Editor's Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on August 2, 2015, and we're proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
Canadian filmmaker George Mihalka, director of the original My Bloody Valentine, has become a familiar face at Montreal’s Fantasia festival. This year, he came with a particular purpose: Pitching a new fright feature called Revelations at the Frontières International Co-Production Market, joined by scriptwriter Al Kratina (pictured above left with Mihalka).
Kratina gives Fango the basics of the storyline: “It’s about five ex-convicts who accidentally kidnap the Antichrist and hold her for ransom, and understandably, her father isn’t too pleased about that. They hole up in a church, and all hell breaks loose.”
“Imagine the crew from Reservoir Dogs accidentally kidnapping Satan’s daughter,” Mihalka adds.
Revelations pulls a twist on the typical Antichrist story by making that character female. “It’s the Antichristine!” Mihalka quips, and Kratina says, “I can’t think of any other examples, other than To the Devil…a Daughter, but that was back in the ’70s.” He then reveals that in the initial conception, the role was in fact male. “The original script featured Satan’s son, and we put that out for coverage and got very good feedback on it. Then we started thinking, what would happen if the devil had a daughter instead of a son? How would that change the dynamics between the characters, their relationships and their arcs? And we figured, instead of talking about it, as George says, why don’t I just write it, and we both quite like it. Now we’ve got both versions, and we’ve had some split votes as to which way to go.”
“Although it seems that most people are leaning toward the devil’s daughter,” Mihalka notes. “Surprisingly enough!”
This will be the director’s first fright feature since 1994’s Relative Fear (he’s been busy in TV since), and his reasons for returning to the genre boil down to one word: “Fantasia. I’ve been a guest of the festival for the last four or five years, since [fest co-director] Mitch Davis invited me. I’ve been a member of the jury, and it’s the combination of the love and encouragement from Fantasia and the fans of My Bloody Valentine, and the realization of how much that movie means to the genre community. I’ve constantly been asked, ‘When are you gonna make another horror film?’ and I always said, ‘When I find the right one.’ I have now finally found the right one, where I’m proud to put ‘From the director of My Bloody Valentine’ on it. Because, let’s be honest, the expectations will be kinda high, so I don’t want to just do a movie and exploit that idea, and disappoint the people who will go see it. Now with the script Al wrote, I’m 100 percent confident that I can give the genre fans a great ride.”
One thing he did want to avoid was a return to the subgenre he successfully mined with My Bloody Valentine. “I didn’t want to do another slasher film. Not that I won’t ever make another one, but I didn’t want to just reinvent what I already did. I wanted to do something totally different, so Revelations was just perfect. I love crime drama, I love criminal characters, I love that dark world, and this combines that world with something so cool and supernatural. At the same time, it’s about a crew who don’t believe in any of this, and slowly come to the realization that they’ve fucked with something they should never have touched, which I find really exciting.”
The duo’s Revelations presentation during the Frontières pitch session emphasized paintings as visual references rather than the usual clips from other movies. This event took place in the same room at Montreal’s Concordia University “where I used to give pitches to my film teachers,” Mihalka reveals. “And in those days, I had a fabulous professor named André Herman, who studied at the Polish Film Academy. As you know, Polish movie and production posters are the most incredible in the world. And André always said, ‘Try to use paintings [as references], because they already cry out with the emotions you’re trying to find. Use paintings to show me the inspiration for your imagery, then use those as your basis.’
“So rather than stealing scenes and stills from existing movies, I said, ‘Well, why don’t we turn it around and do it the way he suggested?’ No music to distract, just showing images. So we used, obviously, Hieronymus Bosch’s visions of hell, William Blake’s visions, and we had Goya in there. Then we had three modern ones: Francis Bacon, Clive Barker, and Beksiński, the Polish Surrealist painter. I think they give people a very good idea of the visual world we want to explore. I don’t think we need to show anybody what a film noir Reservoir Dogs looks like. We just want to say, ‘Hey, this is the world these poor fucks are gonna end up in.’ ”
