‘For Sale By Exorcist’ Director Melissa LaMartina On Video Games and a Cryptid Beach Band
Melissa LaMartina is involved in a lot of cool stuff. She’s the lead singer of the cryptid-themed surf band Beach Creeper, she wrote the super-popular Amanda the Adventurer video game, and now she’s releasing her first film as a director, For Sale By Exorcist, via Dread (a sister company of Dread Central). And let’s not forget Melissa’s horror-host variety show Shocktail Hour, a live show that she puts on several times a year. If there’s one theme running through all these projects, it’s a love of horror (the campier the better).
Melissa’s first major film role as an actor was the lead in the cult classic Call Girl of Cthulhu. It’s there that she met director Chris LaMartina, best known for WNUF Halloween Special. They would eventually become collaborators, and they got married, too! For Sale By Exorcist marks their first collab with Melissa at the helm.
We spoke with Melissa LaMartina via computer, discussing her love of theater, finding the various locations for For Sale By Exorcist, and being part of a cryptid surf rock band.
Dread Central: What would you say was your first artistic love?
Melissa LaMartina: Theater was first for a REALLY long time. I started doing theater when I was a kid. Then as I went into college I started getting into costume design, and I got more into directing. And as an adult I continued to direct. I was artistic director / managing director of a community theater here in Baltimore. Then I got involved with the Baltimore Rock Opera Society. Did a lot of writing, directing, and acting for them. And once I met Chris, first I acted for him and then I got more into the producing side of things, too, which really appealed to me. But this is my first time directing a feature, which is terrifying. [Laughs]
DC: So was getting into film always part of the plan?
ML: Not really. I was at a point where I was doing back to back and overlapping theater shows, whether it was as an actor or as a director. In fact, while we were making Call Girl of Cthulhu, I was, at the same time, directing a production of Medea in Baltimore. So I was directing this Greek tragedy while at the same time performing in a movie. So that was wild.
Basically what happened was I was doing all this theater and was kind of in the mood for something new, and a friend of mine who I did burlesque with was doing the wardrobe for Call Girl. She said, “Hey, you should come audition for this.” They were doing a burlesque fundraiser, so I said, “That’ll get their attention!” So I did a routine based on Lady Macbeth where I kept finding blood on myself and then I have to keep shedding the clothing that’s got blood on it.
So I met Chris at that, but come to find out that he’d been eyeing me up on Facebook for a while. We had intersecting social circles, but we’d never really met, which I thought was really funny. So it was just a function of being ready for something new. Because I’d been telling stories through theater and through burlesque for such a long time that it was like, “What else is available to me?”
DC: So, video games. How did you get involved in making one?
ML: That came about because we’d been talking to folks at Dread about some different projects and then someone asked Chris about making a trailer for Mortuary Assistant, one of their games that came out before Amanda the Adventurer. Then they contacted him again about doing some live action content for Amanda. They mentioned they were looking for a writer. He told them about my experience at Hunt a Killer, the fact that I was a writer, the fact that I was a director. So I got in touch with the team that was making Amanda and put together a little portfolio.
I talked to them and had a great conversation right off the bat. We went through a few rabbit holes, and then I was brought onto the team, which was awesome because they gave me such a huge sandbox to play in. They had made a proof of concept game, the pilot, and it it was so well received. They gave me such a gift when they brought me on the team—because I wrote all the lore, and I wrote all the scripts for the full release—they said, “Listen, you can discard anything you want from the pilot, as long as you keep the two characters and the basic conceit.” Other than that they said, “You can do whatever you want with it.”
I pitched to them four different ideas for the lore—what was going on, how she got there, why your character that you’re playing through is there—and they just let me run with it, which was awesome.
DC: So there was just a little spine of a story and you filled out the rest?
ML: Yeah, there was a concept, and they let me rewrite the entire story. They kept the bones. They said, “Hey, it’s this cartoon, there are these two characters.” But then I was able to come up with the entire story freely. They weren’t too precious about anything. We were able to explore so much more in that full-length game.
DC: You did the voice directing, too, right?
ML: I did!
DC: Was that always part of the plan?
ML: No, as I got more involved, especially after writing the scripts, having a background as a director, I started talking to the guys about, “Hey, have any of you directed actors before? Would you like me to do it?” And they were really open to it, which was cool. I think they were really grateful to have somebody with that experience on board.
So I pitched that while we were already working on the game, because I’m a little bit of a control freak sometimes, and I wanted it to be right. I wanted it to be how I pictured it.
DC: You have a new film, For Sale By Exorcist!
