The world of low-budget horror cinema has traditionally served as a fertile breeding ground for up-and-coming filmmakers. While this little pearl of wisdom has become something of a truism in the decades following the publishing of Manny Farber’s seminal “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art” it still holds a certain relevance in the modern cinema landscape. For filmmakers like Zach Clark genre filmmaking presents opportunities for narrative abstraction and visual experimentation that can’t be accessed elsewhere. With his new film, The Becomers (2023), he leans into genre tropes while also injecting his own unique brand of humor into the proceedings.
Zita Short had the opportunity to speak with him about his most recent projects, influences on his comedic sensibility and thoughts on the state of the horror community.
Zita Short: What were the origins of this project?
Zach Clark: This movie came together in the exact opposite way that films usually come together. Most of the time you have an idea, come up with a script and then start this long journey that involves searching for money. The producers of my last film, Little Sister (2016), came to me in early 2021 and said they wanted to put together a series of micro-budget productions that would shoot in Chicago. They specified that I would have to work with a very low budget and a very limited number of shooting days. They said I could probably make a movie relatively soon. This film was conceived of a short time after I received a phone call from them. The idea came to me and I presented it to them. They gave me the go-ahead and then I started writing the script. About a month after that we were shooting the movie.
It only took three months for me to go from having the seed of the idea to the moment when I wrapped principal photography. I had to come back about a year later to shoot some pick-ups and re-shoots and handle everything involving VFX. As a result of those delays, the production process for the film ended up taking just as long as your average film. I ended up taking about three years to finish my work on it. The stuff that normally takes forever to complete happened very quickly at the beginning. Then the stuff that usually gets done quickly in two to three months at the end of the process took years to work on.
Zita Short: How can genre filmmakers weaponize lo-fi aesthetics?
Zach Clark: In a decade there is a chance that movies won’t exist. Every time I sign in to YouTube I keep getting fed trailers for videos about nightmares. With all these different platforms for entertainment, everything is becoming so homogenized. Every superhero movie looks and sounds the same. When you’re working with a lower budget you can give your film an artisanal touch. When you watch an old monster movie you can often see the zipper that runs down the back of a creature costume. It’s one of those things that reminds you of the human element that plays a part in a film like this. To me it adds a certain charm to a horror movie. I love practical effects because they allow the audience to see how the sausage gets made and ask their own questions about artifice and unreality. You agree to suspend your disbelief to a certain degree but some people still hold very rigid beliefs about how to consume art.
Zita Short: You have a very unique comic sensibility. Which individuals influenced your style?
Zach Clark: My work tends to focus on looking at normal life from a different perspective. That perspective can be broken in different ways. I want to look at human emotion and our daily lives from an outside perspective. That view sort of heightens the absurdity of the mundane. I think that brings comedy out of it. I am a firm believer that movies that are just sad and just serious aren’t for me. That is not to say that there aren’t great movies that have very little humor in them. However, on the saddest days in my life, there has still been humor present. Humor has also gotten me through a lot of the most painful events in my life. Finding humor in difficult things doesn’t necessarily have to involve making jokes about those situations. You find a way to acknowledge the complexities of the human experience through comedy.
Zita Short: Russell Mael, best known for his work as a member of the band Sparks, serves as the narrator of this film. How did he get involved in the project?
Zach Clark: It’s a thing that would not have happened without the pandemic. A good friend of mine was running a secret Zoom movie club during COVID-19. As everyone was trapped in their houses during that period, he was able to get celebrity guests to participate. He was able to get Ron and Russell Mael to Zoom in. Sparks has been one of my favorite bands since high school so I wanted to work with them. I was able to show them my last film through an internet link and we ended up talking over Zoom for an hour in the Summer of 2020. When it came time to figure out who should serve as the narrator of this film, Russell seemed like a cool choice. I showed him a rough cut and emailed him asking whether he would be interested in getting involved. He is very good at responding to emails so he got back to me quickly. He watched it and said he was interested.
Zita Short: What is it like to ingratiate yourself into the world of horror fanatics?
Zach Clark: It’s very interesting and what I found, based on showing my film at various genre-centric festivals, is that the general programming philosophy of each festival would steer what the audience response would be. I will say that when I made this movie I was expecting genre audiences to embrace it more than they did. There are certainly people who watch this movie and want it to function in a certain way. They have a checklist of things that they want to see. This film does check some of those boxes but those decisions often have unexpected intentions behind them. The most explicit scene featured in the film is a romantic scene that doesn’t depict any of the characters being put in danger. You are asked to follow characters and sympathize with characters in ways that could make some audiences uncomfortable.
Years ago I made a beach party movie with an acid trip in it and a death scene. I found myself in a space where I made something that felt too weird and underground for major film festivals and too mainstream for weird, underground festivals. With this film it feels like we walked a similar tightrope. The places that it screened at were all very, very enthusiastic about it.
Zita Short: What do you think of the use of the descriptor ‘elevated’ to describe a certain sub-section of horror films?
Zach Clark: When looked at from an industry perspective this is a tiny film. It was made cheaply and quickly. It’s a strange animal. For me personally, that term is code for self-serious. Horror has been beset with this leaden self-seriousness in recent years that you see in Ari Aster’s work, for example. It’s nice for me to start seeing movies that are fun again. I fell in love with these kinds of movies by watching stuff from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. That was a time when they weren’t expected to play in every multiplex in America and vie for awards nominations. I wanted to make an actively fun movie that does not take itself too seriously. Elevated could just mean ‘good’ but that’s a representation of the moment that we are in. Movies that were dismissed on the grounds of being B-movies thirty or forty years ago are now taken seriously. I do think ‘elevated’ is soft-code for takes itself too seriously.
Zita Short: Going forward, are you planning to continue working within the genre sphere?
Zach Clark: I really love the artifice of movies and appreciate them because they often don’t attempt to replicate reality. This means that they can capture something deeper. Genre allows for world building and lets you explore all sorts of unique spaces.
Zita Short: Are there any films that you would recommend to readers?
Zach Clark: I really like Curse of the Crying Woman (1963). It’s a Mexican horror film from 1963. It’s October so I’m only watching horror movies. I really like vampire movies and I’m excited about all the great Hong Kong productions featured on the Criterion channel. I just watched Tsai Ming-Liang’s Vive L’Amour (1994) and I was really blown away by it.