Porno is a debut feature from filmmaker Keola Racela. The film is a horror comedy set in the year 1992 at a Christian-run movie-theatre. During an after-hours debate about what film to screen – Encino Man or A League of Their Own – they stumble upon a secret room containing a mysterious film. After opting to watch the newly uncovered movie they unwittingly unleash Lilith, an alluring succubus with danger on her mind. The film arrives on digital VOD platforms from 1st June and is sure to capture the attention of genre fans.
Director Keola Racela took the time out of his quarantine to speak with us about the project. When we caught up with him he was in high spirits, having just completed a new script (more on that later), and was more than happy to chat about what went into making Porno.
So I read you got into filmmaking by teaching filmmaking…
I graduated with a degree in Film Studies. The University I went to just didn’t have a huge production programme. I managed to get my way into one class, but was kind of shamed out of it because I just had no idea what I was doing (laughs). I wasn’t one of these kids who started making movies at a very young age. After I graduated I started teaching at this summer camp / pre-college programme for high-school kids, and I taught a film studies class. At the end of the summer you’re meant to do some kind of presentation and for film studies class… what kind of presentation can you do?… show a scene and then break it down? So we made a film. It was just super fun.
Then I got the opportunity to apply for a job teaching documentary video production, and I just lied and said I’d done it before (laughs), and I got the job. I felt like I was waiting for someone to tell me that I was allowed to make films. I loved films so much and I’d dedicated some much time to watching them, studying them in college, I think it’s a rarefied person that gets to make a film. The programme that I was teaching at was an after-school programme quote unquote, because it for kids who had been kicked out of school, or who had been through the juvenile justice system. The documentaries that we were making were based around policies and personal stories that led them to be either kicked out of school or imprisoned. These are kids that no one was giving permission to do anything, and I was in a position to tell them that they could be filmmakers. By empowering them to do that I had my own revelation – ‘oh yeah no one has to give you permission, you can just grab a camera and start making a movie!’. That was the beginning of it all. I did that for four years, and then I applied for film school.
I also read that you stayed away from horror films when you were younger, yet your debut feature is a horror, how did that happen?
I feel like I came to it late, just in terms of my love of movies. It was the only genre I actively avoided because of this experience I had when I was really young watching this movie called House, which in retrospect is not at all scary, and is more of a horror comedy. It was just something that I actively avoided as a kid and didn’t know much about. In the intervening years I’ve gone on to become quite a big fan. When I went to film school I wasn’t like, ‘horror’s the thing I want to do’, at all.
The reason Porno was a horror film was part of the genesis of making the film. Matt Black and Laurence Vannicelli, the writers, and Chris Cole the producer, called me up and asked me if I wanted to make a movie. I said, ‘yeah, what movie?’ and they said, ‘we don’t know what movie it is, but it’s going to be a horror film’. That was kinda it. It was just part of the deal. We had this much money set aside, which is not a lot of money, and someone was offering to put up the money for a film as long as it was made in a certain time frame and as long as it was a horror. That was one of the stipulations of being allowed to make this movie.
I don’t think there was a direction to make a horror comedy, but because I knew Matt and Laurence from film school, and we’d lived together, the basis of our friendship is this weird shared sense of humour. We got together to figure out really what the movie was going to be and it just ended up being kind of silly because that’s just how we are when we’re hanging out.
The events of the film take place in 1992, what made you pick that time period?
I was born in the eighties, so the nineties were the stage of my pubescence, the same with Matt and Laurence, so we have this association. The concept of the film started with a haunted porno theatre and certainly our relationship to, and access to, pornography is so different today… then it was pre-Internet. That was also a major factor in setting it in the nineties, setting it before pornography was so readily accessible. I think there’s a shared experience that we had as kids growing up that is pornography was this very rare material, almost grail like. It was either something that you stumbled upon or you’d heard a rumour that somebody had a magazine or some video tape / illicit thing that was always talked about in hushed tones. Now it’s a little bit different. In keeping with the inexperience of the characters and the purity it seemed like that was the perfect time period.
The theatre is also showing both Encino Man and A League of Their Own, why those films?
Well we landed on 92 and then were looking at what the big family films of that time period were. A Christian theatre would potentially play G and PG movies – the ratings in the US – and so we just looked at what those films were. I had never actually seen Encino Man, but A League of Their Own was… I grew up with three sisters, and that was a very big film in our household.
I used to work in a cinema and found that there were several moments of the day-to-day routine that were familiar. Have you yourself ever worked in a movie theatre?
