BART
       MASTRONARDI

When we last spoke with Bart Mastronardi, his feature directorial debut VINDICATION had just entered the post-production phase in hopes of when it would be completed, it would set the horror world on notice.

Mission accomplished.

This past December, VINDICATION received a huge boost of support when horror icon Clive Barker publicly endorsed the film. This past June at the Fangoria Weekend of Horrors, VINDICATION premiered to a standing room only audience and was met with enthusiastic applause.

To discuss his current endeavors and the upcoming plans of VINDICATION on DVD, Bart re-enters the Colonelscrypt after a dinner meeting on a bright, summer day with the Amityville Horror House viewed in the horizon and the barbecue blazing.

COLONELSCRYPT: Welcome back Bart.

BART MASTRONARDI: Thank you.

CC: So in the time since your last interview here, VINDICATION has been released and has played at a few film festivals, including a panel and screening at last month's Fangoria Weekend of Horrors. How has the response been thus far?

BM: The response so far honestly has been overwhelmingly better than what I expected. I didn't expect it to be like this. You make a film and you hope that they like it. You get a few tomatoes here and there but the response has been great. I'm totally overwhelmed by everything. I don't even know how to describe it but it is amazing. It's amazing because you've worked so hard and this is what you dream about and now you're finally there and you reach that point. The film is still not complete in the fact that we're putting it out in film festivals and we're getting the DVD ready but it is overwhelming to know that people are liking what you've been working on the last three years of your life and it's nice. It feels really good that someone likes your kid, they want to play with them and make them feel comfortable. I'm very happy that the horror community, particularly the big wigs in the horror community seem to be accepting of the film. I'm very proud and the cast and crew feel the same way.

CC: Talking about big wigs, you received a seal of approval of Clive Barker. How did Clive get a hold of the film and how does it feel to have someone like Clive love your film so much?

BM: You know, I still pinch myself. Clive Barker is perhaps the most well respected horror artist out there. He does it all. He does photography, he writes of course, paintings, films, he's a filmmaker, he produces films as well, so the man is it. He capitalizes that on everything that he does. His name is there and when you see something with Clive Barker's name on it, obviously you're going to be drawn to that because he has that sense of respect. He really takes the genre very seriously. He loves the genre and he loves the darkness that surrounds him there and he's a true artist in that. To have his stamp of approval  from this man, it's total "vindication" for the movie. It clearly vindicates everything that we did. How we got it into our hands, my partner David-

DAVID MARANCIK: Hi!

BM: (Laughs). Anyway, my partner David saw VINDICATION and said that Clive would love this. I first told him "Don't you dare show this to him" because if this man doesn't like it, I would be so heartbroken. Lo and behold, David, who has worked forClive on the book IMAGINING MAN, gave it to Clive and said "You've gotta watch this," and Clive watched it not once, but twice. He gave me a call and we spoke on the phone for an hour and a half and we've been in contact since. I've had a chance to work with him. I really don't know how to describe it because I swear to God it's Clive Fucking Barker but on the other hand I get to meet him, work with him, and talk to him, he gets to talk to me, and he becomes just Clive. He becomes a man, he becomes reality and you really appreciate that. Believe me, to have this man's stamp of approval makes me feel that all the sacrifices and all the money that I put into it, the time that the cast and crew put into it, and all the struggles and fights you have on set to get it made, to have that man put that stamp of approval there like I said earlier is a total "vindication" and you feel like you've won a battle in a war that will probably never be over. It's nice to see that and the film only cost $50,000 so to have this little movie which took three years to make have Clive Barker, Fangoria, Arrow In The Head, uh...

CC: The Colonel's Crypt?

BM: The Colonel's Crypt (laughs), and audiences, I mean the Fango convention we had 45 minutes of lines of people wanting our autographs. When we were doing the convention two years ago, I think we only had five people so it's overwhelming. At the same time, it's still a business and you still have to do the job the proper way and still make sure the film is having that respectability and that you are there for the film and not yourself.

CC: You mentioned that the film took three years to complete. Talk if you can about the origins of the film and how you changed throughout the process because in such a long time, your initial thought about shooting a scene changes or an overall plot point may change. So in essence what was the entire process from beginning to end?

