What the hell kind of name is Scooter McCrae? That's what I wondered the first time I saw the name in print, back when Film Threat was an edgy magazine instead of a slick website. FT raved about a micro-budget horror film called SHATTER DEAD, which was apparently some zombie thing made when zombies were cool because they hadn't been done to death. Several years later, I started reading about Scooter's Second film, a semi-pornographic sci-fi film featuring a woman with clits on her eyelids. You read that right. I discovered that Scooter had worked on several of Frank Henenlotter's films, and had even co-written some scripts with Henenlotter. Since I had been the assistant director on BRAIN DAMAGE, I felt a kinship with this filmmaker whom I'd never even met.

Then I watched SHATTER DEAD and SIXTEEN TONGUES as preparation for CHEAP SCARES! Low Budget Horror Filmmakers Share Their Secrets. Ho-ly crap! Before I lay on the hyperbole, let me first say that McCrae's films are not for everyone. In fact, they're probably for very few people in the grand scheme of things.
SHATTER DEAD is a grungy, downbeat anti-zombie film, an exploitation film so deliberately paced and relentless in presenting its subject matter in a mundane manner that it becomes an art film (which the filmmaker denies). It opens with an angel fornicating and then gets disturbing. I watched it over and over, appreciating it more each time.

Then I moved on to SIXTEEN TONGUES, a sexually explicit sci-fi flick with three central characters. I had no idea what the hell I was watching, I only knew that it was sucking me into its world. This one begins with a mysterious--and then violent--blowjob before it becomes disturbing. If SHATTER DEAD is an anti-zombie film, SIXTEEN TONGUES is---if not an anti-BLADE RUNNER type of film--an intimate BALDE RUNNER type of film; a flick so ugly that it becomes beautiful. My descriptions are obviously designed to get your attention, but the most important thing you need to know about McCrae's films is that they're thinking man's genre offerings that will seriously challenge how view films.

So here it is: McCrae is a unique filmmaker with a strong vision and you should definitely check out his work. Make it a point to do so. And we still haven't met!

The great thing about doing this book is that it's compelled me to see movies I've missed over the years and I was looking forward to yours the most, and now that I've listened to these commentary tracks, and know that we've traveled in so may of the same circles, I feel like I have one up on you in the sense that I know you.

Trust me, anyone with a brain has one up on me. Don't get too cocky yet, my friend.

What was your childhood like, and what role did movies and horror play in it?


I think the first activity I remember from being a kid was watching TV and watching movies, the first real memories I had. I wish I could say that I was a discerning viewer as a kid, I certainly wasn't, especially when it came to television, because anything that was on I would watch. But I guess I came to develop a slightly keener sense of what trash was parading before my eyes. I definitely found that I was watching more horror and sci-fi stuff, which seemed a lot more exciting and interesting to me. The beauty of watching those things as a kid was that yeah, there might be a lot of dialogue and all sorts of hoo-ha that people are spouting about the monster or about the science, but there would eventually come a point where everyone would stop talking and there'd be some monster stalking or some outer space footage, and I remember being most intrigued by that stuff and liking that stuff the most. I was a much more avid reader as a child than I am now.

When I was reading that's what I tended to go towards, more fantastic fiction. Horror, sci-fi... I don't know if kids read Jules Vern, but I remember reading some of that, and H.G. Welles, and I feel like a product of an earlier era than my own when I think back on some of the stuff I read as a kid. I then moved on to Bradbury as Asimov. I definitely remember as a kid liking science fiction more than I liked horror. I go through these phases. I loved STAR TREK, LOST IN SPACE, all these sci-fi shows. The horror stuff I don't remember watching as much as the sci-fi. Then I went more into horror, and back to sci-fi, it's always been a cycle for me. Even now in life I find myself actually gearing more toward sci-fi a little bit now, or at least the classic stuff, than horror. Some people I don't even think make a distinction between them, they just say, "Well, it's all garbage." But there's a distinction for me at least between those two genres.

Well, there was a lot more science fiction available to us as TV kids. The closest we got to horror sometimes were the monsters on VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA.

