Horror Flick Filmed in Norfolk
By Wiley Wood
As they had already made two short horror movies in New York City, Gavin Borden and his friends thought Norfolk might make a good setting for the third in their trilogy. “The nights are really dark up there,” says Borden, “and my mother has a big house close to two of Norfolk’s cemeteries. It seemed perfect.” Borden, an executive producer and writer on the film, is the son of Libby Borden, who first came to Norfolk in 1979.
A scouting trip in early summer turned up a swimming pool and a pond that could serve as locations. The film crew also visited the tower on Haystack Mt. and a watering hole in Winsted with just the right ambience.
The film, “Ripe Decay,” revolves around a couple whose marriage is in trouble. The woman is pregnant, and unexplained things start to happen around her, explosions and implosions, with the viewer never knowing if the events are real or in the characters’ heads. “The idea is to mess with people using their fears about the body,” says Borden.
For the final, terrifying climax, the filmmakers needed blood and guts. “We went to the farmers market on Saturday morning and asked if anyone had cow or pig intestines,” says Borden. “People were incredibly helpful. There were kids running up to us saying, ‘Come talk to my Mom, we have plenty of blood and guts back at our house!’”
Director Gary Marino, who estimates the total budget for the three short films at under $10,000, explains that real pig entrails were cheaper than synthetic. “It was smelly and awful—we saved it for the last day of shooting—but it’s authentic.”
A film school graduate, he joined with another filmmaker, Elliott Fu, to form a website where they could post short horror movies. “We knew we weren’t ready to make feature films,” says Marino. “We decided to make shorts, each of us conceiving and directing our own ideas and helping the other with his. They would be stories where we established the setting and the situation very quickly, then in a few minutes delivered a scare or a twist, something unnerving or unsettling that also sticks with you.” This fall, a short by Fu and Marino, a 12-minute zombie flick called “Pretty Vacant,” will be screened for a live audience at the Atlanta Horror Film Festival.
The present venture, on which they were joined by Borden, represents the next step in their evolution. Three separate horror stories, loosely related in theme and each running 20 to 30 minutes, will be presented together as a single feature with the title “Fractures.” “We’re hoping that we’ll be able to show the film at lots of festivals and get it released on DVD and Blu-ray,” says Borden. Asked whether the filmmakers would present “Fractures” at the Norfolk Library after its December release date, Marino answers, “Absolutely!” Borden, however, cautions that it will inevitably provoke walkouts: “It’s very, very dark.”