Continuing our report on the upcoming trilogy of horror co-productions between Larry Fessenden’s Glass Eye Pix and MPI Media Group (see our chat with James Felix McKenney on HYPOTHERMIA here), we next turn our attention to Jim Mickle’s STAKE LAND. Fright fans have been waiting for Mickle’s next shocker ever since he broke out with his impressive debut movie MULBERRY STREET a couple of years back, and STAKE LAND, on which he once again teams with actor/co-writer Nick Damici, sounds like it’ll be a worthy follow-up.
“It’s an apocalyptic vampire Western,” Mickle tells Fango. “It’s told through the eyes of a young boy who is taken under the wing of Nick, who plays a brutal, solitary ghoul hunter in a world populated by grungy creatures—these are not the pretty TRUE BLOOD vampires. It’s kind of a new Depression; politics have fallen and the economy has fallen. And it’s their story together—how this kid goes from being a young boy in a suburban town to ultimately becoming a stone cold vampire killer. This was written back before the election, so it’s got some political-mindedness to it, because that was a hot topic at the time—the economics and financial system.”
An impressive teaser trailer Mickle and Fessenden presented at Fango’s recent East Coast convention offered a taste of the desolate
atmosphere intended for STAKE LAND, with glimpses of rundown, abandoned homes and rural wastelands. It might seem a challenge to stage a postapocalyptic saga like this on a low budget, but Mickle notes, “We found some creative ways to shoot the teaser, and we’ve got tons and tons of footage. There’s a lot of that [kind of landscape] around, unfortunately. We went to a couple of towns and found abandoned gas stations and other buildings. There are elements of the script that actually happen to exist right now.”Indeed, Mickle and Damici have incorporated a few of the locations they discovered into the STAKE LAND scenario. “That has been a slow process of adapting the story to what we’re finding along the way, both with the cast and the settings,” Mickle notes. “We’ll be shooting some of the movie in Pennsylvania, near where I grew up, and some up by Larry’s place in the Catskills. There’s good, creepy stuff up there. STAKE LAND takes place over a year and across a wide canvas geographically, from the South up to Canada, so we’re trying to cover all that. The schedule will be spread out over five months in different places.”
This expansive scenario is a major switch from MULBERRY STREET, which largely told its story of zombies spawned by a rat-borne plague within the confined walls of a lower Manhattan apartment building. “In some ways, it’s an extension,” Mickle notes, “because it’s Nick fighting hordes of bloodthirsty things that science and politics have created, but it’s a complete 180 in terms of the scale. It’s still not a huge budget by any means, but it’s a lot bigger than MULBERRY STREET. All the things we didn’t get to do last time, we’re going to try and do this time.”
Aiding him in this ambition will be makeup FX artists Brian Spears and Pete Gerner of G&S Effects, encoring for Fessenden from Glenn McQuaid’s I SELL THE DEAD. “Brian already lent us some stuff for the teaser, and has some really beautiful designs,” Mickle says. “It’s cool, because we’re breaking up the shoot—two weeks here, two weeks there—so it’ll be interesting to focus on these beats instead of the entire thing all at once. A lot of it has to do with the variety of the vampires, so we’ll be able to develop that in a very organic way.”
Thus, don’t expect Spears and Gerner (who previously helped create a postapocalyptic East Coast full of vampires for MIDNIGHT MASS) to contribute your traditional screen bloodsuckers. “There’s a wide range of them,” Mickle says, “and there’s a huge mythology with different stages that Nick has come up with that’s pretty unbelievable. When we start off, at first it’s a sickness, and then by the end they’re these skin-and-bone creatures that are dying in the cold. And they won’t just have two fangs, but all kinds of broken teeth. There’s going to be a lot of variety.”
Currently, Mickle and Fessenden are in the process of casting a group of actors to surround Damici. “We’ve been seeing a number of incredibly well-respected stage actors—not a lot of genre names—and we’re finding really interesting people who will elevate the movie more than I ever thought we’d be able to. We’ll be locking in on them in the next few weeks, and we’ll be able to confirm them when we’re done with the agent dance and such. It’s gonna be very good.” Come back tomorrow for the final installment of this three-part Glass Eye report!
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