Or THE OUTER LIMITS or that kind of stuff. The horror films are harder to show because you have to cut stuff out of them. Sci-Fi I don't think ever really had as didn't have as much difficulty, you know? In the sci-fi stuff someone wasn't being gutted every 10 minutes.

Did you grow up in Jersey?

No, no, I've never lived in Jersey, thank goodness. I'm upstate New York, Middletown. It's funny, I get that a lot. Whenever people hear Middle Town they think I'm from Jersey.

Well you know, where I made that mistake was watching the opening of SHATTER DEAD over and over on DVD. The empty streets with the ugly hills look just like a part of Jersey I used to drive through.

I apologize and sympathize with the town that looks like Middletown, New York. Trust me, it's not just you, I get it all the time. Everyone thinks it's Long Island or it's New Jersey. It used to be a railroad town and it's dead, it really is a dead town. All that stuff from those opening shots looks exactly the same. We shot that in '92, I guess. I could back there and shoot inserts now and they would cut in perfectly. It's only an hour outside of New York City, really.

What was your equivalent of CHILLER THEATRE on TV?

When we first moved up there the station we kept getting was Channel 17 in Philadelphia, because cable was a new thing. Channel 17 in Philadelphia was a fucking godsend because every Saturday they would show horror, sci-fi stuff in the afternoon, and then the other stations for me were local WOR, Channel 9, and WNEW, Channel 11, and Channel 5.

Oh, you got some of the New York stations.

Really, 5, 9, and 11 were the stations I lived off of.

I actually know those stations from the dawning before HBO.

DR. WHO before the wrestling, and then DR. WHO after the wrestling, it was a gold mine. And there came a point at which even channels 2, 4, and 7 showed really great genre stuff late at night sometimes. I remember being even, 10, 11 years old and staying up watching stuff until the stations went off the air. SILENT RUNNING would be on Channel 2, this was before video. I remember scouring the TV Guide to see what movies were on, I drove my parents crazy. I would go to sleep when they told me to, and then I would wake up just in time to watch a movie. And in fact to this day, if I go to sleep at a particular time, I'm good enough that my internal body clock will 9 times out of 10 will make me up about 10 - 15 minutes within when I need to wake up in the middle of the night and that's all very well honed from my childhood, of not being able to set an alarm.

It sounds like you stayed up for a lot more of the movies than I did because I would wake up after the stations had gone off the air and be very upset.

My God, you could cry when that happened. But then 9 All Night, I remember when they would do their Val Lewton fests, they would come on at 5:00 in the morning, I think. That was great because I would get up at 5:00, they would end at 6:30, and I would get ready for school. Or they'd come on at 6:00 and end at 7:30, and I'd eat breakfast really fast and get ready for school.

I corresponded with Don Dohler (publisher of CINEMAGIC magazine) when I was in high school and he sent me very encouraging feedback. He had agreed to participate in this book when he died, but I've been in touch with his son and plan to include him posthumously because he definitely belongs here.

Oh, Greg, right? I remember seeing him in the movies. In fact, one of the other vivid things I remember from my childhood was actually seeing THE ALIEN FACTOR on Channel 2 at 4:00 in the morning.

I wasn't that fortunate, his films were never in the syndication that reached my little village of Fredonia, but I saw it mentioned in Starlog and these magazines, so for me they were as big as STAR WARS, they were real movies that were "out there" somewhere. The great thing about Cinemagic wasn't just that it encouraged you, it slapped you in the face and said, "There's no excuse not to pursue this, anyone can do it."

It was very liberating. I want to say it was democratizing, but it's not quite that. It just gave you the facts: "This is a camera, this is what it does, pick it up and just shoot something. You can do this because other people are doing it." It's stunning to think that now, with the age of video, the process is so much easier.

#

On attending SUNY Purchase Film School rather than NYU:

...not only did I end up going to the school that's--Oh, all right, Fuck NYU!--not only did I go to the school with better standards, but I ended up I think with a better education at literally one tenth the price.

That's not an uncommon comment so far.

