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An Unholy Set Visit
Posted Mar 30, 2005 - 06:28 PM

I only recently moved to Queens, New York, but even longtime
residents were stymied when I asked, "Where is Fort Totten?"

After several fruitless attempts at asking various friends, I
finally looked the damn thing up and discovered that Fort Totten
sits on a northeastern tip of the borough, right next to the
neighborhood of Bayside, and has in fact been a working military
base for over a century, protecting its tiny portion of the East
Coast from...well, invaders from Connecticut, I suppose. The truth
is that Fort Totten is in the process of being shut down, with many
of its offices, buildings and barracks no longer in use, making it a
perfect location to shoot - what else - a horror movie.

Well, maybe not. In fact, Unholy, an independent feature starring
genre icon Adrienne Barbeau and "Buffy" regular Nicholas Brendan
helmed by first-time director Daryl Goldberg, is kind of hard to
describe. The director, the actors, and executive
producer/screenwriter Sam Freeman all sketch out the basics of the
plot but are cautious about giving too much away. With its bizarre
mix of conspiracy theory, science fiction, occultism, Nazi mythology
and domestic drama, Unholy may be that rare movie that incorporates
aspects of many different genres into what its creators hope will be
a unique and completely original experience.

"I think it's a very distinct movie," muses Goldberg at one point
during the afternoon I'm on the set. "Most of the time when I tell
people that the movie involves Nazi witchcraft, they just
immediately step back and say, `Whoa, I've never heard of anything
like that before.' I've been very hard-pressed to think of something
to compare it to and still haven't come up with anything, so I think
it's unique in that respect."

"A lot of low-budget horror movies always seem to follow the same
formula and be on a direct line straight to video," says Freeman
after he welcomes me to the location, an abandoned house on the
grounds of the base that's being used as the exterior for a cellar
entrance. "That's why I wanted to write a character-driven horror
thriller, which might give it a chance, because actors like Adrienne
Barbeau deserve to be on the big screen. Hopefully that will happen."

Long, winding roads lead through the base, past what looks like
large storage facilities, a field, rows of empty barracks and a
number of similarly deserted houses. There's a sense of desolation
and detachment here, particularly on a cold January day, even with
the busy Van Wyck Expressway and Whitestone Bridge visible in
relatively close range. With Goldberg's camera (the movie is being
shot on hi-def) focused on Adrienne Barbeau as she kneels before the
cellar door, pleading with the actress playing her suicidal daughter
below, the sense of loneliness is that much more palpable.
Barbeau plays Martha, a widow living in rural Pennsylvania with her
son Lucas (Brendan, who finished on the film the day before) and
daughter Hope (Siri Baruc), who comes home to find her daughter
about to blow her own head off with a shotgun in the basement of
their house. Martha doesn't succeed in stopping her child's horrific
demise, but the girl's death gradually leads the grieving mother to
investigate a conspiracy that involves a legendary local witch, Nazi
dabbling with the occult, and secret government experiments, with
the plot even referencing the fabled Philadelphia Experiment.

"She's just a suburban mom whose husband has passed, has one son
into drugs that she's sort of estranged from, and a daughter who we
come to find out has been acting very strangely for a while," says
Barbeau, sitting in her trailer between setups. "It's a
dysfunctional family. After her daughter's suicide, she decides
she's gonna move away, she and her son, and start over. But they're
faced with some strange characters who allude to something that
might have led to the suicide, other than just emotional trauma, so
she starts investigating and uncovers this government plot."

Of course, Barbeau is no stranger to either horror or science
fiction, with classics like The Fog, Creepshow and Escape From New
York on her resume (she was also married at one time to Fog and
Escape director John Carpenter). Her last foray into the genre was
2000's wicked horror satire, The Convent, but Barbeau admits she
doesn't seek out these roles. "I'm not a horror fan at all. I don't
go to see `em! I've seen The Fog once, Creepshow once, and Two Evil
Eyes (which she also appeared in) once. I thought The Convent was a
fun, low-budget film. But I've never seen Psycho, I saw Halloween
once - because I had to! - but I don't enjoy them. I don't want to
be scared."

Nevertheless, the script for Unholy appealed to her: "The character
and what she's going through (attracted me), especially for someone
who's not thirty years old to have the opportunity," says the
veteran actress. "Her daughter commits suicide, she's not sure if
her son is involved in a plot that led to that suicide...I was just
interested in the opportunity to explore all those emotions."

