed its success to a massively successful trailer that went viral on YouTube. Now, the dashing duo is back with a sequel, GRAVE ENCOUNTERS 2. The film is out on iTunes now, but opens in select theaters on October 12th.
In the following UNCENSORED interview, Stuart Ortiz and Colin Minihan (the Vicious Brothers), reveal their origins as friends and as filmmakers, explain where they came up with their moniker, discuss their thoughts on both GRAVE ENCOUNTERS movies (as well as the possibility of a 3rd), and hint at their next project. Read on for the goods.
FM: So do you guys live in Vancouver or are you there doing another movie?
Stuart Ortiz: That’s where we’re based out of right now. Colin (Minihan) is Canadian, and he’s from here, and I’m American, from California, but we’re working here right now.
FM: I have to ask, though I’m sure you guys get asked this all the time, but what inspired the Vicious Brothers moniker?
Stu: We gonna tell him?
Colin: A lot of acid. A lot of acid. We were really fucked up one time and we hated the way our names looked at the end of GRAVE ENCOUNTERS, and we were just burnt out, and we dropped a lot of acid, and Stu woke up the next morning and he thought that we needed an alias, and The Vicious Brothers came up.
FM: So it was divine intervention. How long have you guys known each other for and worked together?
Colin: We met online when we were like 12, Stu, you wanna go?
Stu: Yeah we met online when we were 12, 13 or something like that, and we met up on this long ago defunct filmmaking web forum. I think it was actually the first filmmaking web forum that ever existed. It was a site called Like a Story, which was an early version of like UPX user or I don’t know, whatever the hell is out there anymore. It was the first website where people would post links to their work and then you could comment and meet people that way or whatever. We would see each other’s work on there and really knew each other’s stuff basically, so started just talking online and just continuing the relationship, and Colin was working on a film he made in high school, this future ranks thing that he made, it was awesome, and I remember staying up with him quite literally all night. He would send me shots, and send me edits, and I would say, “You should try shaving a few frames off the end of this shot or change this…” or whatever and we would collaborate that way. I would send him stuff and he would say “No, try this,” so even from the beginning we were working together, and we hadn’t even met, because I was in California and he was up on Vancouver Island. We had never met but we had formed this friendship, and at some point, I was in art school, I can’t remember what year, it must have been ’05 or something like that, we met in real life. Colin came to California to do a music video and then we kept hanging out more and more, and we’d fly up and down or whatever, and then at some point along the way we started talking about doing a movie, we were like, what if we tried to do a movie. Then I moved up here at some point and literally lived and slept on Colin’s couch for about a year and a half. The end result of that very uncomfortable year and a half on the couch, was essentially GRAVE ENCOUNTERS.
FM: Awesome story. I had a similar relationship with a guy I met on the Marvel.com message boards, except it wasn’t as productive. We only talked about girls and comics. What kinds of books, movies, TV shows inspired you guys to make a career in film, to write and direct movies?
Colin: Oh boy, movies of all kinds of genres. We’re big fans of THE X-FILES. In horror, I don’t know, we’re big fans of the classics, John Carpenter, etc. etc. The art of storytelling is what is most important to us, we just like creating stories, and we’re directors at heart, we always used to run around with cameras when we were young and it’s just something that we’ve always done and always loved doing and knew that’s what we wanted to do. I don’t know if there’s any sort of influences that I can capture…what about you Stu? It’s not like I watched a Romero film and said I wanted to make movies. It was more like, I made some shitty short film and I remember I stayed up all night editing it, and snuck down into my Mom’s basement and hooked the camera up to the TV and watched it and was actually impressed with what the fuck I had just made. And I was like holy shit, I’m gonna be a filmmaker.
Stu: Yeah I don’t know, it’s just something we’ve never given up on.
FM: What interested you in writing a sequel to GRAVE ENCOUNTERS? What did you want to explore that you didn’t get a chance to in the original, and what excited you about the material?