If I'd been at NYU, I probably would have had to magnetize toilet paper and build some new camera system to actually get images recorded somehow. There's no way I could have afforded film under the NYU costs. It's ridiculous. It puts such a burden on students, it's unconscionable. It's downright immoral.

At SVA I was just doomed by the expenses of my still photography class, which was greater than the expenses of my film production class. And that film production class was taught by Roy Frumkes, who taught at SUNY Purchase before he moved to SVA. I also one worked at a Times Square movie theatre where I worked with a guy named Tony Laudatti--

Oh, Tony!

-- who won an Academy Award for Best Short Film for a stop motion animated film he started there called--

The caveman!

THE WHITE GISELLE. Yes, the caveman. I used to call it "King Kong fighting the dinosaur." So I'm familiar with Purchase primarily from working with him all those years ago.

Wow. When I went to SUNY Purchase I was aware of the fact that Tony was the guy who had done the film, and he had shot it at SUNY Purchase, so in some ways for me, having read Cinemagic , it made SUNY Purchase have this Hollywood glow to it. "Oh, my God, the guy who did that went here, I can't believe it." So people like you and me would think that's very impressive, and know at SUNY, now they're happy that Hal Hartley has come through here and all these other people. I'm like, "Fuck all them, man--Tony Laudatti was there!"

How do you look back on those film school years, and what kinds of films did you make?

It was a little odd. SUNY Purchase is considered to some extent an arts conservatory--they've got their music program, their acting program, all of which are very distinguished, all of which hundreds of people interview for, and they end up taking only 15 - 20 students a year. It's really a brutal process. When I went in they showed me a clip from M and had me write a paper on it then and there. They really pout me over the grill and asked me a lot of stuff.

I didn't think much of it; one of the treasures for me growing up--it's hard for anyone to imagine this now--I remember watching Channel 13 when Siskel and Ebert's show first came on. Besides reviewing the contemporary films, every now and again they would do a special show on classic films and whatnot. I remember sitting there and seeing my first glimpse ever of THE SEVEN SAMURAI on their program and eagerly seeking that out as a high school student on VHS, and surprisingly finding it at a video store in Middle Town--just a horrible copy of it. It killed me, this is an amazing film, it's one of my favorites at this point.

There were other films as well that were like this. It's funny to think back that I was using Siskel and Ebert as a barometer to find these classic films. It was actually a viable, interesting program in that sense as opposed to what it grew into, sadly. I mean do denigration toward Ebert, of course, who wrote one of the greatest screenplays of all time, BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS.

When I went to my interview at SUNY Purchase, I was able to say that yes, I'd seen SEVEN SAMURAI. I think I had seen FITZCARAL\DO and a couple of other films like that at that point, the kinds of films you're supposed to mention when you get interviewed at a film school like SUNY Purchase to get in. But of course I was unabashedly in love with STAR WARS and DAWN OF THE DEAD, so I threw them into the same mix as they were films of equal importance in my life at that time, if not more so. STAR WARS was the one that made me say, "I need to make movies now," and DAWN OF THE DEAD was probably the one that made me say, "Okay, maybe I need to make horror films now." I remember at the interview seeing eyebrows kind of cock up when I brought up those movies, and maybe nowadays you can bring them up when you go to be interviewed at film school with a little more respectability behind them. But at the time, as they were fairly contemporary films, they were certainly looked down upon more. DAWN OF THE DEAD was a fucking zombie film. And STAR WARS? Please. That's just crap!

Those were the two seminal films for me as well, and I do remember Spot the Wonder Dog from SNEAK PREVIEWS--"Stinker of the week."

(laughs) I'd actually forgotten about Spot, thank you for that.

#

When people ask me what it was like working with Frank Henenlotter, I say you learn from him by osmosis, without even realizing it.

