Splatter Cinema Makes You Take a Cold Shower
Unless you spend your spare time reading horror blogs and perfecting your recipe for fake blood, you probably don’t realize that Atlanta has one of the best horror scenes in the country, thanks in large part to the folks at Splatter Cinema.
I met the devotees of gore—Lucas Godfrey, Lindsay Starke and Nik Morgan—at the site of the Chambers of Horror, the not-quite-haunted-house they will host through October in conjunction with artist Rene Ariagada.
As they guide me through the unfinished warehouse into their “office”—a room with over half a dozen stacked security televisions meant to creep out visitors—Nik explains the distinction between the Chambers of Horror and a haunted house. You won’t hear a lot of “boo!”s in the Chambers, he says. Instead, you’ll leave feeling like, “I want to go take a shower.” The “horror attraction,” as Splatter Cinema prefers to call the Chambers, focuses not on ghosts but gore, and it’s meant to disturb more than startle.
Besides Splatter Cinema and the Chambers of Horror, you may recognize Lucas from Atlanta Horrorfest and its infamous Zombie Walk, which he started five years ago. For the record, don’t confuse Atlanta Horrorfest with the guys with the (purposefully) similarly named Atlanta Horror Film Festival of dubious repute. After a messy business split with Eric Panter in 2007, Lucas and Co. have been through a lot of bad blood and drama that you can read about in this other article. To eliminate confusion, Lucas started calling the film portion of his festival “Buried Alive.”
Moving on, Lucas, Lindsay and Nik also run Gorehound Productions, a company specializing in film production and horror-themed events like the zombie pub crawl they held this spring for the Virginia-Highland’s Diesel Filling Station. At Gorehound they spend a lot of time making props. They’ve collected so many that Nik remarks, “You could make several movies with the shit we have in our houses.”
“It’s been a way to rationalize hoarding,” adds Lindsay.
Some of the things they’ve made from scratch? A human-sized meat grinder, a giant vaginal tunnel, a photobooth love shack of gore, a 4-foot skull bong, and an entire scene from Suspiria, one of the best horror movies ever made, according to Lindsay. Since Gorehound Productions is still just breaking even and the three are using their day jobs to support their passion, they procure whatever props they don’t make themselves by digging through trash, going to Goodwill three times a week and scouring antique stores. Due to these efforts, they say, if they ever do get a real budget, they’ll make it last five times as long as a normal person could. Gesturing to a hypothetical object, Nik shrugs, “Yeah, I can make an arm with that.”
Gorehound eventually wants to become a full-on production company and allow its members to make a profession out of their expertise, but in the meantime, Lucas, Lindsay and Nik strive to continue cultivating Atlanta’s horror subculture.
They’ve been successful so far. Atlanta has joined Austin and L.A. as a major contender for the nation’s best horror scene, and Luke says he gets emails all the time from fans in bigger cities saying, “God, I wish I lived in Atlanta.”
One of the city’s major spook assets is the Plaza, where Splatter Cinema screens the 35mm films it rents each month. As an original grindhouse theater, provoking audiences with gore there feels about right. Splatter Cinema doesn’t simply show movies, however. For each film they recreate a scene in the Plaza’s lobby, providing audience members with a disturbing photo op as well as a chance to participate in the horror.
Lucas, Lindsay and Nik spend much of their time trying to find the films they screen. When tax laws changed decades ago and production companies started getting charged for each film in their vaults, a lot of B movies were either thrown away or lost. Take Basket Case, for example. After discovering that neither the film’s director nor producer could locate the print, Splatter Cinema tracked it down to Canada. Not only did they show it to audiences for the first time in 25 years, they managed to score an interview with the director and an intro with the famous puppet who played the monster Belial. After the initial Plaza screening, Splatter Cinema saw Basket Case pop up in other cities. But this wasn’t the first time other horror scenes had taken a cue from Atlanta. Splatter Cinema has become the first stop in a kind of second world tour for many obscure films.
Nearly three years after the first Splatter Cinema screening, crowds regularly approach 300 and include people driving in from other states.
The Plaza sometimes receives complaints. After watching The Last House on the Left, people complained that someone should have warned them about the rape scenes. When The Human Centipede played, disgusted audience members left mid-movie. But Splatter Cinema doesn’t let the criticism bother them. In fact, to “genuinely offend people to the point where they’re crying,” Nik says, “is kind of a sign of success.” Besides simply enjoying fake blood and styrofoam axes, Splatter Cinema brings an intellectual curiosity to their screenings.
They just launched a new event, Splatterday Night Live, which fills the Plaza’s time slot previously occupied by the Silver Scream Spookshow, currently on hiatus. On the last Saturday of each month, Splatterday Night Live will present a classic horror flick combined with live gore, bringing a slice of the Chambers of Horror to the movie-watching experience. “One of the great opportunities with Splatterday Night Live,” Lindsay says, “is expanding the range of offending people—pressing all sorts of buttons and testing people’s boundaries. Playing with people’s expectations and helping to test their limits.”
“It’s the dark side of humor,” adds Nik, “making people uncomfortable so they laugh.”
So are there any films that make the Splatter Cinema guys and girl so uncomfortable that they laugh?
“Fire in the Sky,” says Lindsay, while plunging a retractable knife against her throat.
“The Day After,” says Nik, idly playing with a real butcher’s knife. The 1983 made-for-TV movie dramatized a fictional nuclear war.
“Event Horizon,” Lucas says. “As a kid I got scared all the time.”
While to call them amateurs would be a stretch, none of these guys exactly got a degree in freaking people out– except maybe Nik, who studied mortuary science. Lindsay majored in Latin American Studies and has a nine-to-five working marketing and social media for Big Squid. Lucas studied film and now works dual jobs as a special effects artist and bartender. Nik is a charter school teacher and librarian, but does some special effects make-up and set dressing on the side. Since he was 13, he confesses that he wanted to name his daughter Ripley, after Sigourney Weaver’s character in Alien.
If you’d gone to the April screening of Rosemary’s Baby you would have seen Nik’s pregnant girlfriend playing a bloody Mia Farrow in the Plaza lobby.
And as luck would have it, Splatter Cinema procured the print for Alien the same month Nik’s daughter was born. They named her Ripley.
“The great thing about having a kid,” Nik said, “is that now we have another prop sitting around our house.”
Up Next:
Sept. 14: The Blob (1988)
Sept. 25: Fright Night
Sept. 26: Zombie Walk
Oct. 1: Chambers of Horror opens at Masquerade. Now looking for paid actors. Audition information here
A highlight reel from last months Splatterday Night Live!
Photo Credit: Tim Song