BM: To start with, the three year process of it, VINDICATION was a short film first. I approached it as to creating a feature film. It started off as a typical slasher film. I didn't really mean it to get to the point that it did. What happened was I was starting to do more DP work. I was becoming a cinematographer and I was meeting a lot more actors. I was getting a lot more credibility with the work I was doing. I felt I had something there and I felt like utilizing the actors that I had. Being an English teacher, I would be doing a lot of the classics with the students. Being a film teacher also, I talked about doing your job properly as a filmmaker. I took all three of that, got rid of the slasher thing, and made a story with emotion, depth, and drama and fill it all in the backdrop of a horror film. I took a lot of my own personal experiences and things that people could relate to. I started to write the script much more seriously and I felt that I had a sense of responsibility towards my actors and towards the whole horror genre in particular. Let's face it, the torture porn and the remakes and stuff, after a while it's going to get boring and very repetitive. Not that there's anything wrong with some of the films, it's just that after a while, we want something different. When I began to write VINDICATION much more seriously, the story just started to come to me. I started to study themes and I started to study a lot more about what truth is. The writing process just started to make the movie for me. When I was ready with certain scenes, I would cast the actors which were all hand picked by me, nobody had to audition for VINDICATION, and I had a whole pool of talent from Keith Fraser to Alan Rowe Kelly to Zoë Daelman Chlanda to Miguel Lopez to Jerry Murdock to Jessie May Laumann, I mean the list goes on and on. Then you surround yourself with the best crew, like Dominick Sivilli, Stolis Hadjicharalambous, Henry Borriello, and Javier Rodriguez, and everything starts to come to fruition. The film just then gelled together and it told itself as if it had its own soul and it just chose me to direct everything. That's how I began to see it. I started to study classic films, not just classic horror films, but classic movies and why they stood the test of time. I wanted to emulate that so I started to put a lot of that into VINDICATION.

VINDICATION is not a perfect film and I'm sure there are a lot of flaws with it but it's a movie that I wanted to make that I would love to have seen that I missed seeing when I was a kid growing up. I loved James Whale's FRANKENSTEIN. There's emotion there. There's a heart there that comes with that. You miss that and I wanted VINDICATION in there.

What I began doing was that I would schedule the film around my paychecks and we would film every other weekend depending on the pay schedule and I would have to ask my actors to come in and have to schedule them up. That's how we did it. It was all my money. I didn't ask anybody to give me any money. Family and friends donated places for us to shoot and catering. Nobody got paid on that set. That's why it's so great to have Clive Barker and Fangoria get behind it because this is what it's all about. You want these people to come in and say "You know what, we're gonna help you get this film out there and give that stamp of approval for you guys," and on the low budget that you have, you made something twice as big. You're feeling that now with INSATIABLE.

CC: Yes, and it is a good feeling.

BM: What I tend to appreciate is the sense of loyalty that they have towards us and they say "You know what, you're doing better work than the bigger budget stuff but we're liking yours and we want to give you the opportunity to do that," and I feel that if they're going to give me the opportunity then I don't want to let them down. I want to make sure that that work is going to be just as good as the other project is. When you're invited to the conventions and speak on a panel, there's a way you have to talk to people. There's a way that you have to make the audience and the horror fans feel appreciated and tell them that this film is a stamp on the horror genre and that you want to be able to reach out to the audience to get them because that's what it's for. It's for the audience.

CC: Explain the concept of VINDICATION and the many themes within the film?

BM: VINDICATION is a coming of age story and that's as simple as I could possibly make it. To go a little more complex, you have to go along with what goes with a coming of age story. A coming of age story is about moments of truth, realization, journeying from one part to become something else. I took those elements and the script and I went "OK, what else is going to be part of the journey," and you need characters to push it along. You can basically associate it to a young gay boy or a lesbian girl who are understanding a little more about their sexuality, they're afraid of it and try to kill it but then they begin to understand it a little more and then they finally accept it. Let's face it, all truth is developed in three stages. It's violently opposed, then it's examined, and then it's finally accepted as to what is truth. Nicholas' (Keith Fraser) journey is divided into three parts; the setup, the confrontation, and the resolution to it all. That's what VINDICATION is, and then you throw in your horror characters, your monsters, your blood and guts and gore, and the masks, everything else that comes with a great horror film, you want to manipulate all of that and that is what VINDICATION is.

CC: Talking about monsters, there is one particular character called Kon'scious that coincides with Nicholas' character. Who is this character in the film?

BM: Kon'scious was a representation of Nicholas' conscience. We spelled it differently and it was literally to show one's guilt manifest into reality. I really wanted to make his conscience very horrific looking, even if it is his conscience, he's awoken something inside of him and I wanted that awakening to be something very scary to him and give a sense of truthfulness to that. When we created him, we wanted him to be blind. We covered up his eyes and we felt by having him be blind, it went back to the Greek plays where the prophets were always blind and we wanted to make a statement about that; how the blind are always able to see while the people who have eyes are really the blind ones. We did that with Urbane's character, who's played by Alan Rowe Kelly. We did that with the Timekeeper, where you never see his eyes. There's a scene where a girl's eyes are gouged out. There's always something about the sense of what are we seeing, and Kon'scious is his conscience. Kon'scious sees the truth. I'm sure you'll see similarities in Kon'scious with other monsters in the horror world but Kon'scious is such a great character. We all have a conscience and this guy happens to manifest and speak to him.

