A woman who collects the blood of Bad Men. An unscrupulous eBay merchant of haunted items. Party girls who aren’t nude. Contemporary terror takes many forms, and Fewdio does its darkest to document it.
Hollywood’s Writers’ Strike of 2007 was a scary time, a nightmare house of uncertain paychecks and the dreaded prospect of moving back to Maryland. No surprise, then, that out of this particular brand of California unease came Fewdio, a horror troupe that uses terror rather than improv games, and a fear of the unknown eerily reminiscent of wondering where the rent money is coming from.
We talked with Fewdio Drew Daywalt, John Crye, and Paul Hungerford on the DVD release of “Nightmare House Volume One,” a collection of 13 horror shorts that rely on humor, shock, and – most of all – a lurking fear to deliver terror in treat-sized morsels.
Mavervorl Media: What is a Fewdio?
John Crye: As Bhl’aag, our spokesperson at Fewdio.com says, Fewdio is an unimaginable entity that feeds on fear. It is Lovecraftian in its inability to be described. That, and we have limited vocabularies, which actually makes most things indescribable for us.
MM: Well Played.
Drew Daywalt: Fewdio is a Horror Troupe. And quite possibly the only one in the world. At least it’s the only one I know of.
MM: What’s a horror troupe?
Daywalt: Same as a comedy troupe, only our goal is to horrify an audience instead of making them laugh. Our goal is to create new media horror in the form of short horror, horror fiction, web series, television and feature films, all to the glorification of all things frightening.
Paul Hungerford: The genesis was Drew and [co-producer/writer/director Dave Schneider] using the [Writer's Guild Strike] to help show that they could write and direct in the horror genre. It filled the creative need. The desire to create with your own hand. Drew is very very good at that and asked many of us to come on board and help him.
Daywalt: We formed a small internet startup and began expressing ourselves in the horror genre completely unchecked by development executives, executive producers, lawyers, business managers, and all the other suits that get in the way of the creative process.
MM: That sounds very arty for a collection that is, in the end, very scary. The first short you made was “Curse,” about a gangster who couldn’t die.
Crye: The core group – Drew, Dave, Paul, Kirk [Woller], and me – got together to make one film, “Curse”. It was just a fun experiment in homegrown film. When the writer’s strike happened, we looked back fondly at the “Curse” experiment and decided to make more.
Daywalt: They started as a replacement for our Dungeons & Dragons game nights and poker nights. We usually shoot our films in two days, then edit for a week or two. The immediacy of the journey from concept through initialization to audience feedback is just amazing.
MM: How much of the Fewdio project was an exercise in keeping yourselves limber during the strike, as a video business card for future projects, or as a reaction to the state of Hollywood horror?
Daywalt: All the members of Fewdio felt that the term “horror” had been hijacked by gore hounds and slasher fanatics. There’s nothing wrong with those two subgenres, not by a longshot, but they are subgenres. People hear horror nowadays and they automatically think slasher. We wanted to take the name horror back. We want our work to encompass all things eerie, creepy, macabre, gothic, evil and spooky… not just bloody.
MM: Cthulhu seems to be your copilot on a lot of these shorts; things barely seen, hinted at, threatening to appear in a vacant part of the frame…
Crye: Lovecraft had a way of frightening his readers by making them conjure up the awful imagery themselves. That is always more effective. Nobody can scare you like you.
Daywalt: It’s not the moment of the attack that’s frightening. It’s the moment before…
Hungerford: Cthulhu’s mythos is fun to play in. You can create your own characters and your own monsters and you can just say ‘the Elder Gods made it.’ We don’t have all the answers and we never will. It’s a part of the human condition that we won’t know until it’s all over.
MM: We see many of the same actors (including Crye, Hungerford, and Tom Rhoads) in several shorts, the crews for each are mostly the same, and many of them feature a single scene or even a single shot. How much did this cost?
Crye: Laughably little.
Hungerford: As we made more movies, characters recurred. If we showed them in a film where something horrible happened to them, maybe we could tell the story about how they got to that point.