Yeah, that's true. And editing with Frank was amazing. I'm still a little shaky as an editor--it's not like I've been doing this for 20 years! And the film stuff I've been doing over the years--it's not like I'm a professional editor, where I edit a feature a year or something; I do a feature now and then, I do little things here and there. Being under Frank's tutelage was absolutely eye opening for me. It's just fantastic to work with him. We'd be sitting there and he'd even joke about it, saying, "You're going to hate me for this. Let's see that again, but take a frame off that one and add a frame there. Now do the other way around, add two frames here and take one frame off there." We would massage every single cut like this, and by the time it was over you'd look at it and go, "Well, yeah, that seems to be the best place for the cut." I've worked with other people editing as well, and there's a tendency to just kind of do the edit, put it together, slap shot, "Okay, that works." Frank doesn't do that. Frank goes, "It works, but maybe it could work better. So let's message it, let's finesse it." I think that's something that people would never expect from a guy who's made BASKET CASE and BRAIN DAMAGE. Not because these aren't wonderful movies, but because it's easy to dismiss someone working on low budget projects like these, as having to work as quickly as possible and just get it the fuck over with and move on because we don't have any money. And Frank just doesn't think or work that way. Editing with him, we might as well have been working on a $100 million film; to the extent the amount of love and care and time he put into it.

I've read many interviews with directors who say, "I don't shoot in a conventional way, I shoot only what I need, I know exactly what I want and my stuff can only be edited the way I want it to be." And I think that's bullshit. But Frank is the one person I know who really does that.

Yeah, especially on the last one. I mean, how much money did he have to shoot coverage on this last one? On any of them? I remember on BASKET CASE 2, Ted Sorel gets killed by Belial. The camera's shooting through a little pane of glass in the door and Ted's face gets flattened against it and he falls out of frame. They shot it twice. The decree from SGE was to shoot a TV version of the shot as well as the one that ended up in the film. The one in the film, he hits the glass and spits blood and falls out of frame. The TV version was him hitting the glass, no blood, and then sliding out of frame. They did the TV version first, obviously. He hit, fell out of frame, and Frank said, "Cut." And he turned to Bob Baldwin, the cinematographer on that, and said, "How was it?" And Bob said, "Well, it could be a little bit better. He was kind of to the left and wasn't fully in frame the way he probably should have been, so we should probably do it again." And there was a perfectly timed pause and Frank said, "TV version. Fuck it, move on. Get some blood in his mouth." It was a beautiful thing.

There was a similar moment on BRAIN DAMAGE, with Rick Herbst looking at his bloody underwear in the courtyard set we built. Frank did a TV version with less blood, but it was till pretty disturbing. He said, "Fuck it, that's never going to make it to TV."

Exactly, that's what he said about BASKET CASE 2. "There's going to be a TV version? Are you fucking kidding?"

(On Peter Clark, a mutual friend who died in 2000; Peter co-produced and shot SLIME CITY and worked on some of the same Henenlotter films that Scooter did.)


All of the best fistfights I was ever in were brawls with Peter at my back.


(laughs) That's a guy you definitely wanted at your back. Biggest fucking biceps I've ever seen!

Oh, yeah. I once saw him punch a guy in the forehead on 42nd Street and the guy's leg flew up from under him and he hovered perfectly horizontally in the air before he crashed down to the sidewalk and the beer in his hand sprayed everywhere. We had a bit of a falling out during post production on SLIME CITY, but the night before shooting commenced on my second film we got together at some bar because he needed some paperwork from me for taxes and we had a few drinks. I'm so glad we did because it was the only time that I saw him before I learned that he had died. But the funny thing was, he still tried to hustle me in a game of pool.


(laughs) I'm just glad you guys were on a good note when all that went sown, that's nice.

Yeah, it puts a lot of stuff in perspective. If you ever have a falling out with a friend because filmmaking can be so intense, it's just not worth it.

Yeah, I totally agree and that's something I've talked always talked about with friends. Even now I'm like, I'd rather not do a shoot or I'd rather just walk away from a project before any arguments start. All friendships come first and I know that in a professional world sometimes that's not the way it's supposed to work, but I'm fine with remaining an amateur for the rest of my life if being professional means being a total fucking asshole, I can't do it.