Yeah, I worked in a movie theatre after I graduated from my undergraduate University. I moved to Hawaii and I worked at a movie theatre in Hawaii, which was super funny. It was great because you got to just see movies for free. But the actual job you realise is that you’re a janitor and a snack bar worker. You shovel popcorn and then you just pick up trash, and that’s your job. We definitely snuck off to smoke cigarettes, although we did it in this trash room that stank so bad – stale soda and soggy popcorn. In Hawaii they put this stuff on their popcorn called Furikake mix, which is like sweet rice crackers, and also seaweed and sesame seeds. You get a packet of it and put it over your popcorn. It tastes really good, but oh man if you just smell mounds and mounds of old soogy Furikake mix, it’s just horrible. So we would stand in the garbage chute essentially, which would reek, and just smoke cigarettes. It was so much fun.
When we met at FrightFest last year we spoke about the similarities to the Clive Barker Book of Blood story ‘Son of Celluloid’, a story that you guys weren’t familiar with until after you made the film. Have there been any other comparisons made that you weren’t expecting?
What’s funny is Matt, one of the writers, started to read that Clive Barker book on the way to SXSW and was like, ‘guys, this is very similar to our film’ (laughs). I think that people mention Demons, and then this movie Popcorn, which I haven’t seen. After one screening someone came up to me and said it was like The Breakfast Club. I love that movie so I’ll take it as a compliment. I think Matt and Laurence were thinking more Superbad than Breakfast Club, but I think that’s great.
On the surface the film is this heightened horror comedy, but at its core it deals with some very serious themes of sexual identity and relationships. How did this blend come around?
I think that maybe it’s some of the DNA of the film school that we all went to. I think the ethos there is more around independent film or art film, in that those films are usually character driven and are also not genre films. People who are huge fans of genre films and want to make those types of films, I think sometimes have a tough time at the school that we went to, although I think that attitude is changing a little bit. I went to school in Columbia, the equipment there is not the most state-of-the-art and they’re very much a story first school. Part of that is because of the faculty, it’s made up of workers during the eighties and nineties on independent films. None of them were big commercial filmmakers.
I think first and foremost, just in the way we think about film story and character first, and building that at the core of something. I think sometimes it throws people off when they watch the movie. They think that these genre films, these midnight movies are supposed to be how many gore gags can you get in per second. We certainly love those movies and are trying to play in that space, but I think sometimes it throws people off when there’s character stuff in there as well. I think that it’s one of the things that makes the movie special to me and one of the things I really love about the movie, but I understand why people sometimes find it a little confusing.
There’s also nudity and vulnerable scenes. How do you make them comfortable, especially in this post #MeToo movement. I guess people are more conscious of when they’re asking people to do these things. How did you go about making sure that your cast felt comfortable?
Absolutely. I think that we walked in on a human level. You can write anything you want and be like, ‘oh this is a fun idea’, but then when you’re asking people to perform it’s obviously a very different thing. I think we were all very sensitive. One of the producers was very conscious to make the crew very female heavy, in part because of this, and to the make the environment, at macro level, something that was more friendly to the female cast, and I think Katelyn [Pearce] in particular. We had a female second AD who was always on standby, and we did our best to close the sets when there was nudity.
It was certainly my first time making a film with nudity and so I was very self conscious about that. I mean to be honest I was quite nervous. I had something as far away from a caviller attitude as you can imagine. Just because that anything that you ask an actor to do, even if it’s just doing lines of dialogue, they have to open themselves up, make themselves vulnerable. It’s your job as a director to protect them and support them. That’s how you get the best performances. When people feel safe to be open and be vulnerable. I’m very aware and conscious of that and try to do the best job I can. Not only because I’m a human being and I want other people to feel safe, but also because it benefits the film. The actors give a better performance and the film is better for it. So I think it makes sense on all levels to support the actors and be conscious of their safety.
What do you hope audiences will experience when they settle in with Porno?
I hope that people have a fun time watching it. It’s a little bit of a love letter to old time movie theatres and just the excitement around watching a movie. I hope that people are able to get some of that feeling back. We’re all in desperate need of that feeling of going to the cinema and so I hope people find a little vicarious movie theatre visit even if they have to watch it from home. Hopefully they’ll watch it with other people though, as it’s a really fun shared experience.
So are you hard at work on the next project?
I just finished a script, which I’m really excited about. It’s not a horror comedy, although there are some funny elements in it, but it is a horror movie. It’s a little darker in tone and I’m super excited about it. I think it’s going to be super awesome. I wrote that with Laurence, and we’re working on a whole bunch of stuff. The great thing – there isn’t really a great thing about quarantine – but one of the side-effects of it is that it’s sometimes hard to dedicate time to sitting down and writing, which is the thing you need to do in order to write, which is just throw time at it. Now it seems like we have a lot of time. So we’re trying to write as much as we can while we have this time. Hopefully then when people start making films again, we’ll have something ready to go.
Porno is available on Digital HD now.