One thing Barbeau has been able to explore for sure on this shoot is
her resilience to outdoor shooting on the water in a chilly New York
winter (the film was shot mostly in Queens, with some additional
locations in Staten Island and New Jersey). "Physically it's been
hard, because we ended up doing it in the middle of this huge
blizzard in New York," she admits. "There were a couple of nights
where it wasn't so much about acting, it was about getting the lines
out without your teeth chattering so much that you thought you were
gonna cut your tongue off! There were a couple of mornings, five in
the morning, when we were right next to the water and it was
probably minus six degrees out with the wind chill factor. Those
were not easy!"
Luckily today is not one of those days. Although it's crisp outside
with the temperature hovering in the mid-forties, the sky is blue
and the sun is shining brightly enough to make conditions bearable.
Still, Barbeau has to continually run around the side of the house,
drop to her knees on cold concrete, and bang on the cellar door,
pleading with her unseen daughter. The scene is physically demanding
and emotionally tiring as well. "It's exhausting, especially when
you have to tap into it over and over again for the master, the
close-up, the other angle," Barbeau says. "But I have two friends
who've lost children, and I think it's probably the worst experience
an adult or a parent can have."

Heading back onto the set, Barbeau goes through her paces several
times as director Goldberg watches intently on a monitor just a few
feet from the action. Barbeau plays it a little more frantically,
then a little more controlled, as she and Goldberg search for just
the right tone. At one point, shooting has to stop as some
maintenance workers stroll casually into the frame along a road
behind the house. While the crew sets up for another angle, Sam
Freeman shows me the empty residence next door, which is being used
for the front of Martha's house, before taking me upstairs in the
main house to an eerily empty room where we chat about the genesis
of his script.

"I was reading through paranormal and conspiracy websites - I find
they serve as good inspirations for the foundation of horror
movies," says the 24-year-old Freeman, whose Sky Whisper production
company (which he runs with partner Joshua Blumenfeld) counts Unholy
as its first in-house feature. "I came across this interesting
article about a classified military document that was found in
Pennsylvania that indicated that after World War II, our own U.S.
government smuggled in Nazi technology to continue experiments right
here that the Nazis were conducting in Germany. They believed that
Hitler was onto something with this study of witchcraft and the
occult that the Nazis were working with. This document suggested
that we actually took these experiments and continued them on our
home soil."

Intrigued, Freeman began exploring these theories more, and also
began thinking about the legendary Philadelphia Experiment, an
alleged 1943 government experiment in which an electromagnetic field
was thrown around a Navy ship to determine if it could be rendered
invisible. According to the myth, the experiment left many of the
men on board insane, suffering from severe radiation burns,
partially embedded in the decks or walls, and possibly projected
through time. The existence of the Philadelphia Experiment has never
been proven, but it fit nicely into the scenario that Freeman was
cooking up.

"There's also a theme or commentary going on about how far we are
willing to go to theoretically help the greater good of mankind,"
says the screenwriter. "Are we willing to take on some of the evil
of Hitler if it means saving American lives in the future? Where do
you draw the line? The film is all about, `Beware the experiment.'
So who is part of it, and what does it mean if they're part of it?
Are they Nazis? Or is there something more to it?"
Freeman hopes that his second produced screenplay (his first, The
Peak, was made in India) will strike a chord in its finished form,
and he's thrilled to death with the way that the film is taking
shape. "Adrienne Barbeau has far surpassed any notion or foresight I
had for her character," he enthuses. "She's been amazing, and so has
Nick. And Daryl has truly impressed me. Every script change, he's
come to me first, so this is pretty much the script I wrote. There
weren't any major changes. Since this is our own production and
we're not with a studio, there aren't any higher-ups telling us that
we have to change things. The only restrictions we've had were in
terms of time and money." (Freeman does not divulge the film's
budget.)