Stu: As far as new things, the story of the sequel is kind of like after we finished the first GRAVE ENCOUNTERS, it was such a nightmare getting that movie made, you know indie filmmaking is hard. You’re really on your hands and knees just trying to get the thing made, quite literally, and it was such a hard way of getting it made and finally getting distribution, that I don’t think our heads were anywhere near the idea of GRAVE ENCOUNTERS 2. I don’t think we wanted anything to do with that idea. As time went on, and it actually looked like there might be some interest, I think the main thing that we worried about was just that if we were gonna do something, we wanted to do something we actually thought was interesting. Yeah, I think that sequels, especially horror sequels, are notorious for being shitty most of the time, so we definitely didn’t want to do something unless we had a good idea. And then Colin called me up one day with this idea about what if it was actually set in reality and it’s about this kid that has this YouTube channel and then starts to believe that the movie is real, and that idea actually sounded cool. There was a million different things you could have done with a sequel to GRAVE ENCOUNTERS, you could have had Lance Preston’s brother searching for him or something like that and finds the building or whatever.
FM: Or his mother.
Stu: Or his mother, yeah, something like that. It seemed appropriate given the way this first film found its audience, which is primarily all online, we had a pretty violent trailer that had, like, 23 million views and that was really what put the film out there and all stemmed from the internet and the culture we live in now, so it seemed appropriate to harp on that, you know? In terms of exploring things, I think we wanted, rather it was imperative to keep it in the same building, because I think the building is very much a character, it’s a character in its own right, and we wanted to explore that the building actually has an agenda, and that the building has something going on, and it’s not just that it’s haunted and it’s crazy, oh my god, it’s actually that the building has a purpose.
FM: You kind of touched upon what I was going to delve into next, because clearly the second film is an ode to the digital media of today. Given that this atmosphere is what propelled your first film as a success, what are your thoughts on the strengths and pitfalls of the age of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Vimeo? Obviously it makes filmmaking a lot easier, but clogs the system.
Colin: Yeah, for sure. YouTube’s tough. We had a lot of luck, but if you have good content, people will find it, and it’s exciting, it’s exciting to see something spread virally, and watch kids Tweet about it, and then more kids Tweet about it, as Facebook fan pages get made, it’s just something that you have to embrace today. If not, you’re just a dinosaur. You can follow us on Facebook, interact with fans on Twitter, and it’s cool for them, since they get closer to the filmmaker, closer to that experience, and obviously filmmaking still has a lot of mystique around it, and it’s exciting for the audience to get back further behind the scenes versus just seeing it on a DVD or something and being a giant wall between the filmmaker and the audience, and it bridges that gap, and I think overall, a good thing. The one thing I miss though is video stores and the romance of actually having to commit to a film. A date would be going to see a film. Because if you rent a movie and bring it back home at least you have to fucking commit to it. It’s a bitch to go and take something back. Today, with things like Netflix, it makes media a lot more disposable and a lot of kid’s attention spans are meandering as a result. It’s a surprise if you can even make it through half the movie on Netflix because there are so many other options and you don’t have to commit to any one thing, which is negative for filmmakers, because it makes media more disposable, which sucks, but it is what it is.
FM: It’s kind of that multitasking thing that is prevalent in our culture. You have a window that’s Netflix on your computer, your texting, while watching TV, and on Reddit looking at BS. I’m right there with you.
Colin: Absolutely.
FM: Changing gears, I read somewhere that the opening sequence of GRAVE ENCOUNTERS 2, which feature a bevy of video bloggers giving their opinions of the film, were all real, excepting of course, the final one with Alex (Richard Harmon).
Stu: Most of those, I’d say probably about 85% of them, are real. It was funny to watch video reviews of the movie, even if they were negative, because they would be really hilarious. So when we knew we wanted the movie to start that way, we had the producers started reaching out to people. The reason that it’s not 100% all real, we basically reached out to some of our friends, people we didn’t even know that well, and reached out to them and said, “Hey could you do a review of the movie?”, and just be honest. If you don’t like it or whatever, say what you want to say, we don’t give a shit. The reason we had to do that came down to the fact that we literally sent it out to forty different people on YouTube and nobody would get back to us or they would, but they have to sign a release form if we’re gonna use it, right, so it just came down to getting enough people and we just didn’t have enough people so that’s why we started sending it out to friends and stuff like that, but most of them are real. Especially the negative ones.
FM: I appreciate that, because it’s hard to accept criticism, let alone revel in it, and you’re right, it is funny. It’s hard to have a sense of humor about your own work.
Colin: We figured we might as well throw it out there right off the top. If you can make fun of yourself, it will disarm the audience because right off at the beginning of the second movie, we have people saying the movie sucks, bad special effects, yada yada, and hopefully the audience goes “Whoaa…this could go anywhere then” you don’t know what’s gonna happen next.
