Michael “Don’t Call Me No Stinkin’ Independent” DiPaolo: Founder of Black Cat Cinema
The Interview
By: D. Termined
September 30, 2008
Mike DiPaolo has been making horror videos for over 20 years yet emphatically states, “Don’t call me no stinkin’ independent.” A critic of the current state of horror and other cinema genres, he observes that “the stuff they call independent is just low-budget conformist crap.” And Mike is no conformist. His films include such titles (among others) as: Daddy, a zombie revenge drama with the backdrop of incest; Transgression, the account of a reporter who gets into the mind of a serial killer and ends up with much more than she bargained for; and Mother, a film with no dialogue that portrays a twisted son’s relationship with his aging mother. Mike also wrote a book, The Six Day Horror Movie: A No-Nonsense Guide to No-Budget Filmmaking to demonstrate that good horror films can be made on shoestring. I had the opportunity to sit down over coffee with Mike and ask him a few questions about his history in the business and his views on current horror films.
DT: So, Mike, why horror?
I have been in the room with more murderers than most police ever will, videotaping over 2,000 confessions during more than sixteen years at the Brooklyn District Attorney's Office. Simultaneously, I have written, produced and directed feature-length dramas based on fictionalized variations of those confessions. I have a somewhat a different view of reality than most people. When I started doing these features, most people who saw them said they were unbelievable. But in horror, you can do things that you can’t do in other genres. In horror, I can make a molester a vampire or a zombie and that can work. My film, Daddy, is about incest and the father who was the perpetrator became a zombie. Horror is more accepting – you can get away with more things. I’ve always had a dark view of things, I guess. Edgar Allan Poe is my favorite writer and I remember when I was 10 years old, I read everything I could get my hands on of his. To me, the real horror is life. Werewolves and vampires were just serial killers. People didn’t know how to explain it in human terms so they invented werewolves. They would find mutilated corpses and all these other things and they didn’t know what the hell it was so, they would blame a werewolf or a vampire.
DT: So, it is a way of projecting what it is too horrible for us to deal with on to something else.
Exactly, it’s not us. The problem is not us, it is someone or something else.
DT: You’ve seen so much of the dark side of human nature. What’s really scary to you?
What people do to each other. The stuff I saw at the DA, there was nothing worse than that. The worse horror film is not worse than that. Victims become victimizers – they either stay victims or they victimize others. That is the thing you see over and over at the DA’s office. The people that do these crimes, somebody has got to them first. If you are going to break that cycle of abuse you have to understand it and most people don’t want to understand it. They’d rather hold onto the fictions of how they think the world is than to deal with it.
DT: What do you think about mainstream horror movies?
They suck (laughs). It’s all just meant to sell. Now, the best horror is coming out of Japan and Korea because they believe in what they do. They actually believe in ghosts. If you watch a Japanese horror film and then watch the American remake, the American version is selling you a shock every 10 minutes. But the Japanese and the Korean films have a weird and spooky feel and atmosphere, like Juwon and the Grudge. That’s where there’s the good stuff is – not in America. Americans only know how to sell what they sell. If it’s something new, they don’t know how to sell it. There are a few exceptions: Tobe Hooper manages to keep that fresh element alive. John Carpenter used to, but he’s is getting tired, he’s sick of the whole thing.
DT: Are there places where people can watch innovative independent horror?
There used to be something called underground film festivals but they didn’t like horror films. My film Transgression got into an underground film festival in 1995 and my friend had a horror film that got in, too, and we were the only two horror films in the New York underground film festival that year. Even underground film festivals thought horror was too déclassé. But that’s one of the nice things about horror – it’s classified right next to pornography. The link between horror and pornography is interesting. For example, comparing the cum shot in porn to when you knife the woman in horror – it’s the same build up, the same dynamic.
DT: So there are few outlets in this country for horror films that aren’t big studio productions.
Yes and no. With digital film, anyone can make a movie, and there is ten times as much stuff and ten times as many festivals. So you can show your film at a festival, you just can’t make any money. But on the other hand, horror has become this great big business. So that’s the good news and the bad news. It’s a big business – films like Saw and Hostel. People find out they can do them for relatively little money but make a whole lot of money. And then they formulize it but people quickly tire of it. Nothing has changed much in mainstream cinema for a long, long time. It all goes back to Aristotle and his poetics. He was talking about Greek tragedy and that it only had certain number of elements that really makes it good. He was into rationality and logic and said that basically, the plot had to be plausible. It was preferable that the plot be plausible but impossible to something that is implausible and possible. So basically, if the story is true but its unbelievable, you really shouldn’t do a movie about it. You have to make it so the audience can follow it. Basically, with few exceptions, that is the form of Western drama from the Romans up until today. When I worked on the cable series, Trauma: Life in the ER, I would go into preproduction meetings and the producers were talking about how they envisioned the sequences, and they were basically spouting Aristotle’s poetics. It is this inbred way of putting it all together. I hate it, I have always hated it. When I would send something out people would say my characters aren’t likeable. The events are unbelievable. I then realized that is why. I also began to realize that good taste was a form of self-censorship. So, I don’t buy into that. A friend of mine, Scooter McCrae, did a film called 16 Tongues and it was a sci-fi story set in the future in a porn hotel. In this hotel you have to pay them to turn off the pornography. The hero was a cop who had been blown up and his skin grafts consisted of tongues, so his whole head was tongues. The woman protagonist had clitorises on her eyelids.
DT: They were a perfect match! Not exactly what you would call mainstream horror. So, the cultural vision of cinema is very constraining in terms of what you can do.
Right, the only heroes you are allowed are white males of action. But if you do that, you leave out half the stories. There is a climate in America of “Fan Boy” cinema. It’s horrible. Movies now are more about movies than they are about life. That’s the problem. And mainstream horror is made for 18 year old boys, like male development has to stop at 18. And this 18-year old male mentality can’t handle strong women. Women are in movies up until they are 30 and then they go into a black hole until they are 50 when they become character actresses. Everything is geared toward 18 year-old boys and anything that won’t bring them into the theatre is left out. It’s always been bad but its getting way worse. But still there is the potential for horror – it can be one of the most subversive genres because it allows the viewpoint of the “other.”
DT: What advice would you give to someone who wants to produce and make horror films?
Good luck. The only way to make a lot of money is to start off with even more money. Most people who are getting into it are just waiting for the right price to make a big budget thing and make a lot of money. So they figure out what can be marketed, they make that picture and a lot of money. People that do it because it is their passion – there are fewer and fewer of them, at least in the United States. My film Daddy was shot in six days for $6,000 and everybody was paid. I wanted to show that you can make a film for a small budget and still pay people.
DT: Thanks, Mike. You gonna pay for the coffee?
Check out the catalogue of Michael DiPaolo’s work at Black Cat Cinema You can read about his films, purchase them, and learn more about the man behind the video mayhem. Especially worth checking out on the site is his “I Hate and Denounce as A Coward” rant. Horror fans, count yourself as lucky that people like Mike continue to keep it real in the horror world.