It's those very restrictions that made first-time director Goldberg
take on the challenge. Finally able to talk during a quick car ride
from the set to the nearby hotel where the crew is staying, the 24-
year-old Goldberg confesses that he got interested in directing
through a teacher who took "troubled kids" and taught them the
basics of video and film. The Florida-born Goldberg went to NYU,
where he met Freeman, and shot several music videos before jumping
into feature-making with Unholy. "It's totally a rising-to-the-
occasion type of thing for me, not to mention a trial by fire," he
admits. "I've never shot anything in 18 days before. You know, on a
music video, you get two or three days to shoot three minutes. To
make a feature in 18 days, we're shooting six or seven pages a day;
it's a totally different pace. Every aspect of it, to be honest, is
fairly new to me. I've never worked with name talent, and Adrienne
and Nick have been absolutely amazing to work with. Adrienne is just
a consummate professional and I think everyone's learned a lot from
her, so that's been an absolute joy. Nick's been amazing too. He's
an incredibly fun guy and very, very popular amongst the crew."

Although Goldberg and Freeman didn't set out to make a horror
feature (or "thriller," to use Goldberg's preferred term), they
realized - like many filmmakers before them - that it was in many
ways the easiest genre to tackle for an independent venture. "There
was another movie, a kids' adventure movie that me and Sam were
trying to raise funds for," he recalls. "We wrote and loved the
script, tried raising money for it, then realized we didn't raise
anywhere near the amount we needed. So we stepped back and
said, `Okay, this is how much money we can really raise - what can
we make for this?' Me and Sam are both very big fans of the thriller
genre, so we wrote a movie based on our restrictions. It was
actually a wonderful way to work, because once you're very
restricted, it forces you to be very creative."

To work within the limits that they set for themselves, Goldberg
looked back to one of his favorite directors to determine how to
make the movie. "The way I put it to Sam was, `To me, a scary movie
isn't about the throat being cut, it's about the moment when the
knife's being pressed to the throat.' That's where the tension comes
from. The throat being cut is just exposition; what keeps you on the
edge of your seat is the tension leading up to that. So we just
talked about how we could stylize a movie to have it constantly
tense, and I always thought that was a very Hitchcockian approach."

Visually, Goldberg wanted to differentiate his film from typical
indie thrillers as well. "As far as cinematography, it's very moody,
very contrasty, very surreal -- not trying to make things look
natural," he explains. "There's a constant feeling of oddity, a
constant feeling of unusualness, so even in a scene that seems very
tame, visually there's something odd, even if it's working on a
subconscious level. The colors aren't right. There's props jagging
into the frame. We're just trying to keep up that constant (off-
kilter) mood...I always see these movies that are made for not a lot
of money, and they're struggling to look like a big-budget film, and
they fail every time. Why struggle and fail when instead, you can
try and make your movie look totally distinct and unique? We can
make it look like something people haven't seen before, and that's
been our approach all along."
Goldberg's approach (with the aid of his cinematographer and crew,
whom he constantly praises) is on display as the production moves to
the basement of the Fort Totten house. There, shadows and ripples of
filtered light create a truly unsettling mood, not to mention a
startling, almost painterly image on the director's monitor. A light
mist hangs in the air, and the back part of the basement is so dark
that Adrienne Barbeau nearly trips down the stairs as she is led
down (Sam Freeman is there to save her, adding `hero' to his credits
on the film).

This is the same scene that was being shot earlier, only this time
from the viewpoint of Hope, the doomed daughter of Barbeau's
character. Barbeau stands on the sidelines to deliver her lines,
while the waif-like Baruc stares plaintively up at the cellar door,
terror and sadness fighting on her face (she'll later be the subject
of one of the film's few elaborate makeup effects, a shotgun blast
to the head). A portrait of an evil-looking, almost demonic old man -
a Nazi witch, perhaps? - stares menacingly out from one corner of
the set, not in use but adding more atmosphere by its presence.

It's clear that the filmmakers have high ambitions for this film, as
evidenced by the cast, the care that Goldberg takes and the
dedication of the crew. When a rough cut is ready (which should be
about the time you are reading this), the plan is to begin shopping
for a distributor or entering Unholy in festivals. Either way, Sam
Freeman feels positive about the prospects for the film: "We have an
advantage with actors like Adrienne Barbeau and Nicholas Brendan,
who have huge cult followings," he theorizes. "Hopefully
distributors will see that this is not your standard straight-to-
video fare and it would do well with a broader audience. We think
the questions that this movie poses would seriously freak out every
single person who sees it, so we are one hundred percent optimistic
for a theatrical release."

For more info on Unholy, keep an eye on its official site right here:
http://www.unholymovie.com/

- Don Kaye