The horror! But that's what he seeks
Don't blame me, says children's theater director Dinah Lane as she watches one of her troupe's alumni direct his first horror film.
Michael Neel of Allston is shooting a segment of "Drive-In Horrorshow," an anthology in the tradition of "Tales from the Crypt." In a scene filmed at a Dover farm, a doctor makes a house call - remember, this is fantasy - on a man suffering from a flesh-eating disease.
With "Horrorshow," Neel and producer Greg Ansin of South Boston hope to re-create a creature feature like those they enjoyed as kids. The two, who have teamed up in the past on documentaries, see the horror genre as a way to make a potentially breakout film on a shoestring. They estimate "Horrorshow" will have cost $100,000 by the time it is ready in the spring.
Lane, artistic director of the Watertown Children's Theatre, says Neel was one of the sweetest, gentlest, and most enthusiastic members of the company she founded 25 years ago. "I knew he had a penchant for Stephen King, but I wouldn't have ever suspected this," she says. Indeed, the mild-mannered Neel doesn't seem like the type to consort with zombies, cannibals, and serial killers.
An oasis of calm amid the screams and peeling bodies, he is generous with praise, diplomatic with criticism, and meticulous with his organization.
He just seems so normal - that is, until you ask him, say, about where he got the idea for the disease story, aptly titled "Fall Apart."
"I was thinking of the most disgusting thing I could, and thought of someone's fingernails sliding off," he says in his friendly, matter-of-fact way. "We hadn't written a gross-out piece yet. I figured we needed one."
But before you let Neel creep you out too much, consider that his debut directorial effort was "Growing Old," which chronicles the lives of three seniors in Cambridge. And look at the crew he has gathered to help prepare his grisly stew: You wouldn't mind running into any of them in a dark alley.
Even Lane, who has "a very low tolerance for violence of any kind," agreed to play a part, and she allowed Neel to recruit several children from her theater troupe. "Michael I know," she says. "Michael I trust."
Lane plays the wife of the disease victim, portrayed by lawyer Robert J. La Trémouille of Cambridge. La Trémouille, marking his 66th birthday the day of the shoot, keeps his eye on his watch, as he has to rush back to town to film his local-access cable TV talk show, "The Cambridge Environment."
Mommy, the scream queen
Several days earlier, during filming on the first floor of a two-family in Medford, Nadia Delemeny talks about leading the double life of a Wellesley mother and a horror actress. She plays the ex-wife of the doctor who makes that fateful house call.
"I go home, and my children ask, 'What happened today?' I tell them, 'Well, my husband's fingers fell off.' And they love it," Delemeny says.
Delemeny appeared as a damsel in distress in "Grimm," a 1995 horror film that she is loathe to discuss much beyond saying that it helped her launch a sideline career dubbing screams.
Which is why she can critique with some authority her co-star, Larry Jay Tish, who is practicing screams in the bathroom. Tish is rehearsing a scene where a fingernail slides off, a not-so-subtle sign his patient's disease is contagious. The Cambridge actor is better known for his comic turns, including the Jewish half of the show "The Black Jew Dialogues" and the hyperactive Professor Fritz on Channel 5's Sunday morning show "Totally Patriots."
"Fall Apart" is told in flashbacks, opening with Tish's doctor encased in bandages and isolated in a sterile bubble. The climax arrives at the end when the bandages are unwrapped and reveal "all this gross stuff that's been happening to him," says Neel, the director. "This might be the one where people walk out of the theater, which I guess if they do is kind of a compliment."
Why so messy?
Neel makes no apologies about the gore. "Part of horror is trying to establish tension and then release tension," he says. "If you establish tension, then you can release it with something that's gross or something that's funny or something that's scary."
Gore for the sake of gore isn't enough, he says. "For 'Fall Apart,' I wanted the grossness to be an essential part of the story. If you're doing a flesh-eating virus, you have to show what this thing is and what it does."
Neel says that he and other fans are attracted to horror in part out of curiosity about death. "At a certain point you kind of want to push yourself and see how much you can take," he says. "It is gross and disgusting and over the top, but at the end of the day, you're still someone sitting in the theater or at home on the couch and nothing really has happened."
Neel's previous foray into horror was as editor and special-effects cameraman on "Veil of Blood," made by Joe Lemieux of Quincy (who has several parts in "Horrorshow"). For "Veil," Neel coaxed his mother into playing a woman who has her brains drilled out. "I would do anything as long as the horrible part could be done in the editing," says Barbara Neel. "It was a once-in-a-lifetime role." (Neel's father, Stephen, has enough drama in his own job; he's a Suffolk Superior Court judge.)
Ansin financed "Horrorshow" in part from proceeds from a software firm he co-founded. He left the company to work on movies full time, having burned out writing code. His title may be producer, but his job description includes everything from co-writing the script to moving furniture.
Neel says the picture may debut on a midnight bill at a local theater. He expects distribution will be primarily through DVDs, direct downloads, and cable television.
"If we move 10,000 to 50,000 units, we'll be looking at a pretty good success," says Ansin. "If this ever gets out to a bunch of theaters, that would be beyond my wildest dreams." 