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Risky Business
Risk is good.
I’m talking about risks in style and content.
Like when Mark K. Danielewski reinvented the haunted house story in House of Leaves, a novel that has layers and layers and layers to its structure. You end up happily lost among the annotated, footnoted research materials. You scrutinize photographs and clues (turning the novel upside down—or holding it up to a mirror—to decipher certain passages). An overly familiar genre becomes unfamiliar—as does the act of consuming a story—and as a result you become more vulnerable to the fear it’s trying to communicate.
Something similar happens when Hitchcock kills off Janet Leigh thirty minutes into Psycho, defying the expectations of the audience and making them feel untethered and exposed. Or when Ghostwatch terrifies viewers by presenting its story in the style of a news program, becoming the television equivalent of Orson Welles’s panic-inducing War of the Worlds radio broadcast. Or when Barbarian breaks itself up into tonally distinct chapters that feel like trapdoors you keep falling through.
Risk pays off. Personal and professional ones as well.
Twelve years ago, I quit my professorship at Iowa State the same year that I received tenure. Maybe this seems insane. Probably it is insane. For some time after I made this decision, I woke up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, wondering if I had made the right decision for my family and career.
I enjoyed teaching… though it was never my goal to be a teacher; it was simply a way, a good way, to support the writing. But there were a few things about academia that made me narrow my eyes and ball my fists, including the snobbish disdain for genre and the comfortable softness that so often followed tenure. This isn’t a universal truth, but so many professors slowed their writing and publishing output once they had job security…or even stopped altogether. I didn’t want to lose my fire. I wanted to play without a safety net. When a book deal (for a werewolf novel I wrote called Red Moon) gave me the opportunity to quit the classroom and go full-time at the keyboard, I talked it over with my wife, and we abandoned the ivory tower and moved to the shady woods of Minnesota. This turned out to be the best possible thing I could have done for my life—professionally, financially, emotionally.
This same maverick mindset is what made me expand my arsenal from short stories to magazine journalism to novels to comics to audio dramas to film and TV. And that same maverick mindset fuels my desire to chase this nightmare now and make the leap to director. With every transition comes a shifting set of expectations and challenges and risks, some of them uncomfortable.
I started prepping 13th Night in the spring of 2023. We shot in November. We jumped immediately into post, and by late February of 2024, the sound-mastered, color-timed cut was ready.
David Ullman cut a killer trailer.
David Huyck built a killer website.
Our work was done, except it wasn’t.
Now I had to face a different kind of risk—the anxiety of submission and the fear of rejection—as I began to research festivals…
Fellowship
To make 13th Night, I applied for a regional fellowship through the McKnight Foundation. This is the money I used to pay for everything from catering to makeup to insurance. But they also offered their fellows a trip to the Sundance Film Festival—offering up a plane ticket, lodging, and a badge. I attended while deep into post, and this experience set the stage for the next (less fun, more uncomfortable) phase of filmmaking: promotion.
I have never attended a film festival, and Sundance might be the most legendary and hallowed of them all. I felt as though I knew its marquees and mountains before even arriving, and I’ll admit it was pretty fucking magical walking down Main Street at night as a light snow fell. I waited in two-hour lines for premieres, and I drank whiskey at High West, and I attended a panel for first-time filmmakers and another on science fiction with Jonathan Nolan—and it was a great, no-pressure way to understand how festivals functioned.
I met up with some fellow Minnesotans when I was there—including Laura Ivey, a producer, and Jim Brunzell, who runs the Sound Unseen fest in Minneapolis. And I had a few meetings set up by my reps. And I attended a few events with the other two McKnight fellows. But I was mostly alone…
If I was at a comics convention—or a literary conference—I would know every other face. I would be sitting on panels and standing behind lecterns and teaching workshops and closing down the bars in the company of old friends. Here, at Sundance, I was more of an outlier. I realized then—as I stood in lines alone, as I watched movies alone, as I grabbed takeout alone, as I navigated the bus lines alone—that in a way I had slid back in time and become a student again. It was humbling but also energizing. And it was the attitude I’ve had from the beginning.
From an outsider’s perspective, there is no justifiable reason for me to be spending this much time and putting this much energy into a project that will make no money. In the time I’ve spent making 13th Night, I could have written another novel. Or launched a new comics series. Or hammered out a spec script and two TV pilots. But I’ve already done those things. And this dream—this nightmare—of directing horror movies is what claws at the window of my mind and keeps me up at night.
