I didn't interview James Felix McKenney for CHEAP SCARES! Low Budget Horror Filmmakers Share Their Secrets, but I would have if I'd had the room. Maybe if there's a sequel...

I did interview Larry Fessenden, who produced most of McKeneny's films--the creepy ghost story THE OFF SEASON; the grim retro sci-fi actioner AUTOMATONS; and the upcoming SATAN HATES YOU--through his Scareflix production company, and McKenney's name kept coming up. McKenney's genre films are very unusual for low budget films--because they're very good! If you don't check out his work it's your loss.

Now McKenney gives Fear Zone the dope on his darkly entertaining and thoughtful excursions into the worlds of horror and science fiction.

The beginning is usually a good place to start, unless you're a character in a Quentin Tarantino film. When did the science fiction and horror genres bite you?


When I was very, very young there were two experiences that warped me for the rest of my life.

The first was when I saw THE WIZARD OF OZ on TV, which is one of my earliest memories. I was not quite three years old, so I had no sense of what was going on beyond our house and neighborhood. I thought that movie was an accurate representation of the outside world.

My older sisters thought it was funny that I believed in wizards, witches and all of that stuff, so they encouraged the fantasy that I lived in. It was a huge letdown to get older and find out that the world was a lot less magical than I had thought. So I spent a good deal of my life chasing more colorful worlds in books, comics, TV and especially movies.

The second experience was when my parents took me to see ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN at a local park when I was about three or four years old. I became OBSESSED with the Frankenstein monster. Years later, my father had to explain to me who Abbott and Costello were. I had no memory of seeing them as part of my first big screen experience. All I remembered were those classic Universal monsters!

And when did you decide to become a filmmaker?

I'm not entirely sure. I had a lot of things I wanted to do -- write, act, draw comics -- all of which involved telling a story in some way. As a teen, I was sort of a film and cult TV super-fan and I knew adulthood was just around the corner, so it made sense to me to turn my obsessions into a career of some sort.

I spent the first half of my 20's doing theatre - acting mostly, but also a lot of crew work and some writing and directing. Once I got that out of my system, I was writing and editing comics, which eventually led to me doing some scriptwriting for music videos, documentaries and low-budget features.

By the time I hit my 30's the digital video thing came along, which finally gave me a way to quickly and easily tell stories.

It took me a while to get there, but that was when I really became a filmmaker.

This isn't a job interview, but what's your educational background?

I spent a couple of years dropping in and out of Emerson College in Boston. I was majoring in both acting and writing and took a film class or two. The guys in the film department (and they were mostly guys) seemed a little uptight to me, so I spent more time around the writing and theater departments. The parties were better and there were a lot more girls around.

I got pretty bored with Emerson, as it seemed to be geared toward preparing kids to go out to LA and work in TV, which was not my thing. Also, the tuition was way more than my family could afford.

I spent a couple of semesters taking classes at Harvard and Massachusetts College of Art, before abandoning formal education and joining the work force where I got paid to learn new skills.

I just finished paying off my student loans for those two years at Emerson this past year, which has really soured me on formal education. All of the skills that I use to make a living I either picked up on a job or taught to myself. Given the choice of shelling out money to spend weeks or months being spoon-fed information in a classroom, or getting a book out of a library and learning what I need to know on my own in a day, I'll take the solo approach any day.

I'm not at all familiar with CANNIBALISTIC! What would you like horror film fans reading this interview to know about that film?

CANNIBALLISTC! is part cannibal/slasher movie and part black comedy that we shot in Maine in 2000 with about $7,000 of my own money. That was my real film school.

There are a ton of technical things wrong with that movie, mainly because I ran out of money and didn't completely know what I was doing. But the people who've seen it seem to really like the movie. It got some great reviews, but barely got a DVD release. The company that put it out went out of business right after releasing the movie (Not our fault! Really!) so there aren't a lot of copies out there.

It was a really terrible, no-frills release. So at some point, I hope to fix the movie up a little and put out a good DVD version of CANNIBALLISTC! It's just a matter of finding the time to do it.

When I interviewed Larry Fessenden for CHEAP SCARES, he credited you with the somewhat indirect creation of Scareflix.

Yeah, I'm Larry's enabler in a lot of things. So far, he hasn't really held it against me.

After Larry saw CANNIBALISTIC! he really encouraged me to make another movie. I wanted to do this thing SATAN HATES YOU, but thought it would cost a lot of money. I had this old script kicking around called THE RAINY SEASON, about a couple living in a haunted motel room in California. I dusted it off, moved the location to Maine and that became the first ScareFlick. Ti West's THE ROOST followed soon after.

THE OFF SEASON uses its cheap motel setting the way STREET TRASH used the collision yard and J.R. Bookwalter's THE SANDMAN used a trailer park. I didn't think anyone could pull off a ghost story in such a cramped location, but you succeeded.

I originally wrote it without giving any thought to budget. I had just noticed how horror films dealing with ghosts always take place in these giant structures - a mansion, hospital, hotel, or whatever. It seemed scarier to me to be stuck in close quarters with a ghost. At the time I was calling it "THE SHINING in one room." Some aspects of it worked, some didn't.

You also gave Angus Scrimm the opportunity to play a character I'd never seen him play before, and Larry was genuinely creepy. For some reason, the whole film kind of reminds me of BARFLY.