MM: And yet it doesn’t have an awkward “Labor of Love” air of sympathy vote about it…
Crye: Simply put: love is not enough. You can love the shit out of something and still be really bad at it. I absolutely love billiards, but I suck. I love playing HALO against my 12 year old but my failure to best him is epic. Fortunately with Fewdio, everyone involved has had years to hone their skills. We love what we do as much as any other backyard filmmaker, we just don’t suck at it anymore.
MM: You have almost three dozen shorts up on YouTube. How are you going to make money?
Crye: When we make some money, we’ll let you know. In theory, we are growing a grassroots fanbase that will support Fewdio by purchasing the DVDs, t-shirts, and other goodies. That is actually happening now, but in a small way. A bigger marketing push – when we can afford it – will grow the fanbase and profits faster. We think.
Hungerford: We decided to offer the product to the fans who wanted to enjoy the films on a bigger screen with better sound. It also allowed us to add more onto the DVD like more behind the scenes, more details about our universe and some special secrets behind the scenes.
Crye: Contrary to conventional wisdom, there is a desire in the marketplace to own a physical DVD that people enjoy, even if it is available on-line. Many of the shorts have been retouched to better suit big screens (and avoid legal issues with images and music that were not licensed).
MM: Speaking of retouched, what’s with blocking out the nudity on the tweaker party gone wrong?
Daywalt: “The Tap”? I think perhaps John (Crye, “Tap”’s director) was being sensationalist. A little William Castle by way of P.T. Barnum, I guess. Blocking out the nudity, he thought, would titillate the young male audience. Frankly, I didn’t see the point of it. The movie is dark and wonderful in its own right and didn’t need the sensationalism, but I guess it worked if you’re asking about it.
MM: I asked as a casual observer and scholar.
Crye: I blocked it out at first so we could put “The Tap” on YouTube. It got banned anyway. The more I watched the blurred-out version, though, the more I liked it. It makes the whole affair seem dirtier, more prurient. Also, the blurs make you feel like you want to see what you are being denied, which is exactly what the protagonist in the film feels, and that leads to a bad end for him.
MM: Bad ends. Are you planning a feature-length film -
Hungerford: Yes.
Crye: Yes.
MM: – or are all your needs being served by the five-minute format?
Daywalt: While Fewdio is moving forward with developing a web series and pursuing TV and Features, we’re never going to stop making short horror for new media. We feel like we’ve really cracked the nut on that form and it’s our true and first love. So you can expect to see a lot more 3-5 minute bon bons of terror from us in the future. The Nightmare House anthology will continue indefinitely; as long as we have ideas that are right for the format, we’ll be terrifying people in under five minutes.
MM: Were there ever situations were you scared yourself while filming?
Daywalt: The one time I felt sick to my stomach was filming “Door 17,” when the stripper went from an incredibly sexy lap dance to slitting her own wrists.
Crye: On “Marie” Drew and I were in the parking lot of a public park. I was holding a shovel and an ax and there were bloody hand prints on the trunk. And then a cop car pulled up. That scared me.
FEWDIO home | Buy “Nightmare House” | FEWDIO on YouTube
Mavervorl Media is a shadowy content provider dealing in entertainment, technology, and academia.
This is fascinating. I thought (but everybody does) about doing something similar – 3 – 5 minute non-sensical shorts from stories I’ve written and upload them all up on the web. So far I’ve shot 2, finished 1. I just find it hard to produce the shorts. I can direct and write and shoot, but the producing of it is what gets me. I can’t seem to get passed that. hahaha…I am treating this comment box as therapy…my fist memory was…
You must cage your creativity and slap it like the bitch it is. Only then will it work for you.
I agree with MM, Garbriela! But it’s also why having a few people works so well — it’s really, really tough to do absolutely everything by yourself. Find a friend to do the parts you just can’t.
It’s also great to have someone looking over your shoulder saying, “oh, that’s great — but that part sucks. Fix it”. Because sometimes you can’t see it when you’re so far in the middle of it. That’s been what I’ve enjoy the most out of working with Fewdio — the great collaboration.
Thanks for the great interview, Mavervorl!