CC: The look of the character is horrifically creepy. How did you come up with his specific look?

BM: Henry Borriello and I sat and he talked about the kinds of makeups that he could get for the price that we could. I remember we were covering up eyes and we did tests here and there. He is great to work with because Henry loves to experiment a lot and that led to us on how Kon'scious was going to look. I had a way of how Kon'scious was to look and Henry had a way so we combined the two together in order to create him. I found him actually on a magazine cover while I was doing my research for him and I looked at it and thought it would be really good. I brought it back to Henry and we worked it all in. We added things here and there. We added scars to show he was a warrior. You have to learn to collaborate with your fellow filmmakers because they're going to bring ideas to the table that you're not seeing. I'm going to bring ideas that they may not see, but overall that's where Kon'scious comes about.

CC: One scene that's been mentioned from critics and fans is the party scene, which is the most graphically violent scene in the film. Can you talk about how it was filming that sequence with a large group of actors and crew?

BM: It was shot in two days. The first day was just where they were all dancing. It was a masquerade party. The murder sequences were all shot the next day. What happened was I was shooting Unit A and I told Stolis and Dominick to shoot Unit B and I gave them very specific instructions as to what to do which was to have a strobe light and make it like an assembly line of people being slaughtered. Henry did the makeup and they were all shooting that. When we edited it all together, we added Billy Archiello's music score to it and it just works. It's gory, it's bloody and it's a lot of fun but it's not done for the sake of exploitation murders. It's done in the sense where it drives the plot further forward. It's not just stupid people being slaughtered. It's Nicholas' journey of destroying guilt in people and them trying to hide it through a masquerade so he goes and slaughters all of that. It has a purpose and not for exploitation reasons. We shot it in two days. We had no money to do it. It was just strobe effects and lots of blood all over the place. It's friends and family coming in and watching their throats slit, their noses punched in, and their heads rolling across the floor. Alan was there, Jerry was there and they helped out. Stolis and Dom did a great job with that. It just worked. You have to realize as an independent filmmaker, you don't have a lot of money to tell the story so you have to be much more creative with the way that you show things on screen.

CC: You did this on VINDICATION and you did this on THE BLOOD SHED. How fun is it to kill Michael Gingold on screen?

BM: (Laughs) Killing Gingold on screen is a lot of fun. It's fun because it's Gingold and he's such a great guy. I'd kill Michael any day... on CELLUOID! I have to clarify that. On the other end of it, it's Fangoria and you're sitting there going "Holy shit." He came with his Fangoria shirt on. We put a knife through his head and we had to discard his body so we dumped it in the trash. That's why you haven't seen him in a while. On a plus note, Gingold is a big supporter of the independent films and without his push, a lot of people wouldn't be hearing about VINDICATION in the pages of Fangoria. Tony Timpone comes on board and he loved the film and embraced it also. I'd love to kill him on screen but we need him for Fangoria.

CC: You said earlier that you are in the stages of putting VINDICATION on DVD. What can you talk about the DVD thus far?

BM: If I tell you anything, I'd have to kill but I want the interview so I can't do that (laughs). It's still in its infancy stages. We played the film for cast and crew last December. We played it at Fango in Chicago. I thought that cut was a little too long in Chicago so we cut 20 minutes out of it. Then it played in New York last month and that's when we had standing room only, people sitting on the floor watching it, and that amazed me. We had a full room and it was hot. It blew my mind. We screened it on the white wall.

CC: Jerry Murdock said that weekend "The white wall never looked better."

BM: (Laughs) Yes, we had VINDICATION, INSATIABLE, and A FAR CRY FROM HOME playing in that theater all weekend and they all looked beautiful along this white wall. The wall that dripped blood. Back to your question, I wanted to work on the DVD. Dominick Sivilli and I have been working on that. I'd love to put a double disc out for the film. There's so much stuff that got cut. We shot it as a slasher film first so there's so much that we left out. We want to put it on DVD, really fill it up, and say that if you want to make an independent film, this is how to do it. This is what we started with, this is how we finished it, this is what we cut. I'd like to do two commentaries for the film; one for cast and one for crew and people could listen to whatever they want to. I want it to be an experience. I don't want it to be a movie and that's it. I want it to be an experience for people. You spend three years of your life with it. I don't want it to stop there. I want it to live a life and maybe 20 years from now a kid would come up to me and say "Because of VINDICATION, I want to become a filmmaker."

