A SIX 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 handcrafted horror of Evil Dead II and the realist vibe of The Exorcist's opening scenes, everything about DIRTMOUTHS was a labor of love, from the night shoots under the house to the stop-motion scenes animated in the living room.
EMBRACING SERENDIPITY
I really just wanted to make something (anything) so bad that DIRTMOUTHS ended up written on the fly. My basic outline embraced whatever free resources we already had, and then each shooting day Pen and I would sit on the porch and discuss shots we wanted to get that night.
The film's details were written and rewritten in those talks, one day at a time.
Directing live action is so discordant and incongruous with real life that the process feels like it's trying to shatter 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. So the more I improvise and roll with whatever's happening in the moment, the happier the entire 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.
In the end, I --
1. Used a fog machine to add depth and keep the air alive in each shot
2. Scanned art paper and charcoal rubs
3. Animated them to create a textured 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 help me understand intentional sound design that doesn't rely on score telling the audience how to feel.
I also studied another creature feature -- the quiet, 8 minute animated 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 examples with (mostly) no music, like Rope, Network, Dog Day Afternoon and No Country For Old Men.