So I became a student again—reading books, taking classes, studying StudioBinder clips and screenplays and director commentary. I needed to take that same approach with the festival circuit. I was a nobody at Sundance, but I was nobody who was taking notes. “How do you do this?” “Where can I learn that?” “What advice do you have for me?” These are questions I used to ask agents and editors when I was a twenty-five-year-old baby writer. These were now questions I was asking people at Sundance as a forty-five-year-old baby filmmaker.
Almost exclusively, I attended the horror films (or Midnights, I guess they’re called in Park City). A Different Man. I Saw The TV Glow. Krazy House. It’s What’s Inside. When I was in line for the premiere for In a Violent Nature, I struck up a conversation with some guys next to me. Their names were Adam Mast and John Pugh, and as it turns out, they ran a festival called HorrorFest International. We spent the next hour bullshitting about our favorite movies, and they gave me some great advice on how to approach the festival circuit when 13th Night was ready to submit. I felt then a small connection to a community, a spider web that stretched across the country (and even the world) that I wanted to get tangled up in.
The premiere only deepened that feeling. In a Violent Nature turned out to be the highlight of my festival experience. The movie was fantastic (like if Gus Van Sant made Friday the 13th Part 2). The crowd was raucous, throwing up their arms and cheering on the kills (Wood splitter! Cliffside yoga!). The cast and crew were present for a fun, moving Q&A afterwards. The collective joy in that library theater was infectious and underscored why I was doing what I was doing. These were the people I wanted to be in conversation with—the rowdies, the misfits, the midnighters.
Festing
I now have a Vimeo and FilmFreeway account. I now have dozens of submissions logged. And I now have, I’m pleased to say, two acceptances.
The Final Frame Short Film Competition is an event hosted by StokerCon. Something like 1,500 shorts are submitted and something like ten are screened. This year’s convention took place in San Diego, and the judges ranged from Rob Savage (Host, The Boogeyman) to Jamie Flanagan (The Haunting of Hill House, Midnight Mass) to Izzy Lee (a writer and filmmaker whose short film Meat Friend tore up the festival circuit a few years ago and whose first feature, House of Ashes, releases later this year).
Jonathan Lees runs Final Frame, and he went out of his way to patiently walk the 13th Night team through the screening process. We were worried about sound, brightness, and the grain layer we had added (which became a mangled mess when uploaded to Instagram). It all turned out fabulously, and it was such a thrill to sit in a ballroom with three hundred other horror nerds and listen to them cheer and gasp and laugh as the movie played.
It was also enlightening to watch the other shorts—some of which had sky-high production values and backing from governments in New Zealand, Spain, and the UK. I’m not a line producer, but I would guess their budgets to be in the 100k range. As far as I know, that kind of support doesn’t exist in the US, maybe because we worship at an altar of profit and short films might have more in common with poetry that tentpole blockbusters. But I was blown away by the lineup and felt honored to be in such grand (and monstrous) company.
And then there is the second acceptance—from the Chattanooga Film Festival—which Moviemaker Magazine lists as one of the “Top 25 Best Genre Festivals in the World” and Dread Central ranks as one of “The Best Horror Film Festivals in the World.”
On March 19th, I submitted 13th Night around 11PM—and by 3 AM on March 20th, I had received an email from the festival director, Chris Dortch. He said that he had been reading a Ghost Rider comic when his computer dinged, indicating a fresh submission. He looked at the name Benjamin Percy on the screen—and then he looked at the name Benjamin Percy on the comic book—and wondered if he was having an out-of-body experience. “No way they’re the same dude,” he thought and clicked open my director’s statement and confirmed that we were indeed one and the same. “No fucking way.”
Given the cosmic kismet, he said he felt compelled to write to me immediately. “We don’t usually do things this way, but we also don’t usually get submissions from one of my favorite writers on the planet. So, I just wanted to take the opportunity to reach out to you personally and say that I’m honored to have the chance to tell you myself that your film is excellent, and we’d be thrilled to screen it as part of our 2024 edition. The coincidence was honestly too cool for me not to say SOMETHING.”
Which is one of the coolest emails I’ve ever received.