FM: You guys both wrote and directed the first one, but the second film was directed by John Poliquin. Why the switch, and why didn’t you guys direct it? Was there a specific reason behind it?
[Colin was having some echoing issues on his end, so he let Stuart go forth]
Stu: The main reason was just quite literally because right as we were going to start production on it me and Colin were trying to finish this, we made this proof of concept trailer that we produced an directed, this crazy thing that’s hopefully gonna secure us the financing for the next movie we wanna make. But it was a really elaborate 3 day shoot making this crazy trailer and we were just in the middle of doing post but weren’t done with it and basically we wanted to give that our attention and finish it and didn’t want to also juggle and try directing GRAVE ENCOUNTERS 2, which potentially might compromise the quality. We already knew JP, JP is as we call him, John Poliquin, JP, is a friend of ours and he’s done like 15 music videos and is a real talented guy and we kind of talked to a few people about doing it, but then we just sat down for beers with him and just after sitting down with him for 30 minutes it was clear that he was the guy. He totally got the material and he was a fan of the first one and got the whole thing and we weren’t too worried about it. We weren’t like “Oh, is this gonna work,” we felt really confident going with JP, that he could do a good job and he did. We were totally involved in the movie, it wasn’t a thing where we didn’t care, we cared a lot, we wanted to really make sure it came out good, and if possible, come out better than the first one, which I personally kinda think the second one is better than the first one, bigger and badder and more crazy film than the first one was. We were really actively involved, we co-edited the movie, we literally had two editing stations in the hospital set up, so that on Day 2 of photography, we were starting editing the stuff from day one and so forth. We were really active and on set for a lot of it and overseeing stuff. We were definitely involved and cared a lot about it coming out good.
FM: So you guys didn’t drop acid during the meeting with John Poliquin?
Colin: Only during post. During post. That’s when we make our best editing decisions.
FM: I wanted to ask about the proof of concept trailer you guys remarked about earlier. Is that indeed gonna be your next project?
Stu: Yeah, it’s gonna be our next project.
Colin: It’s 90% there and we’re just hoping that the last little bit of financing comes together in the next month here and we hope to move into production early next year, and we’re really excited about it.
FM: Could you tell us a little bit about it, or is that under wraps?
Colin: Yeah, it’s a horror sci-fi movie called The Visitors. It’s an alien abduction film. It’s not a found footage film, it’ll hopefully be a scary thrill ride, and we’re excited to step out of the found footage thing and show what else we have to offer to the lords of media.
FM: Exciting stuff. While I work with FM, my first love was sci-fi.
Stu: Visitors is the best of both worlds. Visitors is a sci-fi movie, but it’s also very much a horror movie.
FM: Kind of like Alien or that tone?
Stu: Exactly like Alien and Aliens.
FM: Are we expecting a GRAVE ENCOUNTERS 3 or do you think you’ve said what you’ve needed to say?
Stu: Yeah, we’ll see, I think the market kind of dictates it. If people want a third one, then you know, then we’re definitely open to it. Again, it’s just gonna be, if we’re gonna do a third done, we don’t want it to make a piece of shit. Where it’s just like, we don’t want to put our name on it and walk away and don’t give a fuck, we wanna do something cool and me and Colin have already started talking about ideas and we kinda have an idea that might be fun and be really cool and takes things further than the second one did. If the opportunity was there, we would love to do it for sure. We’d love to do a trilogy.
FM: Just to wrap this all up in a tidy package, what would you guys say to horror fans, or movie fans in general, who either don’t know about GRAVE ENCOUNTERS 2 or are on the fence about seeing it, to implore them to seek it out in theaters or on demand?
Colin: I think a review of the first film really captured it quite well, they said GRAVE ENCOUNTERS is like PARANORMAL ACTIVITY on steroids, so if you’re a fan of any of those ghost hunting shows or you ever wanted to see actual ghosts on screen, we’re the found footage film that isn’t scared to go all out and show the monster. The second film is a badder, bigger version than the first film. It’s a fun thrill ride for the whole family…
FM: …The whole family…on acid?
Colin: If you let your kids listen to swear words and watch lots of violence. Don’t take that personally, because I don’t think parents should censor their kids from that sort of thing. If you have them in front of a TV, fucking leave them there.