ML: I do!
DC: It was pretty fun following on Facebook the saga of your location hunting. There must have been a lot of locations.
ML: Oh my God, so many locations!
DC: Were there any that were particularly hard to get your hands on?
ML: Yeah! I put about 900 miles on my car just scouting locations for For Sale By Exorcist. I added it all up so I could have it ready for taxes! There were a couple of locations that were really difficult. The location where the climax of the movie takes place—that was really challenging because we needed a space that we could really move into for an extended period of time since we needed three days for the shoot. But we also needed a space that worked for our particular needs. We also had to do some crazy stuff in there, so I was wracking my brain.
We were looking at multi-use spaces, and I was calling developers in Baltimore where I would research apartment buildings that were being built but weren’t open yet, or rec centers that weren’t open yet. I’m cold calling all of these development companies and saying, “Hey, I see you have a building that’s about to be open. Is there a window of time between it being open and people actually moving into it that we can come shoot a movie?”
A couple were receptive, a couple were like, “What the hell are you talking about?” Even the ones that were receptive, the timing just didn’t work. They were like, “If you need something in July we’ve got something in July,” which obviously we couldn’t make.
So, ultimately I ended up through the Maryland Film Office getting hooked up with this amazing property owner in Brewer’s Hill, Baltimore, who took me to tour a building that had previously been used as production offices for other productions that had come through Baltimore like We Own this City. They had used them for wardrobe fittings, Covid testing, pulling in extras, but it hadn’t been on screen. So this is something completely new for them. But they allowed us to move in for a week ahead of time, do all our building, all our set dressing, and we had free reign of the place for that period of time. It was a lifesaver. That was a pivotal location.
Then we needed a house that overlooked a cemetery. It had to be visible from the front porch. So for that, we ended up resorting to flyering. It was funny because, for a while Chris was like, “You know we can cheat it. We can have the house and then we can shoot the cemetery in a different location.” I was like, “No, I want them to be able to walk out of the house and you see it right there. I want this to be continuous.” So I flyered houses all over Maryland. Central Maryland, Harford County, Baltimore City. Just cast this wide net. Flyered about 50 houses. I think three people called or emailed us out of that. The flyer just said, “Hey we make movies. Can we use your house?”
This woman in Westminster got in touch with us, had us out to look at it. So Chris and I went over there and 20 minutes in she’s pouring us glasses of wine, we’re chatting like old friends, and just talking about our lives. She was amazing!
Then we showed up to shoot there a couple weeks later and she and her husband just said, “Okay, if you need us our phone numbers are on the board in the laundry room. Let us know when you’re done.” And left us in their house. We had met them once! It was just a group of strangers that they welcomed into their home completely unsupervised. Which astounds me. I don’t know if I could do that!
DC: So it all worked out in the end!
ML: Yeah!
DC: You sort of had to have faith that it would.
ML: Oh my God, man, you have to. You’ll go crazy if you don’t.
DC: So Chris [LaMartina] co-wrote this script?
ML: Yeah, Chris and his buddy Rob [Walker] co-wrote For Sale By Exorcist. Chris did the story and the initial script and then he and Rob bounced it back and forth a couple of times. Because Rob’s expertise is in really strong comedy punch up. So Rob did a lot of that.
Once we started talking to the rest of the team about making For Sale By Exorcist and we started talking to Dread and started talking about the scope and the budget and all that, Chris and I were actually at the time staying at a hotel because our kitchen was being renovated. So we were staying at this hotel and every evening from five to seven this hotel would have free snacks and drinks in the lobby. We would go down to the lobby and drink wine or get some whiskey and we read the script. I made a bunch of notes. We ended up cutting out whole scenes, whole characters. Strengthening the bones but also trying to reduce its footprint a little, just thinking about the budget.
It was a wild time that we had this retreat that was unintended, because when we left to go to this hotel for our renovation, we were there for a month, and we weren’t even talking about For Sale By Exorcist. But that all developed while we were there, and it ended up being this unintentional writer’s retreat.
DC: From the beginning of development, was it planned that you would direct? Were they writing For Sale By Exorcist for you?
ML: No, initially Chris really wanted to write a script that he could sell, that wasn’t necessarily something that we would make. But in talking to Dread, they really wanted us to be more involved in it. Of course initially they talked to Chris about directing it because he’s the one of us who’s the clearer option there because of his body of work. He’s been a film director for a long time now. But his full time job is really prohibitive as far as being able to have the time to make a movie where you have to shoot it in 15 to 20 days.
