Bedeviled – Exclusive Interview With The Vang Brothers
Playing as part of Screamfest L.A. is The Vang Brothers’ new film, Bedeviled (review), and we have a battery of interviews to bring you up-to-speed on the spooky! Next up: The Vang Brothers (Burlee and Abel Vang)!
Bedeviled premieres Saturday, October 22, 2016 – 10:00pm. Get your tickets here!
Dread Central: I know the movie has a sort of a technological horror aspect to it but you’re shooting in this old craftsman house, so how do the two worlds collide here?
Berlee Vang: The reason for that is Saxon’s character’s friends, they live in more contemporary homes with wide spaces, so we want our main character to live in a house that’s on a different contrast to those houses so that we can tell which houses we are in when we move into the character’s homes.
Abel Vang: For the sake of the horror genre, the Craftsman home like this works super well because of the architecture of the color, and because we are with our main lead most of the time, we want to shoot in the space that is interesting.
DC: So is this grandmother’s house?
BV: Grandmother used to live with her. The house had three women and they lived together and grandmother passed on and so it’s just mother and daughter. So, they’re more modest in terms of who they are; compared to their friends they are wealthier, you know a different class.
DC: So what made you guys decide to use this practical location as opposed to building something on a set?
BV: We want a location that would look like it’s lived in already.
AV: Part of building a set is, you might not get that lived-in quality, you might not have that rich history that comes with the location and so, when we were looking for a house we wanted, we found this one, which has a lot of history.
BV: In fact, I think a lot of things in this place are actually antiques. Some of the light fixtures are the original pieces, so they date from over 100 years ago.
DC: So can you tell me a little bit about the premise about the story?
BV: It’s an app that ends up killing these characters but what we wanted to do in this film was to re-invent The Boogieman. We have Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers and Freddy Krueger, they were for different generations, and so right now, what we want to do is to re-invent the new Boogieman.
DC: That is no easy task.
BV: But this is for the new generation and so we figured if we tie them to technology, social media, we could bring in the new Boogieman through that.
AV: And with redefining the Boogieman, in horror films a lot of your evil entities doesn’t have a face, doesn’t have a name, doesn’t have a character; it’s just this killing machine…
BV: …With a white mask that doesn’t speak or talk. We wanted to create a supernatural entity that resembles someone like the joker who is charismatic, who worms his way in.
AV: Take his time…
BV: Take his time to really torment a victim who starts out at first as your friend and then you realize how evil this thing is.
AV: This film is like Spike Jones’ Her meets Stephen King’s It. So, imagine this app or this OS that is your companion and does things for you, but ultimately it turns.
BV: You realize it’s a super natural. We wrote the script, we spent a good 6 months on it.
AV: Developing and writing the concept.
DC: So how do you guys divide up your duties as writers and directors? Do you take turns doing different things or do you just work together?
BV: We just work together. I think I’m more right brain and he’s more left brain.
AV: I’m more literal and he’s more abstract, but then we see the same vision all the time so we’re going toward the same target, but we come at it with different perspectives.
DC: Given the fact that this is a movie that will appeal to a younger audience, I know Rob Hall is doing your make-up and he’s known for his incredibly gory R-Rated or even not rated movies, so who’s your audience for this and how do you think it will turn out?
AV: There’s actually no gore.
BV: It’s more psychological, you won’t see a dead body, it’s hinted at maybe from the back of the person, or we see a hand and a corpse at most, but it is psychological, the killings are off screen. But it will be R because of the language.
AV: But other than that we wanted to create a movie that doesn’t really on brains coming out or blood spilling guts coming out.
BV: This is not Saw
AV: This is not Saw. When we were creating this movie, when we were writing it, the key word that we were after was mood, in every scene we wanted to create mood.
DC: So your DP is most incredibly important to you.
AV: Yes, his name his Jimmy Lu. We actually sat him down and we watched some of our favourite horror films like The Evil Dead 2, The Quiet, The Ring, kaiju movies, a lot of Eastern films. But Jimmy went to school with me, so he knows the mood I want. We started at USC film program in 2008, the same semester with Ryan Cooglar, the guy who directed Fruitvale Station. Jimmy was his DP on one of his advance shorts and I think with that short Jimmy DP’ed, it got into HBO and won some kind of award. Jimmy is a very talented, a good friend and a super talented DP. We worked on a short film two years ago that got into Screamfest and with that short film we were able to get financing…
BV: …Get financed for this film so, we brought Jimmy back.
Directed by The Vang Brothers (Burlee and Abel Vang), Bedeviled stars Saxon Sharbino, Mitchell Edwards, Brandon Soo Hoo, Victory Van Tuyl, Carson Boatman, Alexis G. Zall, and Jordan Essoe
Synopsis:
Five teenagers receive an invite to download a Siri-like app. Once they accept this app which calls itself Mister Bedevil, it begins to torment each of them by tapping into their worst fears. To stop this malevolent force, the teens must learn to trust and depend on each other’s wits and courage.
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