The Sinister 7: Eduardo Sánchez

There are more reasons than you’d think that stuff doesn’t make it in the magazine. More often than not there’s simply not enough space, at other times something is too similar to something else we’ve just covered, in other instances our page count changes due to circumstances beyond our control, it also may be that we don’t catch wind of stuff until it’s too late to make our lead time or occasionally a werewolf will eat one our hard drives. Long story short: there’s no shortage of stuff in the genre that we’d like to give some love too. That’s why we’re going to try a little something called the Sinister Seven, a seven-question – which seems like a good balance of informative and concise – Q&A with someone doing something in the genre that we feel like interviewing.
I’m gonna start with Eduardo Sánchez. He’ll always be known as one of the creators of the Blair Witch Project (along with Daniel Myrick) – one of the few movies I’ve seen in the theatre three times and the only film I bought a poster for without first having seen it. I’ve got that haunting (reverse exposure) image of the woods framed at my place. I still love it; I’d marry it if it were legal to enter into such a union with a large rectangular, glossy piece of paper.
Anyhow, I was very happy to hear he’d completed Altered, his backwater-set alien abduction film, which recently hit DVD. Look for a review of it in the next issue, but in the meantime, seven questions for Ed Sánchez.

Why’d it take so long to get another film up and running? You didn’t spend the last decade rolling around in Blair Witch money, did you?
Actually, the whores and cocaine kept me busy for quite some time, but that’s another interview for a different type of magazine…
After the craziness of BW, I guess I kind of wanted to catch up in life a little bit, get married, buy a house, get a car that wasn’t a Hyundai, have some kids, etc. Just normal things. We tried to get [the comedy feature] Heart of Love going but it didn’t work for many different reasons, and after that I moved back to Maryland, where I grew up, settled down, and began to work part-time on developing films.
I guess I was being lazy or trying to figure out what to do next but I was having fun collaborating with many fine writers and watching my kids grow up. Probed (which later became Altered) was one of those films I was developing. That one ended up getting the attention of BW producers Gregg Hale and Robin Cowie and the rest is history.

What’s one alien movie – aside from Altered, of course – that everyone should see?
The abduction scenes in Fire in the Sky still can’t be touched. We steered clear of doing any alien stuff like that because of that film. Alien and Aliens are two different kinds of alien films using the same alien and still working like motherfuckers, each in their own way.
And of course, E.T. My kids watch that now and I find myself watching it with them a lot.

Why choose this particular script? It isn’t because of something that happened to you…late at night…in a farmer’s field, is it?
I told you never to mention that in public, man.
The closest I’ve come to that kind of thing was one of my aunts telling me how she saw something alien-looking peering in through her window one night. When she went to look, it disappeared and this huge light appeared shining from a above and blowing the trees and the grass with a huge wind. Then it was gone, just like that.
That shit scared the fuck out of me.
What I loved about the script was the reverse-alien abduction, of course, but also the story of these guys who were all banged up as kids by these aliens. It was like they had been molested and it had completely messed them up for life, but in different ways. That was very cool. It allowed us to take a totally serious topic and play with it a little bit, examine it in a way that you couldn’t if it had just been a drama. I dug that a lot.

How would you describe the threat that your redneck heroes are up against in Altered?
Their biggest threat is really internal. I mean, none of the shit that happened to them would’ve occurred if they had just dealt with the situation in a rational way, you know? But then we wouldn’t have a film, would we?
The pain of their past is really the big enemy here, that healing that never occurred. They are trying to get rid of the pain of that night fifteen years ago in their own macho, back-woods kind of way. The Creature just comes in at the right time and takes total advantage of them.
It reminds me a lot of some things that are happening in our government right now.
Personally, the less rubber suits I see in an alien movie, the better. Unlike the Blair Witch Project, we actually see a lot of the monster in this film. Tell me a bit about how you wanted to portray the alien menace.

Well, I know I didn’t want too much CGI. I wanted to approach this like filmmakers in the ‘80s would’ve approached this film. The script felt to me like that’s where it belonged.
And I wanted to keep the Creature hidden as much as I could but I also wanted to pay it off at the end. I mean, there’s this huge fight between the Creature and the guys in the finale, so I knew that it was going to be up on screen during that time. I figured I’d build the Creature up enough so that it became a character of it’s own, and that’s one of the things I talked about with Misty Rosas, the actress and stunt woman who played the Creature. She brought a lot to the role and was incredibly effective, I think.
I mean, look, it’s Misty in a rubber suit, okay? But the film isn’t exactly Hamlet, is it? I think that by the time you see the full suit you hate this fucking thing so much that you just want to see it get its ass kicked.

What became of your flash-animated Sasquatch project, Manabal’wak?
I’m actually still working on that damn thing! It’s an experimental side project for me so it’s kind of just been going along, but I’m still hoping to get it out there one day. It’s looking great but it’s just so big now. What started as just this little comic book idea has become this full-length flash film, and it’s a lot more than I can handle most of the time.

Is there anything else lurking out there in the woods besides witches, sasquatches and aliens that you’re planning on telling stories about?
I’ve got some great junk coming up for sure. I’m writing a script right now called Seventh Moon that will be part of a three horror picture slate we’re doing in China at the end of this year or early next year. That one is coming out really creepy, closer to BW than Altered is.
We’re also pitching some comic books in a few weeks based on script ideas that we’ve had on the back burner for a while. We hired artists to make these cool covers for us and they are coming out really nice.
And I hope to finally get a script I co-wrote called Bad Moon Rising into production in the next few months. We’re waiting for a re-write from the director right now.
Some other things, too. I actually hope to direct another feature before Seventh Moon, I’m just not sure what it’s going to be.
We’ll see what happens. You never know in this business.

Bonus!
Ed just sent in this pic of the nasty lookin’ alien in Altered. Just imagine that thing pokin’ around yer backside with a probe!