A SEVEN MINUTE HORROR MOVIE
On a lonely, fog-drenched hilltop, the Night Groundskeeper crawls under the house and finds a new, unexpected chore.
DIRTMOUTHS is a short, proof-of-concept horror comedy directed by Breehn Burns and starring Pendleton Ward in his first live-action role.
Hungry things grow down here.
Writer-Director Breehn Burns is the artist who designed Sam for the cult horror film Trick 'r Treat. He was supervising producer on Netflix's Invader ZIM: Enter The Florpus and showrunner on Bravest Warriors.
Producer & Actor Pen Ward created the eight-time Emmy Award winning Cartoon Network series Adventure Time as well as Frederator's Bravest Warriors and Netflix's Midnight Gospel.
Our micro-budget horror short was shot on an iPhone with three friends over ten winter nights. Inspired by the handmade horror of Evil Dead II and the realist vibe of The Exorcist, DIRTMOUTHS is an experiment in making the most of our limitations. From night shoots under the house to stop-motion scenes animated in the living room, our choices were geared toward keeping the action small enough to be achievable.
EMBRACING SERENDIPITY
I really just wanted to make a film so badly that DIRTMOUTHS ended up written on the fly. My basic outline played off of whatever resources we already had, and then each day Pen and I would sit on the porch and discuss what we wanted to shoot that night.
The film's details were written and rewritten in those talks, one day at a time.
In live action, "protecting your vision" is so discordant with real life that it almost breaks your brain. Apparently your goal is to bend reality – second by second – into a fragile illusion that's exactly the way you pictured it in your head.
Thinking that way is bad for human beings, but the more you're able to improvise within the spirit of what you're trying to achieve, the happier the shoot becomes.
"It's a question of preparing the ground in such a way that the lucky accident can happen... so that the piece can take on a life of its own."
– Sidney Lumet
"It's not a matter of how well can you make a movie. It's how well can you make it under the circumstances. Because there's always circumstances."
– George Lucas
AN ANIMATED LOOK
The limited color palette and art-paper texture of DIRTMOUTHS were inspired by RISO prints, a Japanese photocopy technique often used for zines.
My first plan was to print out every frame of the film using a Risograph printer, then photograph them one-by-one like an animated film. But that was going to be expensive, and I wanted to make a short without crowdfunding.
So to reach my goal of visiting a misty, dreamlike place outside of time, I --
1. Used heavy fog to add depth and keep the frame alive
2. Scanned art paper and charcoal rubs
3. Animated them to create a textured film grain that would interact with the fog
4. Composited it all together in post
WITHOUT MUSIC
Some of the most powerful scenes in movies have no music, but (from what I'm told) studios are uncomfortable with quiet scenes. I looked at Friedkin's The Exorcist to understand intentional sound design that doesn't rely on score telling us how to feel.
I also studied the sound of an animated creature feature -- the quiet, 8 minute pilot for Scavengers by Joseph Bennett and Charles Huettner, with sound design by Mike Jannson.
I remember hearing that M. Night Shyamalan edits his movies without any temp score and tries to get every scene working on its own, and at the time I almost didn't believe it.
The insecurity around using music in film fascinates me. An audience will watch a good movie with no score and never even notice, but they rarely get that chance.
I can only think of a handful of movies with (mostly) no music, like Rope, Network, Dog Day Afternoon and No Country For Old Men.