BARFLY! No one's ever made that comparison before! Strangely enough, there were a bunch of scenes in the old RAINY SEASON version of the script that took place with a bunch of regulars in an LA bar. That was where we were originally supposed to meet Larry's character. All of that was cut for budget reasons.

I wrote Angus' part with him in mind years before I ever met him. I always loved PHANTASM - it's just the sort of bizarre little film I adore - and thought Angus would be just about the right age and vibe for the "Ted" character.

When casting genre actors, I always want to cast against type. I think it makes the project more attractive to them and really gives them an opportunity to shine. Of course, once you get to know Angus, it's hard to even think for a second of writing a menacing bad guy part for him. He's the sweetest man in the world.

Your next film, AUTOMATONS, is a very cool, black and white science fiction film. It reminded me of both the old serials, like FLASH GORDON, because of the retro sets and robots, and bleak science fiction films from the 70s, like SILENT RUNNING, THX-1138, and ZARDOZ.

Those are the films that I love. I have very fond memories of being snowed in on Sunday afternoons watching stuff like the PLANET OF THE APES films, INVADERS FROM MARS, GODZILLA movies and TV like DOCTOR WHO, THUNDERBIRDS and THE PRISONER.

One day my uncle was watching something on TV one day that featured robots and he explained to me that this was a specific genre. He obviously meant Science Fiction, but (like with the Frankenstein monster) I ignored all of the other elements and was focused entirely on the robots. I became obsessed with finding "robot movies" as a kid, which I had imagined was it's own genre, like Westerns or War movies. Sadly, this genre was all in my head, so I decided to change that.

After not being completely satisfied with CANNIBALLISTIC! and THE OFF SEASON, where I was letting the budget dictate the type of film we were making, I decided to use the low budget to our advantage and make exactly the kind of movie that I always wanted to see. AUTOMATONS is exactly that movie and is by far my favorite thing that we've done.

You recently finished shooting SATAN HATES YOU, which reunites Angus Scrimm and Reggie Bannister, throws in Larry, Michael Berryman, and Debbie Rochon. What are you trying to do, get wide distribution or something?

Of course, everyone wants to get the widest distribution possible, since I'm constantly being told that the point of making these things is to show them to people. But the films that I like to make are intended for a small, very specific audience. But one has to get the film out to the Blockbuster/Netflix crowd in order for the thing to pay for itself, even if you know that mainstream audience will probably hate it.

I pretty much put Larry and Angus in everything these days; because I love them both so much and they're both very talented and versatile actors. I was friendly with Reggie before we cast him. I wrote the part for him because I'm such a fan of PHANTASM. Debbie came along because she was right for the part and a great friend to GLASS EYE PIX.

The scale of SATAN HATES YOU is much bigger than anything I've done before -- more locations, a huge cast, bigger budget (although still an EXTREMELY low one by industry standards), so I figured one more familiar face in the cast would be the icing on the cake. We had this great character part, and wanted someone tall for it. Angus suggested Michael, who fit right in and is a really fun guy.

You're a writer-director-editor-movie star (TRIGGERMAN). You're also credited as "associate producer" on I SELL THE DEAD and I CAN SEE YOU. Do you plan to remain a New York filmmaker, or make the move to Hollywood? And do you have any interest in directing other writers' screenplays, or writing for other directors?

I shouldn't have those associate producer credits on I SELL THE DEAD and I CAN SEE YOU. I got those when I was working in the Glass Eye Pix office and it was expected that I'd be doing a lot of work on those films, but I moved into a different position and out of the office, so didn't really contribute much to either of those films. I told Larry to feel free to take my name of those movies at any time to make room for folks who deserved to be on there.

I lived in L.A. for five years when I was younger, so I got Hollywood out of my system a long time ago. I'm an East Coast guy and this will always be my home.
I have plenty of my own projects that I want to do, so I'm not actively looking to direct other people's stuff. But if someone came along and said, "Hey, we've got this script for HELLRAISER 15 or FINAL DESTINATION 6 and we'd like to pay you to direct it." or something like that, I'd do it in a heartbeat, because a job is a job and I have a mortgage to pay.

The real joy for me in the whole filmmaking process is the writing. It's the thing that I feel the most comfortable doing and is what I'm best at. Shooting is very stressful and I'm really a loner at heart. Editing, which I sometimes really enjoy, can still be a bit overwhelming and kind of a drag for me at times. If I were to do nothing to make a living but write scripts - of any kind, movies, TV, comic books -for the rest of my life, I'd be totally satisfied.

You'll obviously be busy finishing up SATAN HATES YOU but what's next on your plate?

I'm getting ready to do a very small film called WORLD'S FAIR. It's a sort of dark fantasy that takes place at an early 20th century traveling show. We're shooting that within the next year.

I'm also working on a couple of horror scripts that may turn into monster movies next spring.

In between things, I've been writing this big-budget sci-fi epic / creature feature that I'm sure I'll never have the money to actually make, but it's fun and I like to pretend. Nobody's ever accused me of living in the real world.

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Visit James Felkix McKenney at his website, where you can order all of his movies. And look for a review of CANNIBALISTIC! On Fear Zone in the near future.