Interview: Ben Moody – Director of Last Girl Standing
Last Girl Standing is one of the best indie horror films of the year that I’ve seen. A fantastic mix of horror and drama that asks a question we’ve never had answered before: what happens to the final girl of a slasher’s rampage after the fight is over and she’s survived?
The movie came out on VOD and DVD November 1st, so I took the chance to talk to Moody about the film.
Last Girl Standing Director Ben Moody
Mr Dark: You know Last Girl Standing blew my doors off at Texas Frightmare Weekend this year. It’s an incredibly unique film. Can you tell us a little about where it came from?
Ben Moody: Thanks. It means a lot to hear that it resonates with people. I’ve recently come to the realization that compromise breads creativity. I had done a ton of web shorts and was planning to make the jump to features. We (my wife and I) were working on one film that no one would fund because we hadn’t made a feature yet. It was the classic chicken or the egg bit. How do you raise money for a first time feature when no one wants to fund a first time feature? We have no connections. We’re not surrounded by rich people. So we had to recalibrate and come up with a feature we could do on our own with our own unique resources.
We were starting to rethink the approach to our first feature when our son was born. He was born in Oct (appropriately) and when we got home we turned on a slasher marathon on TV (after he fell asleep). We just caught the end of a film I’d seen a hundred times before but starting at the ending made me look at it differently. All we saw was the girl kill the slasher and then be carted off by the cops screaming. Instantly I turned to my wife and said, what happens to her now? How on earth does she go back to normal life after something like this? We basically spitballed the entire movie in the next 45 minutes and suddenly we had what we thought was a great idea for our first feature.
MD: The overwhelming theme of the piece seems to be trauma, and surviving then living with it. What inspired that?
BM: Well, the theme was inspired by the initial idea, what happens to the character that survives a slasher movie? Within 30 seconds of the idea hitting me, I knew it would have strong themes of PTSD and trauma but the idea came first. For me personally, things tend to feel more organic when I start with a strong idea then find the themes within the idea rather than working the other way around.
Thankfully, I haven’t been through anything too traumatic myself but I think it is a pretty universal theme. We’ve all experienced something bad, to some degree or another, and we’re all living with it. Not to say all trauma is equal, because it isn’t. I mean, I was in Manhattan during 9/11. I felt the heat of the flames off the buildings burning from my rooftop. There were a few moments early on when I figured this was it, I was at the epicenter of World War 3. I’m a goner… But that didn’t happen and even on a day like that, I was always thinking, there are people having a worst day than I am. Maybe I listen to NPR too much and maybe I’m an overly empathetic person but I feel there’s a lot of people who have survived something bad and I thought the slasher genre was an interesting way to explore it.
Last Girl Standing Director Ben Moody
MD: The balance between slasher film, with the scare/laugh/scare rhythm, and the dramatic side of LGS is damn near perfect. How hard was it to walk that line, knowing when to add a scare or a moment of humor without taking the audience out of the drama?
BM: Thank you. That’s tough for me to answer because it all felt natural to me. That being said, it was a conscious decision from the get-go to have ups and downs in there. Given our subject matter and the approach, LGS could have been a brutally depressing and boring movie to watch. We didn’t want to make viewing a chore. We wanted to give the audience some peaks and valleys to make it (hopefully) more enjoyable to watch. It wasn’t like a page count thing of “oh, there needs to be a scare every 10 pages or a joke every 5.” I think it came from always wanting to stay honest. Everything had to feel true and honest to the characters and situation. I think that comes down to what you feel in your gut a lot of the time.
MD: You’ve got an extremely strong cast, especially your leads Akasha and Danielle. Where did you find them? Was it hard finding such an amazing cast for a small, independent movie?
BM: When we were coming up with our unique “resources” like I mentioned above, we knew we had an incredible pool of acting talent here in Austin. Doing so many shorts over the years had proven this to us. A lot of the cast came from our short films or at least were recommendations from people we’d worked with before. The only reason the movie got made was because we had this built-in trust with the cast (and crew) and they trusted me as well.
Akasha and her husband Brian (Nick) had been in a number of our shorts. When I first had the idea for LGS I think I pitched it to Akasha the next day or so. She was the first person that came to my mind and honestly, if she had told me it was stupid I probably would have scrapped the project right then. The movie only worked if you believed and cared about that main character. If I didn’t have someone as strong as Akasha it wasn’t worth doing. Thankfully she was instantly on board with the concept so I went ahead and wrote it.
MD: A slasher movie is only as good as its slasher, how did you go about creating The Hunter?
BM: That was a lot of myself and Jason Vines, who made the mask and played the Hunter. We talked a lot about character and what type of slasher he was. We wanted him to be someone that reused things, gave them new purpose. We talked a lot about his hunting ritual and how he probably makes a new mask every “season.” Most the our decisions were based on the themes of repetition and cycles. We were also very conscious about not wanting to reinvent the slasher wheel with the Hunter. Being that most of the movie was a dramatic character piece, the Hunter was suppose to instantly inform and remind the audience that we’re in the slasher genre throughout the film. So to that end, we wanted him to feel familiar and be recognizable as a slasher character.
MD: What’s up next for you? Any projects in the oven?
BM: We’ve got a number of things in the oven but I just finished a new script for a martial arts horror film I’m really excited about. I don’t know if anyone is crazy enough to fund it but I’m really jazzed about it. I think it’s a really unique script and would be a lot of fun to make and for audiences to watch.
MD: Traditional final question: what’s your favorite horror movie?
BM: Oh my god. This changes constantly by my mood and time of day… I mean, the one I’ve probably seen the most and I can turn on while in any mood is An American Werewolf in London. It’s got some good scares, some good laughs and some of the best effects every put on screen. Damn, just thinking about makes me want to watch it again right now.
Thanks to Ben for taking the time to talk to us! Check out Last Girl Standing right now on the VOD platform of your choice or on DVD!
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