Texas-based directors Duane Graves and Justin Meeks, creators of the acclaimed ’70s-horror homage THE WILD MAN OF THE NAVIDAD, are back with a new shocker called BONEBOYS. They’ve reteamed with TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE co-scripter Kim Henkel, who served as a producer on WILD MAN and both scripted and co-produced this one, and Graves sent along some info and exclusive photos.

BONEBOYS sees the duo leaving the backwater locales of WILD MAN to tell a story of urban fear. As the synopsis tells it, “A birthday celebration at an upscale restaurant sets in motion events that bring Sissy [Ali Faulkner], her brother Mikey [Phillip Wolf] and friends Kenny [Matt Hensarling] and Barbie [Tory Tompkins] face to face with the macabre world of the Boneboys. Inspired by Jonathan Swift’s cannibalistic tale A MODEST PROPOSAL, the Boneboys are international predators who deal in human flesh—dead or alive. Their hunting grounds are the cities of the world.”

“We were attracted to BONEBOYS because there’s an infinite number of horror films out there these days set in rural settings—cabins, woods, back roads, etc.,” Graves tells Fango. “They always start off in a city but leave for seclusiion in the first act. This one starts and ends right in the middle of a bleak urban landscape, yet somehow there’s still nowhere to run or hide—and nobody to call for help. That, to us, made it all the more frightening and real.”

Not surprisingly, the change of scene from the grassroots WILD MAN required a bigger production. “We made WILD MAN for $7,000 with a crew of about five people in our backyard,” Graves notes, “so coming to a project like this was a big adjustment, because suddenly we had 50 creative minds to wrangle, producers watching, special effects, cars crashing, etc. It’s a totally different animal making movies at this level. Probably the biggest challenge was the dicey locations. The entire film is urban, so we shot the film in five weeks in a dizzying amount of locations that included a dusty old jail above the courthouse in downtown Austin, TX, a crumbling power plant that extended down several stories underground—with only a few rickety metal grates to keep the crew from plummeting to certain death—and a sprawling, jagged maze of an active metalworks building.

“One of the single craziest places we shot in,” he continues, “was a gigantic, cavernous, dirt-floored room with 20-foot ceilings underneath a functioning Sears store in Austin. Sears would only allow us to shoot overnights when the store’s escalator was turned off—because it was loud and rolling by directly over our heads. Apparently the store was built on top of the old Austin city hall, so all the original office rooms in the basement areas were still intact and had been sealed off for decades. Very dark and creepy. It was so mucky in there that anytime the actors shuffled around, the air was dangerously thick with dust. Let’s just say your skin can get pretty irritated after wearing a mask for 12 hours! Someone told me that the Sears store we were shooting underneath was the same one where Charles Whitman bought his rifle just hours before he sniped down 16 people from the University of Texas tower in 1966—so the horror in that room ran deep, let’s say!”

The cast also includes Derek Lee Nixon, Katie Patterson, Christina Gonzalez, John D. Montoya, Johnny Walter, Mike Davis, Tom Byrne and Meeks himself, with cameos by CHAINSAW’s Marilyn Burns, Edwin Neal (bottom photo) and John Dugan and THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2’s Leatherface, Bill Johnson. The “wonderful crew” backing up Graves and Meeks on WILD MAN included special FX artists Meredith Johns and Everett Byrom, both fresh off Robert Rodriguez’s gorefest MACHETE. “It’s a pretty easy choice to make when you visit someone’s office and they have the intestinal rope used in MACHETE wrapped resplendently around it!” Graves says. Find out more about BONEBOYS at its official website and Facebook page. 

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