With high-school bullying a regular part of the national discourse, writer/director Jason Paul Collum has reached way back into his filmography and will release his 1997 shot-on-video teen thriller 5 DARK SOULS on DVD this November. Collum discusses this 15th Anniversary Special Edition and why he decided to put it together after the jump.

“I swear I get an e-mail or Facebook message about this film at least once a month,” he says. “Not bad for a 15-year-old, cheap little shot-on-video movie.” Originally released on VHS by Moore Video, 5 DARK SOULS is about five popular kids who lure three of their less popular classmates into the woods to make a snuff movie, “just to see what it’s like to kill someone.” The new disc, which Collum’s B+Boy Productions will release November 13 with Tempe Video distributing, will include the following extras:

• Audio commentary by Collum

• Deleted scenes

• Photo gallery

• Trailer gallery

Collum, who shot 5 DARK SOULS during a harsh Wisconsin winter for just $400 with a group of college friends and actors—paid in “Dunkin Donuts and coffee,” he says—notes that SOV flicks are enjoying more respect now than they did back in the late ’80s/early ’90s. “There was always such a negative stigma about this type of film,” he says. “Magazines typically never reviewed them—and usually unfavorably if they did—and the general public turned them off before they got through the opening title sequences. Now all of a sudden there’s this weird nostalgia thing happening, but it’s not with people my age who were there when it was happening. It’s a younger generation treating these movies with respect. I still just find it…odd. I found out recently someone paid $150 for an original VHS copy of 5 DARK SOULS! Outrageous. I would have dubbed a copy and sold it to them for $20.”

It’s fitting that Collum has pacted with Tempe’s J.R. Bookwalter on this new edition; not only has Tempe released several of Collum’s past movies “with budgets” like OCTOBER MOON, its sequel NOVEMBER SON, SOMETHING TO SCREAM ABOUT and SHY OF NORMAL, but Bookwalter “is literally the godfather of all this stuff,” Collum says. “ROBOT NINJA, POLYMORPH, OZONE, THE SANDMAN, SKINNED ALIVE…he’s had a hand in so many of the films this new subculture seems to revere. So to put 5 DARK SOULS out through his label made complete sense to me. He’s been offering to do it for a decade. I just had to reach a point where I was comfortable with how the movie looked to put it back out there.” To get it into shape for its 21st-century resurrection, Collum teamed with his regular editor Derrick Carey to “clean up 5 DARK SOULS. Streamline it. Cut away the fat, like the endless scenes of people running around the woods. It still has its no-budget video origins and feel, but now it simply moves at a much quicker pace."

5 DARK SOULS also owes its resurrection to Collum’s latest feature SAFE INSIDE, which wrapped earlier this month in Wisconsin (see story here) and features many of SOULS’ cast, including Tina Ona Paukstelis, Darcey Vanderhoef, Karen Dilloo and Sy Stevens. “It was the first time many of us had been in the same space together in 15 years," Collum says. “So it was this really cool reunion. So many of the group are now married, have kids, day jobs… We kept joking about our first venture together, so I decided it was time. Plus, Chris Harder, who played my lead villain John Small, has gone on to a professional acting career in films like EXTRAORDINARY MEASURES, Gus Van Sant’s RESTLESS and the TV show LEVERAGE, so I figured he was due for a little embarrassment. Every actor has one of these things in their closet, right?”

While Collum sequelized 5 DARK SOULS in 1998 and 2003, Collum states that short of a potential remake—which has been suggested over the past decade, and which he’d only do “with a legitimate budget”—this is the last time he plans to revisit the movie. “I honestly think it has only lived as long as it has because of its title,” he says. “The idea is a sound one; kids weren’t really killing each other for the hell of it back then. Columbine was still three years off, so at the time it seemed like a relatively fresh idea. And I have gotten fan letters regularly about it over the years. But I think that title is what sticks with people, and raises their curiosity. And now, with the awesome new art by Eric Arsnow [an update of the original cover Collum created “with tape and scissors” for the Moore release], I’m hoping it’ll grab a new generation, and appease those who, for whatever reason, have been seeking this out since it disappeared before some of them were even born. That’s frightening to me.”

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