Director's statement:
I want to make Slayfest because it does something I love in comedy: it takes an utterly absurd premise and treats it with complete seriousness. Dave and Peter desperately want to be respected serial killers, yet they are petty, insecure, competitive and spectacularly ill-equipped. They imagine themselves as terrifying professionals, but the reality is two exhausted men dragging bodies up a mountain.
Beneath the horror and physical comedy, the film is about ambition and the painful gap between how people see themselves and who they actually are. The reversal at the end makes the film particularly funny and satisfying. The woman they have treated as cargo is neither helpless nor dead. She is more capable, more prolific and considerably more terrifying than either of them. Dave and Peter spend the film trying to prove that they are formidable men, only to discover they have been carrying the real threat between them: the Karenator.
Visually, I am excited by the difference between the majestic landscape of Snowdonia and the grubby practicalities of transporting a body through it. I want to give the landscape the scale and seriousness of an epic. Against that beauty, Dave and Peter will wheeze, stumble, bicker and drag their increasingly inconvenient “kill” uphill. The film has a distinctive visual identity: cinematic and expansive, but also sweaty, physical and painfully undignified.
The violence will be heightened, audacious and firmly within the world of horror comedy. However, I do not want the humour to depend on gore alone. It must come from character, rhythm and the deteriorating relationship between the two men. Their dialogue should feel fast and instinctive, while their physical behaviour reveals how false their confidence is.
Framing, sound and editing will help build the jokes and intensify the contrast between the gravity of their mission and the incompetence of its execution.
The script’s success at Austin confirmed the strength of Mark’s comic voice and the immediate appeal of the premise. More importantly, Mark and I have worked extensively together on screenplays, developing characters, structure and comic rhythm. That process has given me a close understanding of what makes his humour work and where performance and visual storytelling can take it further.
I want Slayfest to be bold, cinematic and gleefully improper: a sharply performed horror comedy about delusion, rivalry and underestimated women.
