Christmas Themed Horror with Georgia Filmmaker Ron McLellen!

2011 marks a big year for Georgia based Film Company Southlan-Films and more importantly director Ron McLellen who has been away from feature film making for several years but has returned to the genre this year with the holiday themed horror fantasy "And All Through the House," which is now filming in Duluth, Georgia. McLellen's previous holiday themed horror film was the Lionsgate Home Video release "Jack O'Lantern." Since then he has directed the WWII sci-fi & horror film "Hell's End" and the cannibal horror film "Bad Land," which won the award for "Best Local Feature" at the Atlanta Horror Film Festival. After several failed projects that never met completion McLellen spent most of 2009-2010 in production on several horror fan films - the "Halloween" fan film "Return of the Sandman" and the "Friday the 13^th" fan film "The Man in the Lake" and most recently the "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" fan film "TCM: New Blood."

McLellen got his start shooting documentary footage for the Navy while also attending classes at Berkley University in San Francisco, California. Upon finishing his service with the Navy after five years he left college and returned to Georgia where he would hone his filmmaking techniques by filming many short films. His experience on these short films would allow him the time to develop his first feature film "The Middle of Nowhere," which starred a then unknown Anna Lynn McCord of "Beverly Hills 90210." This film, which screened in several film festivals, would then lead to a partnership with Executive Producer Tim Hayes who would then finance his next two features "Jack O'Lantern" and "Hell's End" as well as the short lived Cinefest Film Festival, which focused on horror, sci-fi and fantasy films. Now McLellen has a new production filming and several high profile events planned in the near future not to mention his horror-fan website Cryptshow.Net. I was able to sit down with the busy filmmaker and ask him a few things about the new film and what his plans for the future might be.

QUESTION: What have you been doing since the release of your last film "Bad Land?"

McLELLEN: I started on several other projects. I have one feature film which is our Christmas themed film called "And All through the House" and we just finished a short film called "Revenant," which is a ghost story, and we are starting pre-production on our summer film tentatively called "Station 6."

QUESTION: I know you spend much of last year doing horror fan films. Why did you choose to do horror fan films over the last few years?

McLELLEN: They were my favorite Hollywood monster films - Jason, Michael Myers, Leatherface and Freddy and I always wanted to make one of those types of movies so I decided to go out and make one. It started from a contest online that just kind of vanished so instead of stopping the project I went ahead and finished it. I liked it and I had fun and everyone liked the movie so I went ahead and did another fan movie called "The Man in the Lake" - a Jason ("Friday the 13^th") fan film. Everyone liked that one so we did our improv fan film which was really short called "Texas Chainsaw Massacre: New Blood" which was modeled after the Tobe Hooper original. Eventually we are going to do "Dream Prison" which is our Freddy Kruger fan film. I just do them because they are good video business cards.

QUESTION: Who inspires you as a filmmaker?

McLELLEN: The genre inspires me. I just love horror. I'm inspired by a lot of people - John Carpenter, Tobe Hooper, George Romero, Quentin Tarantino, to an extent, and Robert Rodriguez because he does all his own stuff like I do. He does all his own scoring, editing, and filming. As far as whom I pattern myself after that would be Robert Rodriguez but they all have been a big influence.

QUESTION: Tell me a little about Cryptshow.Net.

McLELLEN: Cryptshow.Net is your online source for all things horror. I had gotten into some of the horror forums and I realized that all of them were pretty much exclusively for either "Friday the 13^th" or just for "Halloween" or Freddy of whatnot, so I wanted to make a horror forum that looked at everything horror - all the slashers, the monsters, the ghosts - anything that has anything to do with horror whether its movies or collectables, comic books - anything. I wanted a place for fans of the horror genre as a whole. A place where they could come and network with each other and talk about everything horror.

QUESTION: Tell me a little bit about your current film production "And All Through the House."

McLELLEN: "And All Through the House" was kind of inspired by the horror anthologies that I liked - "Creepshow" and "Trick 'R Treat" and "Trilogy of Terror," where you have more than one story going on in the film but in "And All Through the House" I wanted there to be three stories within a single story. There are three things happening all at the same time but to different people. It's kind of a "cause & effect" story, which is a trickle down theme where one person causes another person to do something causing another person to do something different in their lives. It constantly flip-flops back and forth throughout the story until the climax at the end but it's a little different than those other movies as it doesn't have a host like "Creepshow" and it doesn't flip-flop back and forth through time like "Trick 'R Treat." It pretty much stays on the timeline all the way through.

QUESTION: What do you think is the most difficult thing about being an indie filmmaker?

McLELLEN: Marketing your films and selling them. The market is so saturated with indie films that you have to have something that catches everyone's eyes and that no one has ever done. Everyone has done everything so you have to try and find a gimmick or an edge to make your film stand out among the thousands of others. Making the film is not that hard; it's a lot of fun. Production, pre-production, and post production it's all fun to me but when post production is done then you get what I call "Post Production Blues" because then you have this beautiful film that you just don't know what to do with it. There are just so many films out there that it's hard to sell anything without a gimmick, which is another reason why I did "And All Through the House" which has a gimmick to help it stand apart from the other films.

As I leave McLellen to go off and finish filming "And All Through the House" I am left with the satisfaction of knowing that indie filmmaking is not dead and that filmmakers will continue to struggle and thrive and hopefully break through the barriers of the film industry any way they can.

For more info on this filmmaker and his latest productions visit him at Cryptshow.Net ( www.cryptshow.net )