If you ask anyone vacationing in Michigan what they’re here for, you’re bound to hear a lot of answers concerning Motown history, the Great Lakes, good beer and fudge.
But if you were to ask director Darrin James and producer Fabricio Cerioni what brought them here, they would have a much more macabre answer.
This past year the pair came to Michigan to shoot their film Elder Island, a movie based on some of the darker history of Beaver Island. Sure it’s a popular Michigan tourist attraction, but it also has a creepy history involving religious monarchies, a power-hungry preacher and (of course) murder — in other words, a great starting point for a horror movie. James and Cerioni, who also wrote the screenplay together, found inspiration in this actual history, but also had no problem taking liberty and making the horror story their own.
“One of the things we found as we were writing the story was we ended up writing something that was a little more like Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th or Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” Cerioni said. “We actually went a little bit retro with the story we had. Instead of have it be this gorefest we actually have a very interesting bad guy and all of these great characters that have great motivations and so forth. We felt much happier with that kind of story.”
Of course neither James nor Cerioni want to be pigeonholed as horror filmmakers. They’ve worked with a variety of genres, creating an eclectic portfolio of independent features and shorts.
“We’re basically storytellers, so we don’t want to tie ourselves down to any particular genre,” Cerioni said. “The horror/thriller setting was just very apt for the Reverend, for the bad guy in the movie. That’s why we went in that direction.”
When it came down to finding locations to shoot the film, Michigan was the obvious choice. Not only were there obvious historical ties to Beaver Island in their story, there was also the plentiful Michigan wilderness creating the perfect setting for a scary movie.
“Let’s face it, woods, when shot right, can be creepy no matter where you are,” James said. “And in Michigan you guys have so much green everywhere.”
As if those weren’t enough reasons to shoot entirely in Michigan, Cerioni and James were also awarded a roughly $90,565 film incentive, some of the last of the Michigan Film Office’s budget, generously boosting the funds for the movie.
Cerioni and James haven’t settled on a distribution deal quite yet, but they have plans to premiere the movie in Michigan.
“There are a number of directions we’re going in,” James said. “As far as film festivals, we want to do those. We’re looking at international distribution. If it catches on from there hopefully we can move on to domestic distribution. I mean, that’s always the end goal.”