On SLIME CITY there was one day when we were waiting for film stock to arrive, so we spent an afternoon playing Frisbee in a park in Bay Ridge, and Peter got sun poisoning.

Oh, shit!

And the next day he had these big boils, like 20 of them, the size of quarters, all over his back, filled with yellow pus. And we shot that in 16m, so he was hauling around this big NPR Elair on his shoulder. We shot that in June, and I remember that night we shot this big erotic dance number from a bunch of angles in a top floor apartment that was like 100 degrees. Stuff like that takes a toll on your mind...

Takes a toll on your mind but also takes a toll on your body! It's like me with SIXTEEN TONGUES--why I ended up shooting all interiors in an apartment where we had to close up all the windows during the hottest fucking days of that summer is still beyond me. Incredible.

I laughed during the TONGUES commentary track when you described how you would yell "Cut!" and you'd hear one fan fire up, and then another, and another. It was the same way on SLIME CITY: "Okay, you can plug in the refrigerator now, and turn on the AC..."

In the 'making of' segment I left in this one bit of him laying there, and I yell "Cut!" and he leans out of frame, and he didn't even get too settled, and suddenly four fans come on, and you hear "Whoosh!" and I left that in. Whenever I put together the supplements for the DVDs they're like home movies, you know? I don't care if anyone else watches them, I just want them there. The people who worked on them will know the gags in some of this stuff even it appears to go on too long. That's one that meant a lot to me to leave in.

Had you shot nudity in any of your short films prior to SHATTER DEAD?

You know, unbelievably, no. It's the funniest thing. I went through college without doing any of the stuff you're supposed to, which I guess is to indulge in drinking and drugging binges and invite beautiful girls onto the set and tell them to take their clothes off. There was just none of that. I had written as my senior project a script that was absolutely chock full of nudity. People had their clothes off more than they had them on in the script. But it wasn't as exploitative as I'm making it sound, it was just a natural thing. I didn't end up making it, it was just too elaborate to do for a senior film project. The project I ended up doing was actually a little sci-fi short with no nudity. Actually, I take that back. There was nudity. There was an alien character. It was a guy, he was completely naked, and we shaved his body. So that was my first stint with nudity. I forgot about that.

Good thing you remembered before someone reported you!

Well, just to show that I'm an equal opportunity nudist in terms of the nudity.

I don't think anyone will question that after SIXTEEN TONGUES! So what was it like shooting the major scenes in SHATTER DEAD, because I imagine Stark (lead actress Stark Raven) wasn't used to parading around naked in front of whatever size your crew was.

The crew was usually just me and Matt ( cinematographer Matt Howe), which I must say made things just so much easier to deal with those nude scenes with everybody. Literally, we had no one else. Matt would run the camera, and I'd be there directing, but I was the one holding the microphone. This way I was able to stand near the actors and really watch the performances, holding the mike. I like working that way. If I do it that way again, I don't think I would mind being the sound person for the close ups. For the wide shots, someone else could do it. Some actors actually like having the director that close to them sometimes. But because we were all friends and because we all knew each other on this project, it was just a little lark, there were no strangers on this shoot. Everyone in the movie knew each other, were all friends back in college, so we're talking about people who had known each other for 5, 6, 7 years at that point. So the comfort level was very high. I say this to you like, "Oh, yeah, friends always hang out together naked with each other!"

I'm making it sound very simple when I say it that way, it's stupid. But that was part of it, there were no strangers around, it was a very familial atmosphere, and everyone felt like no one was exploiting anyone. No one ever felt like, "Oh, you're asking me to be naked in this because you're exploiting me." No, it was like, "Oh, you wrote this script and we're all friends and we'll help each other out, and there's nudity, no problem, if that's what you need for that I'm there." And everyone in the movie had never done nudity before and hasn't done nudity since... most of them. Which I find flattering. I was very pleased. And everyone's fine, everyone was okay with this. There's some pretty explicit stuff in this. When I showed it around, I showed this to everyone, I was doing public screenings, I was like, "Are you okay with this? Is it all right?" And they were like, "Oh, yeah, it's fine, I like the project, there's no real shame in it." I was very honored and pleased.