Our previous projects were nights and weekends. Out There Halloween Mega Tape—Covid aside, because Covid completely screwed us—it took us five years to make it because we were making it when we could work on it. Which doesn’t really work when you start talking to production companies. They don’t want to wait five years for a movie, which is understandable.
So we talked to them about me directing For Sale By Exorcist, and they were receptive to that. Because I do have a background in directing. My strength is certainly working with actors and working on characterization and things like that. I did, in this process, learn a lot about other aspects of directing film, like communicating with the director of photography and things like that. I had a strong foundation for it, but I’m really grateful that I got this opportunity because For Sale By Exorcist was such a learning experience.
DC: So, there’ll be another one after this, I’m assuming?
ML: I would love to do it again! It’s such a different experience from directing theater. In theater you have that luxury of the rehearsal process where you can really dive in, and of course with film you have the luxury of being able to do multiple takes. And there are such advantages and disadvantages to both as an actor and as a director, and I feel like one informs the other for me. The strengths can really support each other.
DC: What inspired the Aurora Gorealis character and how did you come up with Shocktail Hour?
ML: Shocktail Hour came to be in 2017. I had been talking to my friend Sam who owns Golden West Cafe here in Baltimore about how I’d always wanted to dip my toe into horror hosting. I’d done some emcee kind of stuff before in the burlesque world and I have such a love for camp and especially where camp and horror intersect. I just think there’s so much potential when you get a group of people together to experience something like that. In most of my experience with theater, and as a performer and director in multiple media, I value immersion and world-building. Immersion is a huge thing for me.
About 2016 or so, I directed A Bucket of Blood for the stage. I did a transcription of the movie script and I directed this production where we set it at an old restaurant in Baltimore, turned that restaurant into a club and Walter’s apartment was on the stage. But anything that took place in the coffee house took place around the audience. At the bar, around the tables, and there was a full art show where each week I had visual artists display their work. We started each night with a presentation of Beat poetry. I was so interested in a transformative kind of experience where people can come in and have this world wash over them. Where they’re fully living in this space for this temporary period of time.
With social media, and a lot of us being on our phones all the time, you don’t get a lot of opportunities to really be present and really experience something. So it’s important for me to give people those opportunities.
With Shocktail Hour, what really appealed to me there was doing that same thing as sort of a party atmosphere. Building a night around a movie. Watching things that were kind of silly, really fun. The first few movies we did were Don’t Look in the Basement, the original Little Shop of Horrors, we did one of my absolute favorites, The Undertaker and his Pals. We were exposing people to movies a lot of people hadn’t seen, and I would do these ridiculous skits, we would have drawing contests where we would put up a projector and show everyone’s drawings, we would do cocktails that were on theme. Looking around a room and seeing a bunch of adults watching a campy horror movie and so absorbed in their drawings for the drawing contest – it’s really special to look around and see people fully absorbed in being in this space.
That transitioned with the pandemic, because I had a show March of that year. All day I was wondering, “What’s the right thing to do?” People hadn’t started shutting down yet, but I don’t want to endanger anybody. I don’t know if it’s right to get fifty people into a restaurant. So we did it live and broadcast it from our basement with a set that we had actually built for Out There for Dr. Frankenstein and Dracula themed commercials. We turned it into a Shocktail Hour set and live streamed it for the first time. I learned that Facebook has really good robots, because they will show immediately that you’re showing a movie that’s copyrighted, and will shut you down!
So we had to restart it a bunch of times, and that turned into us reaching out to friends who had made movies and showing their movies. I showed House Shark, I showed some of our stuff. But it was cool because it gave us an opportunity to branch out and show off work from people whose work we love.
DC: Since you’re doing so many things, you might as well add a band onto that.
ML: I know!
DC: How’d you come up with the concept of a cryptid-based surf band?
ML: So Chris and I are really into tiki. Whenever we travel, the first thing we look up is the tiki bars. We turned our shed into a tiki bar. And, of course, we love cryptids, we love monsters. When we travel we’ll go to the museum of whatever the local cryptid is, so it seemed like a natural thing. A love of novelty bands, tiki, and cryptids and monsters! And of course that turned into Beach Creeper. How could it not?
So we started working with a couple of our friends, our bandmates Brian and Paul. Brian was the first bandmate that we added, and he and Chris started writing the music. For a while, Chris was writing all the lyrics, but I sort of took that over because I wanted to feel more involved than just being the vocalist and front person of the band.
For Sale By Exorcist comes to VOD on March 11, 2025.
Categorized:Interviews