I flew out to Chattanooga last summer, and I can tell you that Chris is also one of the coolest guys you’ll ever meet. He is fueled by pure geek enthusiasm for all things horror and he wants to cultivate a family of like-minded folks. The fest takes place at a historic hotel, The Read House, which is marbled and mirrored and dark-wooded. Before every screening, Chris takes the stage and speaks like a shaken-up can of Mountain Dew and you can’t help but feel the same energy bubble up inside you before you take in the Dangerous Visions shorts block or see a feature like Somnium premiere or enjoy the Pumpkin Pie Storytelling Hour with Clay McLeod Chapman or attend a wild party thrown in honor of Rod Serling’s 100th birthday (with his daughter present). The festival feels like a summer camp for the black T-shirt kids.
I was joined at the festival by David Ullman (editor, assistant director, script supervisor), Matt Bowers (producer, set builder, sound mixer, composer), and Nat Wilson (the actor who played our villain, the Agent). To share the experience with them made it all the more meaningful. We had built this story together, and we would celebrate it together. We didn’t stop smiling the entire weekend.
At one point, when we were forking into plates of brisket at a filmmakers lunch hosted by a BBQ joint called Puckett’s, we were told by another director, “You’ve been spoiled, premiering your film here. Not every festival feeds you. Not every festival invites you to parties. Not every festival gives you a gift bag of merch and whiskey. Not every festival wants everyone to mingle and become best friends. Not every festival treats everyone with respect and fellowship.”
But Chris and his team sure as hell do.
The End?
I don’t know what’s next.
Maybe, hopefully, 13th Night will be invited to screen at more festivals. Maybe, hopefully, I’ll continue to build connections in the horror community. Maybe, hopefully, I’ll be able to leverage the short into a feature. Or maybe this is the end?
Making a short film in the hopes of launching a career as a director is a gambler’s logic with zero guarantees (and a negative probability). There are no promises on the horizon. But I nonetheless feel totally satisfied and energized by this experience. I needed to do it to prove I could, if that makes sense. And maybe this sounds corny, but it was fun. It was fun as hell to get out of my comfort zone and build something with a talented, devoted group of friends.
I don’t know what’s next.
But I’ve been working with Sony and Shawn Ryan (The Night Agent, The Shield) on a TV adaptation of my novel, The Ninth Metal. When Shawn heard I was interested in directing, he invited me on to the set of The Night Agent and I spent several days shadowing Adam Arkin.
I don’t know what’s next.
But I’ve written a feature-length version of 13th Night. But I’ve also written two other specs, one of which is dirt cheap to make (in the range of 50-100k), the other of which is more in the million-dollar range. I want a range of possibilities available in case anybody gets excited enough to give me a shot.
I don’t know what’s next.
But at the Final Frame competition, Rob Savage told me that aspiring directors should make two shorts. The first should show that you can manage emotions and plot; that was the case with his Dawn of the Deaf. The second should be designed for virality; that was the case with his Salt, a two-minute short that plays like a panicked sprint and that was shared widely online.
So maybe that will be part of my plan. I’m studying some of my feature specs right now, trying to figure out if there’s a short scene that could communicate a high-concept hook and scare/shock the hell out of people.
I once heard Todd McFarlane—the comics creator behind Spawn and one of the founders of Image comics—talk about success. He said that at any given moment, two or three million people were following his work. Maybe that seems like a lot, he said. Until you realize that there are eight billion people on this planet. Two million is .025% of eight billion. That’s the same as zero. He thinks about this every day when he sits down at the desk. Not the money he might make off a project, nor how many awards he might win, nor the number of people who might see the fruits of his labor. He only thinks about his love for the work—and that satisfaction is the only true victory. I love how even someone who is wildly successful in the traditional sense recognizes that he is irrelevant in the cosmic sense. Whether he draws a comic that’s read by millions or whether he draws a comic for his child alone, it’s all the same, as long as he’s enjoying the hell out of himself. Whether I direct a movie that’s seen by millions on Netflix or a few hundred folks at film festivals, it’s all the same, because I am enjoying the hell out of myself. That’s the spirit I hope to keep burning in my skull as I continue to chase this nightmare.
I don’t know what’s next. But that’s part of the fun.
So stay tuned, midnighters.
FANGORIA is proud to present Benjamin Percy’s 13th Night below.