#

On sequels and remakes:

I've stopped calling them remakes; I call them 'covers' now. And I still can't stand them. I just figure, bands cover songs by other bands, so maybe people will accept these remakes as covers. So I went to the New York Underground Film Festival and the Chicago Underground, which was great. I was just so glad that it was accepted. And then it went to the Fanta-festival in Rome, which I don't even think exists anymore, and it actually won an award there for Best Independent Film. I know it was up against TEXAS CHAINSAW: A NEW BEGINNING and a few other movies that were out at the time, none of which I think were terribly good. I say that as I don't think I should have won, mind you, but it's not like I won against something that would be contentious, either. No one will sit around saying, "Jesus, you beat out that? What the fuck?" I benefited from the fact that it was a weak year for the genre on celluloid, and I'll leave it at that. So that was good luck.

#

When I e-mailed you how much I liked your films, you wrote back, "I'll have to watch it again in five years and see if I like it any better then." That took me back to when I worked on BEAIN DAMAGE, and Frank said that at that point--I don't know how he feels now--he couldn't bear to look at BASKET CASE. And I thought, "Are you kidding me?" Because when I first moved to New York that film was playing midnights at the Waverly Twin, and Peter Clark and Jimmy Muro (STREET TRASH) and I used to go watch it with other people from our dorm. And then a few years after SLIME CITY received its first video release I couldn't bear to look at it for a good 10 years before I could appreciate it for what it was.

And part of that is the warmth of a home movie. I look at it and I go, "Look at that, we were all so young then, I remember that day." A flood of memories. It's always hard to watch it as a movie. Although I was surprised the last time I had to check out TONGUES for a little bit because I had to make someone a copy maybe a year ago, and I actually started watching it and getting involved in it and I was shocked. "Jesus, fuck, man, what the hell was I thinking?" But also I'm kind of liking it at the same time. "All right, it's not as bad as I thought, as I remember."

#

What's your feeling about the lack of adult nudity in mainstream American movies?

Whew. Man, you're opening up a kettle of fish, my friend. I think it's such an appalling comment, the backwards morality of a country that finds nudity far more offensive, and something that should be kept from the eyes of children, than people with guns and knives gutting people. I feel like a heathen, like a Satanist, like I should be involved with blood orgies or something. It's so much easier to get a gun than to get laid in this country. What the hell's wrong with that? There's all these lax gun laws. I don't want to turn this into a discussion on that, specifically, but there's such an incredible acceptance of the right of privacy of people who want to buy guns and weapons. If you go to buy a gun the records are destroyed after 24 hours. They can't be put into a data base, all to protect your God given right to own a gun. Whereas at the same time gay couples can't get married and you're considered a pervert because you like to lick someone's foot. This is objectionable. It's just amazing. You really hit me raw here, dude. I wasn't expecting this question, shit! I just cannot believe how backwards we are as a nation that we're so lackadaisical that we can kill people, but so stringent on the things that occur behind closed doors and in privacy. God, I'm trembling with anger just thinking about this kind of stuff, that's why I'm a little inarticulate now.

I had a strange thing happen recently. I was writing for AMC. They have a website, AMC TV. And they started a blog for horror films, and I was employed by them for about a little over a month. I was contacted, "Hey, we're starting a blog, we know you write this kind of stuff, we want you to get involved." I was one of three writers. It was hard to call it a blog because it was for a corporation, but they wanted to make it as personal, as breezy as possible, dealing with the horror genre but keeping it G-rated. So already you can see all these confusing points of view coming together here.

I lasted about a month, and the thing that got me canned, with extreme prejudice, was the Virginia Tech shootings had happened. And I saw what was going on in the media, where, "Hey, this guy had a copy of OLDBOY in his collection. Here's a photo of him with a hammer." Well, obviously he saw OLDBOY. They were harping on all this violence and, "Oh, he's from North Korea," and they were whipping out all these reviews saying what a violent piece of crap it is and on and on and on about it. I was sitting there watching it on the news, and on this computer late that night, and I might have had a little to drink while watching it, and I was pissed off, and I put in my under 300-word thing where I said, "You know, it's? the media again, and they're picking on OLDBOY, a movie that no one generally has seen in the United States, so it's an easy one to pick on, just say, 'Yeah, it's some South Korean film that you haven't seen that's full of violence.'

