Exclusive – Die! Sitter! Die! : Rupert – Trailer, Poster, Stills and Co-Director Interview
Of the many quality films we caught at Screamfest 2015, one of the more uniquely disturbing and rather cringe inducing was Lee and Sam Boxleitner’s psychological horror comedy Die! Sitter! Die! : Rupert, and now we’ve got an exclusive trailer for the flick to share plus a poster, stills, and an interview with co-director Lee. Read on.
Directed by the Boxleitner brothers from a script they penned with Alex Holcomb and having premiered to a packed house at Screamfest (their previous short film Downstairs debuted at the same festival in 2014), Die! Sitter! Die! : Rupert intends to serve as proof of concept for a future feature anthology, one which the brothers hope to produce and premiere by Halloween, 2016.
As for the Rupert short film, which stars Caitlin Reilly, Demille Cole-Heard, and “Baby Rupert” himself (we’re trying to remain relatively spoiler-free here in order to not kill the shocking reveal) and was produced by the Boxleitners, Holcomb, Matthew Laumann, and Leo Matchett, the flick is scheduled to be the second story in an anthology focusing on a mischievous babysitter. Serving as somewhat of a narrator, (according to the feature’s synopsis) the sitter character “torments her young charge with terrifying stories, all involving babysitters struggling to survive when pitted against all sorts of evil foes and horrifying situations.”
And in Rupert the titular character is indeed evil, in addition to being one of the most deranged we’ve seen in the genre since perhaps Hooper’s original The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, though entirely uniquely its own.
We queried Lee on his and his team’s inspiration for the short as well as the challenges he faced in handling some of the more, shall we say, “messy” elements.
“My brother, Sam, and I have always been big fans of babysitter slasher flicks,” offered Lee, “and realized there hadn’t been a fun one in a while, so we got together with our cousin Alex and started coming up with some great ideas. We had a bunch of them. The three of us soon realized that we had the makings of a great anthology film and narrowed our selection down to three concepts with a wrap-around story to connect them all. With the script for Die! Sitter! Die! completed, we knew that in order to get a buzz, we had to have something to show. After showing several people the script and watching their reactions to all the stories as they read, we knew that Rupert was the one to shoot first. “
Continued Lee, “Rupert’s inspiration was the ‘Occupy’ movement, believe it or not. How the 99% work so hard and get so little in return, while the top 1% act like babies when they don’t get their way. As history tells us, this usually ends in revolution. I know it sounds serious, but the short is really fun, I promise.”
As for the shoot, ”It was really challenging,” Lee stated. “Our location for 90% of the shoot was a beautiful mansion in Pasadena, built in the mid 1920’s. We literally weren’t allowed to touch anything, so shooting some of the bloodier scenes was tricky (all bloody shots had to be shot in a completely different location). I don’t want to give away any spoilers, but we also had to have actors get into some pretty disgusting situations, and they handled it all like champs. I can’t stress enough how awesome our cast and crew were! We couldn’t have done it without their blood, sweat, tears, and other bodily fluids!”
For more on Die! Sitter! Die!, you can visit the film on Facebook here, and be sure to check out the short film’s trailer below.
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