[Editorial] Horror Filmmakers to Watch: Craig Ouellette

Short films have the ability to showcase a writer and director’s talent in a fascinating way. With little time and often barely any money, unique and innovative methods of storytelling must be utilized to tell a complete and cohesive narrative. In the horror world, short form filmmaking is a tool to challenge a viewer’s boundaries and explore the darkest corners of humanity (and beyond) with flourish. The format shows both unbelievable will, intense tenacity, and an unending well of creativity. 

In my series of Horror Filmmakers to Watch, I aim to shine a light on some of the most unique, terrifying, gruesome, and hilarious short and feature horror films and filmmakers in the festival circuit and beyond. My hope is that getting to know these filmmakers will entice you the reader to seek these films out and share with your friends, and to champion often-overlooked forms of horror creation. You’ll be shocked, you’ll be scared, you’ll be hooked.

Craig Ouellette: $trip, Anniversary

I first saw Craig Ouellette’s $trip at the 2021 Portland Horror Film Festival. The film was the last of an especially impressive block and immediately pulled me in with the gorgeous cinematography, rich color design, and haunting score. 

$trip joins Penny on her first night in an exclusive and shadowy strip club as she has one dance to impress a group of masked elites under the watchful tutelage of the woman in charge. $trip brings viewers to the furthest lengths of titillation before pulling the rug out from under us in a grotesque and gorgeous way. 

Craig’s short film Anniversary was featured at FilmQuest and is the prologue of his current work in progress, the feature film Straight on Till Morning, and without spoiling a masterful work of misdirection, the story follows a newly married couple on a road trip through the desert. 

What I’ve noticed the most about Craig is his ability to build tension in such a short amount of time. It feels like a concrete grasp of genre and a keen instinct as to how far to push the audience before giving them the release they need. I look forward to following his career as I have no doubt people will find his work as alluring and entertaining as I do! 

$trip has won Best Horror Short at Atlanta Horror Film Festival, Best Makeup FX Short at Sin City Horror Fest, and a Director’s Choice Award at The Indie Horror Film Festival. It has been nominated at FilmQuest, NOLA Horror Film Fest, and Chicago Horror Film Festival. Anniversary has won Best Thriller Short at Atlanta Horror Film Festival and has been nominated at FilmQuest and Nightmares Film Festival. Both shorts have been accepted at several other highly regarded genre festivals. 

The following interview was conducted in the historic Hollywood Theater in Portland, Oregon, USA. I spoke with him after the screening of $trip at Portland Horror Film Festival. There are spoilers within this interview! You can find Craig Ouellette here.

Cheers Craig! So, you are the writer and director of $trip.

I am the writer, director, co-producer, editor, and colorist – and partial sound designer.

I have to say I enjoyed every bit of the film. I was really blown away. Is this your first film?

Thank you, and not even close. 

I didn’t think so. Tell me about your history with filmmaking.

I went to school at the University of Iowa then moved out to LA, and at this point I’ve done about 25 short films. This is one of the bigger ones in terms of scale of effects and budget. Some of them played film festivals, I actually did a $2250 feature film in 1999.

Wow, that’s a feat. And what was the genre of that feature?

That was a horror, a horror-thriller but it was a different time, it didn’t really go anywhere, but that was the beginning of the digital revolution. Then I did a feature documentary about my mom's battle with cancer that is on YouTube. I was reluctant at first but now I'm glad it's on YouTube because I get multiple comments every single day from people who watch it. That won best doc at Zero Fest and played at Slamdance. 

Have you found yourself sticking mainly to the horror genre?

They're usually horror, action, thriller type movies sometimes they'll be comedy or drama or documentary, but I like suspense a lot. So, tension, suspense…I definitely like to get a visceral reaction from people.

I definitely got that from watching $trip. $trip offers brilliantly paced tension building and is a beautiful juxtaposition between titillation and disgust. I'm curious what your relationship is to body horror and extreme horror, as $trip straddles the line between both.

There are a couple of answers to that question. I mean, some of my favorite movies, like Cronenberg’s The Fly, which is about as body horror as you can get, The Ruins is a fantastic body horror movie – The Thing – I definitely enjoy all of those kind of movies because I think the breakdown of the human body and the breakdown of the human mind are probably the two scariest things to me. I'm sure some of that has to do with what happened to my mom with her brain tumor and the cancer destroying her personality and destroying her physicality. But I also think that was present before that, though I don’t think I really made anything quite to this degree before her sickness. 

So, this is your first real deep dive into body horror.

