Writer-director David DeFalco has managed to turn his low-budget slasher movie Chaos into something of an underground phenomenon, thanks to both a savvy marketing campaign touting it as "the most brutal film ever made" and a little inadvertent help from film critic Roger Ebert.
Ebert gave the film a zero-star review in the Chicago Sun-Times, calling it "ugly, nihilistic and cruel," and DeFalco and producer Steven Jay Bernheim responded by purchasing an ad in the paper and running an open letter to Ebert challenging his review. Ebert then devoted an entire column to elaborating on his reasons for not only disliking Chaos but also holding its creators in contempt. Since then, Canada's national Globe and Mail newspaper has run a column attacking Bernheim and DeFalco's defense of Chaos (they claim its extreme depictions of violence are educational), and reviews in other mainstream publications and on websites devoted to horror films have been almost universally bad.
DeFalco, who looks like a demonic bodybuilder and has a background in straight-to-video cheapies starring the likes of Andrew Dice Clay, Corey Haim and Coolio, brings his film to Vegas this week and next, after it's played in only a handful of other cities. In his thick Boston accent, the filmmaker holds forth on his creative process, why bad reviews are good for business, and how his movie is similar to Schindler's List.
How did the idea for the film come about?
In the beginning, the idea was to just do kind of a modern-day version of one of these '70s-style, drive-in horror movies, which I was really enthralled by. I was actually going to drive-ins since I was about 10 years old, when I was a kid on the East Coast. A lot of times, my mother would take me and these movies would be billed as horror movies, but they would actually be more like brutal, almost like crime dramas, like Last House on the Left, Texas Chain Saw Massacre, where there really weren't any monsters, but the monsters were the people.
From the disclaimer at the beginning and some of your quotes on the website, you've positioned this as an educational film. What do you hope people get out of seeing the movie?
Well, the whole educational thing, the producer wanted to put that on. That wasn't really my idea. They wanted to put it on as like a disclaimer. My whole thing about that is I never made this to be an educational movie, because that would almost be laughable for me to say that. I made it to be what it is: the most brutal movie ever made. But what I did notice when we've screened this thing for the hundreds of people who have seen it so far, is that a lot of people were coming back saying they'd never forget the movie and a lot of girls were saying, "Man, I'll never go off with somebody I don't know again," or do something stupid that they may have done in the past that could have put them in a situation like this. So in hearing that over and over again, it kind of sunk in with me that maybe these people could get some kind of message or education from the movie, much like when they had those old drunk-driving movies, where they'd show you these horrific car accidents and things like that to educate people into not drinking and driving.
Is it almost better for you to get these extremely negative reviews than it would be to get positive ones?
Oh, for sure. Like in Ebert's review, he said stuff like, "There are two scenes so gruesome that I cannot even describe them no matter what words I use." He actually gave us a lot of compliments. And a lot of reviewers did that, like they said, "Man, this is definitely the most brutal film of all time," but then they'd go on to say either they didn't like it or they wouldn't give it a good review, and that is OK, because that's what the most brutal movie of all time should get. Because if that's what it really is, most people it's going to strongly affect, and a lot of people, they may not like it, but it strongly affects them, and that, for us, works fine for this kind of movie.
A user on the Internet Movie Database who likes the movie describes it as "fun." Is that a good reaction as far as you're concerned?
Look, any time you're getting people writing about it like that, you're going to get a whole gamut of stuff going on, but the bottom line is that it falls in the horror genre, and it's like anything that—you know, I mean, Schindler's List, for the most part, isn't the most uplifting movie, but at the same time, anything that's kind of real-life and brutal or extreme, it's like you experience an emotional rush from the movie. And that's what I think this movie does. It impacts you strongly emotionally and it gives you that ride. That's what movies are all about. They all don't necessarily have to be uplifting or positive for it to still move someone emotionally and make it an experience.