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TO Filmmakers Win Contest with Gutsy, Gory Movie Trailer
Faux–lobby card for the faux-trailer for Van Gore.
In plenty of ways, Jason Eisener’s Hobo With A Shotgun is the most remarkable Canadian feature to come down the pike in years, maybe since Mike Dowse’s mockumentary FUBAR became a surprise cult hit in 2002. Like Dowse’s film, Hobo jettisons the high-minded artfulness or parochial localisms of Canadian cinema, recalling the direct-to-VHS Canuxploitation cinema of the tax shelter era. Though Hobo is packed with laughs, in many ways its best joke is that it’s Canadian at all.
It’s doubtful that Eisener would have secured Telefilm subsidy for such a gory splatter flick without the support of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez, who certified Eisener’s tasteless conceit for a film about a homeless man dishing out vigilante violence to the blood-lusty denizens of some rotten city by slapping the fake trailer for Hobo With A Shotgun onto the Canadian theatrical release of their exploitation double-feature, Grindhouse. Now he’s paying the goodwill forward, recently crowning two Ryerson students the winners of a trailer contest hosted by the producers of Hobo With A Shotgun.
Peter Strauss, a fourth-year student in Ryerson’s New Media program, and Keith Hodder (who, we can’t help but notice, shares a surname with horror icon Kane Hodder), in his third year of Radio and Television Arts, took top honours in Eisener’s contest with Van Gore, a trailer they directed and co-wrote (along with cinematographer Jerrad Pulham, another Ryerson Radio and Television student). It edged out other worthy competitors like Mister Fister, Pet Seminary, and Charlene She-Wolf of My Heart. “I’ve been following Jason Eisener a lot,” says Hodder, who hails from Eisener’s native Nova Scotia. “When I was 17 I remember him doing the original Hobo With A Shotgun trailer; the one that got him noticed at the South by Southwest Grindhouse trailer contest. When he did that I was really inspired by it and promised myself that if something like that [contest] ever came up again, I would do it.”
Hodder (left) and Strauss on the set of Van Gore.
As understood by the trailer, Van Gore is a horror flick revolving around a serial killer artist named Van Clark (Garfield Andrews), whose work in the medium of blood and guts attracts the affection of the art world. Besides plenty of good visual gags, and a spot-on, throaty voice-over track (courtesy of Hodder), Van Gore takes the proverbial piss out of the art world, much in same way Hobo poked fun at the stuffiness of Canadian cinema. “I channeled a lot of resentment, I guess,” says Strauss. “It was sort of a tongue-in-cheek way of making fun of the pretentiousness of art school. We take technical skills that we learned in film school and go ahead and make fun of film school.”
Considering the pair had just over two weeks to get their film together, Hodder and Strauss’s trailer exhibits an impressive level of gloss. (Even if a lot of that gloss is the inverted kind, where it’s meant to replicate the look and texture of crummy ’70s and ’80s horror flicks with shoestring budgets, but you know what we mean.) “A lot of people put their blood, sweat, and tears into it—not to sound cheesy,” says Hodder. “The contest was announced on a Friday and Peter and I wrote the script on the Sunday. We shot it over two consecutive days, and post-production probably took a week.”
As winners of the trailer contest, Hodder and Strauss get to see their Van Gore teaser packaged with the DVD and Blu-Ray releases of Hobo With A Shotgun. They’re also working on expanding it into a feature, further following in Eisener’s footsteps. “We’re writing a treatment right now, to spin it out. Probably just to entertain ourselves,” says Strauss. “We’re going to talk to some people about the possibility of expanding it.”
In the meantime, we’ll keep our fingers crossed. Because like Hobo With A Shotgun, Van Gore proves that Canadian cinema—though ripe with incest dramas and other overwrought emotional schmaltz—is still wanting for a little old-school arterial spray. But enough of our yakking. Here’s the trailer in all its gory glory:
Lobby card still and photo courtesy of Keith Hodder.