Four Years of Torture
Four years ago I had a dream that I would one day own a horror production company based out of my hometown of Fullerton. On February 24th, 2010 I got to celebrate the forth anniversary since I put that dream into motion. It has been a tough road and I’m proud of a lot of things that we have done, but I know there are so many more things left to do.
Here is a recap of the previous four years of owning and running Torture Chamber Productions, Orange County’s Home for New Horror Media.
I grew up in Fullerton during the eighties. The eighties was a great time for horror because of VHS. Every corner had a VHS rental store with isles lined up and down with horror movies. I would rent a horror movie everyday for $1 and my buddies would come over and watch them with me. That is how I watched the great classics such like A Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Evil Dead, Hellraiser, Halloween, and the Exorcist. This is where my passion for horror films was born.
Growing up a horror movie and comic book fan fostered my desire and ability to draw. At first I would write short horror stories and draw them out as 1-page comic strips. I would sell them to my friends for 10 cents a piece. I continued this hobby well into my high school years. I remember I had an art teacher take me to the side and talk about my art being too graphic. The reason she told me this was I did a photorealistic watercolor painting of zombie baby ripping its way out of its pregnant mother.
When I was in film school I carried on my tradition of putting out horror media. For one of my production classes I made a 16mm short horror film called Zombie Cokehead. My buddy, Erik Lynch, and I shot the whole thing in one day. We convinced the actor, Hayato Isa, to actually eat the guts he was ripping out of this victim, Julie Nguyen. If you ever want your actor to do something outrageous for a film remember to say this, “Pain is only one moment but film lives on forever.”
In my special effects class I made a short video project called Nightmare Tea. I shot it on my handy cam with my friend, Joseph Carlos Perez, all in one day. I then put so many post production effects on it that there was no way to tell it was shot by only two guys.
During my senior year of college, I had to produce my thesis project. I met with the professor of advanced production and she told me the perimeters for the projects they produce. So I spent my whole winter break coming up with a concept that we could shoot for $5K. One night after I got my daughter to sleep early I stayed up listening to Beethoven. Suddenly Moonlight Sonata struck my ear. I immediately got the idea and wrote the screenplay.
At that point in time, Cal State Fullerton had never funded a horror film before. I was skeptical that they would give me the funding to produce mine. That spring semester I stood in front of all of those eyes and pitched my idea. It was the most depraved, disgusting, revolting idea of all time but I was able to hook them with the theme. I said to them, “It doesn’t matter who you are, rich or poor, young or old; everyone knows what it’s like to feel lonely and everyone wants to be loved.”
I actually heard some “awes” after I presented the theme of my horror film. The
professor counted the votes and somehow my splatter film was chosen to be made. Now that I had the funding I needed to find a director. Unlike so many others in the film world, I had no aspirations to ever become a director, so I had to find one.
Most of the film students at Cal State Fullerton were your typical mainstream “whatever I see on TV is my only understanding of the world” type people. Those were the exact opposite traits I needed from someone to translate my vision onto film. There was a film student who caught my eye. He was a loner who always kept to himself. When I went over to talk to him I saw he was wearing a Metallica Ride the Lightning shirt. We began speaking about music and it warmed my heart to finally find another metalhead on campus. He told me his biggest influences were David Lynch and Alfred Hitchcock. I didn’t just find my director that day but I made one of my best friends - Ryan Amendt.
Ryan came from a lineage of lawyers so he knew since we were playing with other peoples’ money we needed an umbrella to protect our personal assets should things go horribly wrong. We decided to form our own production company to produce the film under. I went back to my long time creative consultant, Clark Jones, for advice. My girlfriend at the time had a little brother named Frank Nguyen who agreed to do our site for us. We went to the Santa Ana Office of Registrars and it became official, Torture Chamber Productions was born.
We shot The Perfect Girl in 5 days. We went through production hell in those days. We got kicked out of locations by cops. We all almost got into fistfights with one another. Ryan and I went days without sleeping or eating. We finished the film at the $9K mark and graduated that semester with a film under our company’s belt. The film premiered at Raleigh Studios that summer. It was a thrill for me to actually see people scream and cringe when they were supposed to.
That summer we wanted to promote the film so I drew up a short horror comic book with advertisements for the film in it. Ryan and I stayed up until 3am the night before Comic-con making copies of the comic book. The next day we passed out as many comics as possible with only two hours of sleep to live on. We had DVDs of our finished film and gave it to the booths with distributors.
That fall we got a lead with a small publisher who was interested in distributing horror comic strips from us. We hired an artist in New York named Joe Guido and he took up the task. We put together a 2-page spec comic and submitted it to the publisher. Ultimately the publisher passed on the idea.
Weekend of Horrors rolled around so Ryan and I bought all weekend passes. We once again jumped into our marketing mode and gave DVDs of our film to people who could potentially help us and comic books to the fans of the genre. That was when we met Guillermo Del Toro for the first time. He agreed to watch our film and get back to us at a later date.
Months later we met Guillermo at a function in Hollywood where he was promoting Pan’s Labyrinth. We asked Guillermo what he thought of our film. He replied back in Spanish but the translation to what he said was, “You went too far.”
That was the highlight of our lives!
A friend of mine named Hamelth Villalobos had written a thriller, Blind Society, for his thesis project the following year and Cal State Fullerton agreed to fund it. He called me in to produce the project since I was known for the darker genres. Ryan and I stepped in and produced it with the biggest crew we ever assembled before.
After that film a French filmmaker, Marie Sanyas, had already raised funds on her own and wanted our help producing her thriller. I took the reins as associate producer and handled all of the business/legal aspects and Ryan jumped on as cinematographer. Thus we produced Final Warning, our first international film.
In this industry, once you’re on a roll, you’re on a roll. The most amazing editor I’ve ever met in my life, Devesh Verma, had raised money on his own and wanted to try his hand at directing. He got into contact with us and thus we produced our first ever action-suspense film, Trigger. The most amazing aspect of this film is that we shot it on the red when the red was brand spanking new.
As you can imagine, Ryan and I needed a vacation. So we went to the LA Film Festival to take some time off of shooting and enjoy watching film. No such luck. We ran into Guillermo and he gave us a hard time about when our next project was coming out. So after the film festival Ryan and I jumped right back into the saddle.
A friend of ours, Rene Hernandez, was throwing a film festival and said that it was his first year having a horror section. He asked if our company could send him some films. He played Zombie Cokehead and The Perfect Girl. The Perfect Girl ended up winning best horror film at his festival.
After that night, the wanting to win more festivals awakened inside of me. I wrote a film that we could do every cheaply called Carrier of Death. I already have one sponsor for the film, IMOK Clothing, but need one more to fund the rest of the costs. So I have been working on raising money for our next one ever since.
All in all, it’s been a great four years. The road had been very rough and up and down at times, but I’m glad to have embarked on this adventure. Working with the team I have has been the greatest experience in my life. We have opened up our avenues to help aspiring horror film producers from OC to get exposure from our site. Maybe we have many many more years of torture in the years to come.
Victor Phan & Clark Jones
Torture Chamber Productions
March 24, 2010
Comments powered by CComment