Catching Up With… Deadgirl's Marcel Sarmiento and Gadi Harel

I first met Los Angeles filmmakers Marcel Sarmiento and Gadi Harel last October, outside a screening of their coming-of-age creep-out Deadgirl in Sitges, Spain. It was far from the only entry in the International Fantastic Film Festival of Catalonia to explore transgressive themes involving female sex slaves, secluded basements and last-minute shocker twists. Indeed, the festival offers a feast of such things.

But because I was arriving early to see a midnight show, I got to see how effectively the twentysomething directors executed their game. It was all there in the faces of the audience as the gasps echoed and the lights came up at the Prado, a beautifully creaky old moviehouse in the middle of town. As the crowd filed out past the filmmakers, some looked at them and shook their heads. Some cast malevolent glares. And quite a few marched up with giant grins, excited to have been jolted out of their skins.

Sarmiento and Harel go on the road this weekend, appearing at select midnight premieres in such cities as Chicago, Austin, Houston, Seattle, Dallas, Montreal and New York. We caught up with them recently to inquire about how they found new life in the zombie genre.

Paste: Your film has provoked some pretty strong response from viewers at festival screenings, and not unsurprisingly. What have been some of your favorite reactions from people so far, from any extreme?

Marcel Sarmiento: The best are the “It’s not what I expected it to be” kind. When people were warned, came reluctantly, and were genuinely surprised. We recently had a mother and daughter who were quite moved by the movie. That was awesome.

Gadi Harel: Then again, there are those who call us pussies for not going far enough. The people who whisper to us afterwards, “You know, if only you had more beating...” They creep the shit out of us.

Paste: Ever since I Was a Teenage Werewolf, at least, adolescence has been a rich inspiration for horror movies. Deadgirl takes the high-school class divisions common to most teen comedies, evokes elements from films like River's Edge, and then brings a—and, obviously, there's no spoiler here—sexy, volatile, but rather emotionally detached, zombie girl into an already hormonally charged mix. Did this start out as a coming-of-age drama or a zombie movie, or both?

Sarmiento: The script was a pretty harsh read. Trent [Haaga]’s such a great writer that it made the script almost hard to stomach in parts.

Harel: But underneath it all we could see how this storyline really worked as a template for a surreal coming-of-age story. Bringing that out was something we worked a long time on.

Paste: You've mentioned that some female viewers totally "got it," but it might be easy for audiences to take this as a pretty misogynistic piece of work. I think it could go either way depending on how you interpret the last couple of scenes. Was there much discussion about this before shooting, and have you found a little bit of controversy to be a good thing?

Sarmiento: We knew that no matter what, a lot of people were going to throw that label at us. Didn’t matter what our intention was, didn’t matter what actually happens in the movie, but just based on the premise. So it’s not surprising when we get it. Controversy was always going to be part of it because of the nature of the taboos in the story, and knowing how we weren’t going to shy away from certain choices. But we didn’t set out to make something controversial, in all seriousness.

Harel: In all seriousness, we didn’t set out to make something controversial. But at the same time we knew the movie would get talked about. The challenge was to make a movie good enough that it was worth debating. The fact that both sides of the argument go on at length with the same amount of passion is probably the most exciting part of this release.

Paste: The interiors of the hospital set are amazingly creepy. What the hell is that place? And how tricky was it to shoot there?

Sarmiento: It’s a massive abandoned hospital in downtown L.A. that’s now a location for tons of movies and TV shows. E.R. shot its pilot there, and Freddy Krueger was incinerated in the basement boiler room.

Harel: They shut the place down about 30 years ago and just left tons of stuff behind. And the deeper you go, like where we shot, the spookier it gets. You’re in some dark tunnel in the bowels and pass a row of real baby incubators... It’s not pleasant.

Sarmiento: Harris, our cinematographer, was great, a real artist. One thing we agreed on was that despite budget and time limitations, we’d have to find ways to make the film, dare I say it, pretty. His big worry in not really knowing us was that we’d just want to shoot the gore and attack it as a horror film, when in fact, we spent much more time trying to craft something that’s hopefully hypnotic.

Paste: Speaking of that, I note that he used the Viper camera to shoot Deadgirl. What is the Viper camera?

Sarmiento: It’s the camera that David Fincher uses a lot on his movies, and if you like that dark look, with a natural green cast as your base, and really rich depth and grain. You can’t do better.

Paste: Who or what inspired you guys to become filmmakers?

Sarmiento: When you’re a kid, there’s almost nothing as transporting as watching a movie. Moviemaking doesn’t exist as a concept at that point. It’s just this thing that you know you love to experience.

Harel: We met when we were 13, and Marcel was the only person I knew with a video camera. Everything just sort of started then. Learning along the way. And we were hooked.

Sarmiento: There was an immediate thrill, making something and then getting people together to watch it.

Harel: And then we were at the Toronto Film Festival last September premiering Deadgirl for 1,200 people, and it was that same rush, albeit on a whole new level.

Sarmiento: I remember shooting things that would now land us in jail, things like faking the killing of teachers in school, which we shot in the school classroom with the principal’s permission, with blood and guts and stuff like that. Ridiculous stuff, sure, but fun.

Paste: You're going on the road this weekend to promote the movie at midnight screenings around the country. It almost seems like an act of faith these days to expect audiences to go out to a theater for anything that isn't Transformers or a Jennifer Aniston rom-com. Do juicy, freaky, low-budget so-called "genre" films have a chance these days?

Harel: We certainly hope so.

Sarmiento: I have to admit, it’s hard enough for me to go out to the movies, let alone at midnight. But we’re constantly surprised by the reaction and the amount of people who have a real desire to support something fresh. We had an 11 a.m. screening in France a Saturday morning, and 800 people showed up. I was blown away.

Paste: Who is the Deadgirl and where did you find her? That's a pretty brave performance. Not something you'd ever catch a budding Lindsay Lohan doing.

Sarmiento: We got lucky. That’s the truth. There’s no Deadgirl without our dead girl, but our casting calls were providing choices that were increasingly…

Harel: Porny. And this thing that the boys find in the basement had to feel real, and beautiful, and had to feel like it had a soul. She does very little in the movie and yet had to convey so much. While being completely naked.

Sarmiento: Jenny [Spain] was a friend of a friend who never acted before but totally got the kind of movie we were trying to make. She ended up being a real partner on the project. It’s awesome to see so many reviews single out her performance.