But that's a great thing for them to start off with because who's seen the movie in mainstream America for the most part? Not as many people as have maybe seen THE MATRIX, where in 30 other photos he's obviously copying poses from that and DIRTY HARRY. So let's choose a film no one has seen to focus on." And then I said, "Instead of the media going off on OLDBOY, why don't they go off on gun laws, especially in Virginia?" And then I provided a link to a site in West Virginia with their gun laws, showing how lax they are, the worst in the 50 states, and how easy it is to get a gun over there. And even after the fact, apologetically, they were like, "Oh, you're right. He really shouldn't have been issued a gun license." Oops. Gee, that's nice to know. Thanks, guys. And then the kicker at the end was, "Hey, you know what? I'm a guy who works in the horror genre. I know people who work in the genre as writers, as moviemakers and all this. As much as the media wants to paint people like you and me--who like horror films-- as being violent underneath and crazed with blood lust and all this, some of the nicest, sweetest, gentlest people I know are the ones who work in this very genre. So up yours." I was polite, I didn't say 'up yours,' but that was the point of the piece. 'So take that and put in your pipe and smoke it.'

So I went to bed and I got up the next morning, and I got an e-mail from a friend, who also wrote for the blog, and he's like, "Oh, my God, what happened?" And I'm, "What? What?" He sent me an e-mail that he and the other writer had been sent that said, "We're dealing with this right now, but Scooter did a very terrible thing and we're taking care of it right now, blah, blah, blah." And like three hours later my phone rang and they called up and said, "Listen' we've got to let you go. You can't do this." And I was like, "Well, what's the problem? I used no obscenities, I followed word count, I wrote about a current event that was related to the horror genre." And the guy who was in charge there, that hired me, said, "It's not what you wrote, but what you wrote about. We do not over current events. This is not what we're about." I was like, "Okay, thank you." What can you do? So I just walked away from that. What's of course funny is that if you go to the website itself they have headings, you know, 'horror,' 'music,' 'movies,' 'books,' 'current events.' So current events is actually one of the choices on there.

That's what got to me. So it wasn't even what I said, but the fact that I brought it up. Thank God I didn't bring up something about sex, they probably would have sent a flamethrower over here to cleanse out the entire apartment Fahrenheit 451 style. But they're a corporation and nervous about these things. Corporations are nervous about sex and violence, to some extent. They don't mind pedaling violence, they mind pedaling sex, or at least they mind getting caught pedaling the sex more than they do the violence. Some of them can hide behind violence, but it's harder to hide behind sex because sex is natural, and violence--at least violence with guns--isn't. A gun is technically, in many ways, a sex toy in the way that a dildo or a vibrator is. If you were brave enough to beat someone up or fuck someone, there's too much of a similarity there, it's a little different than hiding behind a vibrator or a dildo or a gun. Anyway...

What freelance work do you do?

Freelance work is everything. I write for Fangoria every now and then. For awhile I was regularly employed by the AMC network for the Monsterfest blog, which was nice. I'm a full time videographer and editor, so I do a lot of shooting and a lot of editing for clients like B.M.I. Music Licensing, I also do documentary stuff, I love it. I'm freelance now for the first time in my life. It's been about a year and a half. And I shoot occasionally for Monsers HD, which is funny because they belong to the same parent company as AMC, which just fired me. Hopefully they won't figure that out.

I guess they don't care if you shoot.

Apparently I can shoot a weapon or a camera for them as long as I don't mention anything about it.

Check out Scooter McCrae's films SHATTER DEAD and SIXTEEN TONGUES; his work as an editor on Frank Henenlotter's new film BAD BIOLOGY; and read the really good stuff from this interview when CHEAP SCARES! LOW BUDGET HORROR FILMMAKERS becomes available in October!