CC: That's good because you don't want kids coming up to you saying "Because of you, I slaughtered a bunch of fellow students at a masquerade ball."

BM: No, I don't wanna hear that (laughs). It's a movie and I did the best that I could with the means that I had. The cast and crew did the best job they could do. They did a fantastic job with it. You always want longevity for the work that you do. Look at Shakespeare, it's 500 years after his death and we still study and read the man. CITIZEN KANE is still considered as the best film ever made, and that movie was made in 1941. Welles has passed away and we still study his work. We have great films out there and I want VINDICATION to be a great film. I don't know how long it would take for that status but however long it takes, let it. Let it build its momentum. We're going to have fun with the DVD. I can't promise anything but we'll see where it goes. We're definitely working on it and that I can say.

CC: You are a film professor at the New York Film Academy. Let's say you created a course called "History of Horror 101." You have five films to show your class. They can't be your own.

BM: Well forget it then (laughs).

CC: (Laughs) What five films would you show them for the history of horror and why?

BM: Hmmm. God, there's so many to choose from, to pick five. From the silent films, I would probably pick THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI because that's perfect German Expressionism and you want a sense of artistic merit there. Then you go for one of the Universal classic films. I'd probably pick FRANKENSTEIN because it's an emotional ride there. This is a hard question. I'll tell you what, FRIDAY THE 13TH (the original) needs to be there. Why?  Because it's one of those movies that's really stood the test of time and people don't seem to know why. I think it's a great horror film and has a great horror atmosphere. It had gore effects from Tom Savini. It was a big hit. It was pure exploitation but in the sense it's still a horror film. I just think it hits the right notes and the right chords. I find it suspenseful. It's an old fashioned movie you don't see made anymore. I would throw in the original TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE. That's disturbing and done documentary style. There's so many I want to name but I only have one more. OK, SUSPIRIA by Dario Argento. The cinematography is just brilliant. It's his tour de force, so that's five. For extra credit, it's not really a horror film but I would show my class PLAN NINE FROM OUTER SPACE by Ed Wood because people criticize it so harshly as how not to make a movie. Maybe if we look at the movies that are portrayed as bad, we might learn something from that.

CC: I'm surprised you didn't mention MICROWAVE MASSACRE.

BM: (Laughs) How can we forget that? That title sequence alone, how could we forget that one?

CC: After VINDICATION is done, what is next for you?

BM: What I can talk about is I am working on two projects. One is a short piece, one is a feature film. I will do the short film first and then work on the feature. What I can say about the short film is, and it's not written in stone yet, but it's my version of a contemporary classic and two actresses will be the leads. After that I'll be working on the bigger thing and that is I want to make a horror version of Shakespeare's MACBETH and that's all I will say at the moment. That's a long way off. I just received a letter from David Joyce who's putting a book together about making horror films on an independent budget. He's interviewing me, Dante Tomaselli, Alan Rowe Kelly, so to be asked to do that is a terrific honor. I'm starting to live the dream that I am dreaming about and VINDICATION was the foot in the door that did that. That's due in part to the people that believed in the film and it's paid off. It's still paying off.

CC: Where do you see the horror genre in itself going now? Do you see the independents rise again?

BM: For the horror genre, it's always been the independents that carry the genre through and I think they're always going to carry it through because Hollywood's not really making anything original in that they are retelling things in their own way but they're more business oriented and that's alright. Anyone and this goes back to what I said to you in the first interview; anyone can put a camera on a tripod and make a movie. Anyone can do that but what's going to set you apart is the reasons how you do it and why you do it. That's what going to set your film apart from everything else. If the independents are going to carry this along, then we need very creative filmmakers out there and we need people to support this. I said this at the Fangoria convention and I'll say it again; independent films are not going to go anywhere unless there is an audience that's going to step behind it and support. They're going to step behind HALLOWEEN H2500 because it's safe for them and they know it already. Nobody was behind HALLOWEEN when it came out in 1978. It had to build its momentum. If we're not going to get the audience to come and support us, then nothing in the genre is going to happen. It's going to be a retelling of everything again or a sequel so we need the audience to come back and they have to start checking things out. If they like it, they have to talk about it. If they need to talk about it, talk about in an intellectual and smart way. We need an audience to support the films and if they don't come out, you're going to get what Hollywood is dishing. There has to be an audience and there has to be a voice. If not, then it's not going to be worth anything.

CC: That's it Bart. Thank you.

BM: Thanks Scott.