At least as far as makeup and effects go. 

Speaking of like the makeup and effects, you have truly amazing effects on $trip, what was your budget on this film and how much of that went into special effects?

I spent about $7000 for the whole thing, production, post, though that doesn’t include sending it to film festivals. This whole movie actually happened because I met Rachel Wagner and asked her if she thought she could make a stripper strip off her skin and she was like, “fuck yeah!”, so I said let’s do it. And she gave me a deal and a half. I would say a quarter of the budget was makeup effects, maybe a little more. 

That’s good to know, there are a lot of people out there worried about pulling the trigger on filming their first short because you hear about short films costing $20, $50, even $100,000. It feels impossible. So, to know that you pulled $trip off with only $7,000 will be inspirational to many because your film looks like a lot of money without costing a lot of money. Of, course, I’m sure it helps that you did most of your post-production work yourself.

It sure did. 

Tell me a little about where the stripper storyline came from and the kinds of themes you tackle in the story. 

Well, the idea came from a random thing that popped out of my mouth while I was working on a web series, where the random question “what if a stripper stripped off her skin” came into my head, but I tucked it away until I met Rachel and realized it could possibly be done. I also wanted to shoot something I could finish. I thought this idea was a great trick to play on the audience, to titillate them to the point where they think they’re about to get the goods and then all of a sudden have them saying, “Jesus, what’s happening?!” But I knew it needed to have a deeper theme, and I started thinking about this obsession we have with youth. I’m not a filmmaker in my 20s and, while I love the fact that young people bring new voices to the table, I also think that Hollywood in general, but society as well, focuses so much on what a young person has to say and so quickly disregards what anybody over 40 and, god forbid, a woman over 40, has to say. It makes me feel like we’re missing out on a lot of amazing stories that people over 40 have to tell. It doesn’t mean that one is more valid than the other, but that both are valid and should be heard. That’s probably the most personal aspect of the movie. The obsession with youth in the movie is a statement on our obsession with youth in society. 

It’s also about the artist’s journey. Because I think as artists, if we don't bare our souls and express ourselves with truth and honesty, I think what's the point of what we’re doing and also that we aren’t going to connect with our audience. And while it’s scary to put it out there because there’s a huge risk you may be rejected, if we don’t bare it all, what are we going to get? This is also why Penny is sort of triumphant in the movie, so that it’s not just this woman stripping off her skin but the tale of her journey and her triumph in the end.

Yeah, she is definitely not a victim in the end, even though her body is destroyed, I never got the impression that she was a victim. This was something that really stood out to me, that you never used this story and this platform to exploit your actress or this character. Your short turns exploitation on its head, bringing the viewer to think that the sex and the dance is there for pleasure, before exploiting the idea of exploitation itself through disturbing and shocking discovery. It is very indicative to the artist’s journey, where we’re told that we have to bare ourselves to get ahead, but the truth is that we can bare ourselves and still not get ahead, and by then we may have been sucked dry. 

So, tell me about the process of finding Yuwi Kim who plays Penny.

We found Yuwi through auditioning. The number one thing we needed was a good actor, and number two was that she had to be a dancer of some form or fashion because we didn’t have time to teach someone to dance outside of the choreography. She sent in a video audition then we did in-person callbacks. We needed to see how she moved and interpreted the character, but always made a point to emphasize that there would be no removing of clothing for the audition, even though there was some nudity required in the film, and there was always a woman in the audition room at all times. 

The choreography was designed by Caitlin Rose Williams and the song was written for the movie, written in about six days. I said I needed a song that sounded like Beyonce’s Crazy in Love from Fifty Shades of Grey because someone auditioned with that song and I was blown away. 

And who composed that song?

Her musician moniker is F/B/C.  

Everything in the short works together, from the pacing, the music, the lighting, everything works so well to draw you in so close before it becomes tedious, because even a sexy woman dancing can become tedious, but you’re drawn in right to where you’re on the edge of your seat before it really hits you, what exactly is happening. It was pretty outstanding. 
So, what’s next for you?

I’ve got three features in the works, two that I’ve been working on for a while and one that I wrote over the pandemic. Straight on Till Morning is a feature I shot part of before Covid got in the way and is a script I co-wrote with Neal McLaughlin. (*This film has been accepted into the Movie Maker Production Services Program)

Well, Craig, thank you so much to talking to me for Ghouls Magazine. I love $trip and look forward to people seeking it out and sharing in this experience, and I believe you have a long, successful indie horror career ahead of you.

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