By :Billy Gil | Posted: 29 Sep 2009
bgil@questex.com,

They don’t make ’em like they used to. So goes the saying, whether it’s about songs, books or movies about people who kill people.

Thankfully, Nicholaus Goosen has directed a horror film that’s a lovely throwback to horror films that scared the crap out of us as kids — movies like Poltergeist and Carrie and Halloween — movies that remembered to actually develop their characters because it was a lot more terrifying when they were killed off. The Shortcut, a straight-to-video gem from Anchor Bay, is out on DVD now. The film follows a group of teens in a town in which the land behind the high school holds dark secrets, with kids daring one another to take the shortcut through the woods in which a mysterious old man dwells.

Far from the faceless masses of most gory straight-to-video horror, The Shortcut is rated ‘PG-13’ — and that’s a virtue. I found myself recalling R.L. Stine and others’ teen horror novels I read when I was younger, in which there’s due time given to these kids’ everyday lives, complete with actual witty dialogue, and the horror they encounter seems like something you could have heard about as a kid, the urban legend stuff rather than the more esoteric generic crazed killer or monster story. The film stars Drew Seeley, who is the singing voice for Troy in High School Musical, and Katrina Bowden, who plays hot intern Cerie in “30 Rock,” and the film is a production of Happy Madison, Adam Sandler’s company. Goosen says the idea came from Sandler’s real life, from “an old guy who lived in the neighborhood that everyone was scared of.”

HM: What were some of your inspirations for this film?

Goosen: When I was brought onto the project, everyone had Disturbia in mind … but I saw it more as along the lines of Wolf Creek, which is one of my favorite slasher films in the past few years. Originally it was rated ‘R.’ All of the deaths were taking place in the second half of the movie. What I really liked about Wolf Creek was that it was a slow build … so that when they died in the end, it was a slow impact. We have to make sure we care about these characters and that we know them so that when they kick the bucket at the end, it has meaning, rather than the body count starting really early on and we don’t really care.

One of my favorite ‘PG-13’ horror films of all time is Poltergeist. The movie bears not a lot of resemblance — I guess the family moving to a new town and discovering things around the neighborhood — but growing up, that was one of the movies I remember loving.

HM: It reminded me a bit of R.L. Stine teen horror stories I read when I was younger, and also films like Halloween.

Goosen: I love Halloween and John Carpenter is one of my favorite directors. Being a kid in the ’80s, I looked up to him a lot. I love the way that those guys played everything real, as if they could really be happening. What would it be like if you lived in a haunted house in a suburban neighborhood? Where that’s where the evil’s taking place.

HM: The look of The Shortcut I thought was really cool because it didn’t look like it was trying too hard. The idea of this closed off area behind an elementary school is already scary to most kids. Was that something you were conscious of?

Goosen: There were a lot of things like that I tried to avoid. I made a conscious decision, we’re not going to use a mist machine at all. We don’t need to have a light coming in at night with the fog coming in behind it because to me that just smacks of cliché and unoriginality. We don’t need to put up fake cobwebs and that kind of stuff. When it came time to address that little back area for the school, it was just, “put up a fake fence and make it look like it hasn’t been used in a while.” It just had to look real.

HM: Were there any urban legends or anything as a kid that freaked you out that you drew inspiration from?

Goosen: “Say ‘Bloody Mary’ three times in the mirror” — that one still freaks me out.

HM: Was it tough to keep it in the ‘PG-13’ rating? Some of the stuff I was actually surprised to see, given the rating.

Goosen: Our schedule was really, really tight, so we pretty much everything we shot is pretty much in the movie. So I devised all the kills to work in a ‘PG-13’ way. I was thinking ahead of time how to do the kills without having to see things on camera necessarily. The one time I got to use a little bit of blood is when Taylor (played by Josh Emerson) gets hit by the sledgehammer … they made me take out where the blood splatters on one of the character’s faces. … It was stuff like that. And making me lower the sound of the sledgehammer. Otherwise, everything pretty much made it in there that I had planned.

HM: Do you feel like this movie stands out from the pack of straight-to-video horror films?

Goosen: As far as the home video thing goes, I was thinking that comparatively, our movie is as theatrical-worthy as any. Certainly for the amount of money we spent on it. Most movies in the genre that go to video aren’t considered that good, but the way the industry is changing, and the way people are seeing movies — people like Steven Soderbergh putting movies out on demand the same day (as theatrical, in reference to 2005’s Bubble) — … a lot of movies are released theatrically just for the vanity of the filmmakers, when the audience who are going to see certain kinds of films aren’t going to see them in theaters, they’re going to watch them online or on HD or something. So I guess it’s better to have people pleasantly surprised when they see the movie than having some sort of disappointing box office numbers.

HM: There’s a decent amount of gore here, but there’s way more time devoted to developing the characters. Is that something you think is missing from modern horror?

Goosen: There are certainly a lot of horror films out there that are stylishly shot, but there are very few that have the combination of story, style, characters and acting. It seems like most characters these days in these types of films are pretty clichéd, pretty two-dimensional — you’re really just waiting for them to die. You’re not thinking about them as character. You can always kind of predict what’s going to happen. Predictability is a movie killer for me.

(Buy or rent The Shortcut)