“I’m not going to lie, we came up with the title within seconds,” explained Slotherhouse‘s co-writer, Brad Fowler. “It all started when a little old man in Florida asked, ‘What is the dumbest idea you can come up with?’ After joking around for about five minutes, not only was the concept born, but so was the title, and from there, we knew it was not changing. I met with Cady Lanigan, one of my oldest friends, because we started in an acting class together, and we were talking over a coffee when I pitched her the idea for Slotherhouse. Instantly, she was like, ‘I’m in.'”
Lanigan, the film’s producer who also stars in it, added, “We share a brain by now. It sounded fun, and like a movie I wanted to watch. Brad and I have worked in the industry for a long time and were a little discouraged by some stuff. I was going home to go to business school, Brad was working on a few other things, and making a movie with your friend is the best feeling in the world.”
Slotherhouse, which has its tongue firmly in its cheek, is about a senior desperate to be elected as president of her sorority. Partly as a popularity stunt, she adopts a sloth named Alpha, which becomes the house mascot. However, a vengeful creature with murderous intent lies beneath the cute furry exterior.
“We wanted Slotherhouse to be like Mean Girls meets Happy Death Day with a touch of Gremlins,” Lanigan explained. “Hopefully, those elements came out.”
One creative risk the Slotherhouse team took was embracing the trope of putting the movie’s title in the script for one of the cast to say.
“I love when movies can pull it off,” enthused director Matthew Goodhue. “I don’t know why it works sometimes and why it doesn’t others. I was always pretty frightened to film that scene because I was like, ‘I don’t know how he’s going to say it.’ We cast Andrew Horton to play Tyler, who gets to say the line, and he was so funny.
“We wanted him to be like the hot guy who got dragged into this thing, tried to save the day, but then couldn’t, so there wasn’t a ton for him to do, but he brought up some really funny ideas to make himself look stupid. When we were rehearsing that scene, and the way he said it, his eyes looked like they were watering because he was so serious about it. It was like, ‘Yeah, this works. This is great.'”
While Slotherhouse is a movie that doesn’t take itself too seriously, Goodhue wanted the cast to play it as straight as possible because “for Alpha to be scary, the people reacting to her needed to sell it.”
“They were often reacting to nothing off-screen, or they were reacting to a one-foot puppet. If they did it too big or too silly, it wouldn’t work,” the filmmaker explained. “We also had a lot of actors from the UK who were classically trained, and they brought a lot of drama to each character, which heightened the film. Even though Brad might say the movie is based on a dumb idea, within it, there are a lot of actual dramatic moments.”
Goodhue added, “We had three Alpha’s in total. We had two animatronic Alphas on set, one as a backup in case something horrific happened, which I think something did, so we were lucky. We also had what we called the Stuffy, which was the same shape and had the same fur, but it wasn’t animatronic. That Alpha was used if we want they do something like fling Alpha across the frame or for more fast-paced action stuff where we could hide its face because it didn’t have the animatronics in it.”
Alpha and Slotherhouse are ripe for sequelization. The team was aware of that from a creative and financial perspective from the get-go.
“From a strategic standpoint, movies don’t make money; franchises do, brands do, IP does, and characters do,” Lanigan mused. “From the business side of things, the business perspective of things. It was very strategic. We grew up with horror icons like Chucky, Gremlins, and all those fun characters.”
Slotherhouse even goes as far as to namecheck Chucky. The killer doll has been a titan of terror since first appearing in Child’s Play in 1988.
The producer added, “What is fun about horror icons is you can play with them in many different spaces. It’s not always the case with other characters, but with horror icons, it seems like because the horror community is so supportive and excited to play and in their own world, when you create one, they can do well.”
“Like most nerds, I played with G.I. Joes, Transformers, and superhero action figures. In the 80s, I craved a Freddy Krueger toy the same size as my G.I. Joe to make them fight,” Fowler recalled. “Freddy is an iconic character, and I look at horror villains the same way I look at any of those other IPs. They’re something for my brain to play with. I don’t just watch a Nightmare on Elm Street or a Child’s Play movie and go, ‘Oh, that was a good movie.’ I go home, sit down, and make up new stories and scenarios in my head. I’m engaging with the IP and universe. We wanted to create something similar to what we loved growing up but also for a modern audience. That’s where sloths come in because they are so popular, so we were like, ‘Why don’t we play with that idea within this amazing genre that lets you both be funny and horrific simultaneously?'”
Similarly to films such as The VelociPastor, Slaxx, and Zombeavers, to name just a few, Slotherhouse, which lands in theaters for one night only on Wednesday, August 30, 2023, before heading to Digital, embraces its cult horror heritage with an edge of humor. For some, the PG-13 horror comedy will be their introduction to the genre.
“Growing up, I knew who Jason Voorhees was and who Freddy was, but I hadn’t seen the movies. It’s one of those things where those characters are bigger than just the movie,” Goodhue said. “I remember seeing the Hellraiser VHS cover and my mind taking that image and creating what the story could be, and it was terrifying. Scream was the first horror movie I saw that got me. While there’s no creature in it, I found it even more terrifying because the killer wasn’t this nightmarish thing; it was kids that went to your school. My older brother had it on VHS, and I remember watching it by myself when I was seven or eight years old. I didn’t get all the references but came away from it eager to see more.”
Fowler added, “Freddy’s Dead was a gateway film for me. I was young enough that we were still playing with Masters of the Universe toys, but I had this friend who was a neighbor whose parents didn’t give a damn what they saw. This kid had seen all the Freddy movies, and we were all jealous. Freddy’s Dead came out, and my dad was starting to let me see R-rated ninja movies, so I thought I’d try this. He didn’t care about the murder so much, but he wanted to know how much cursing there was. I had my friend go to the movie theater, watch it, and count how many swear words there were so I could report back to my dad and convince him to let me see it. Shout-out to Zach Calef, whom I probably haven’t seen since I was eight or nine, for doing that.”
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