This weekend, FrightFest returns for its Halloween event. Running from Friday 27th – Saturday 28th October, the mini-festival will play host to nine films, all of which are new for UK shores. Closing out the event is Andy Fickman’s Blue Light, which sees a group of friends realise that there is something deadly in the woods after their RV breaks down en-route to a music festival. Andy Fickman is a director of both stage and screen, having previously directed She’s the Man, and Race to Witch Mountain for the screen, and Heathers: The Musical on the stage. Fickman is currently in London, work-shopping his new musical, 13 Going on 30, and will be at FrightFest to introduce his new feature. Ahead of the event, THN spoke with Fickman to find out more about Blue Light.
How did the concept for Blue Light come together?
So it’s inspired by a real event. When I was in high school in Texas, there was a notorious cemetery called Blue Light cemetery. It’s a very old abandoned cemetery. It was always passed down that at some point you were supposed to, if you could, go to the cemetery and tell ghost stories. My friends, we drove and there’s no lights in this area. It’s just tree after tree, darkness on all sides. We got to the cemetery and there was a chain link and high barbed wire fence. The cemetery has been shut for a hundred years and there’s no real way in or out. We had some cheap champagne from high school and we used our coats to put over the barbed wire fence.
It was pitch black and we were there for a while, telling ghost stories. Then we heard a noise and the noise was not that of a small animal. The noise felt heavy, and the noise was moving towards us. Truthfully, with that area, there was no way in or out unless you maybe crawled under the fence, but it felt more human than it felt anything, but there were no flashlights, there was no security guard, no car for miles. We all ran back and it got more and more terrifying as we were trying to get to the fence and we got everyone over the fence. I was the last one.
That night, we began to have a conversation about what it was and all of us had very different opinions. And over the years, as we’ve gotten older, we have shared some of us have changed our minds, some have gotten more outlandish. But we have definitely felt that we were experiencing something.
The premise is a group of friends break down on the side of the road, but Blue Light goes into a more psychological direction. How much fun has it been messing with expectations?
There were a couple of touchstones for me. I always loved Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock. I loved it because it just felt like a question. I kept wanting an answer, but it felt like a lot of questions. We were travelling and like probably anywhere in the world there would be all these abandoned cars that would be on the side of the road. Sometimes I would start questioning what happened to those people. Clearly that’s a nice car that doesn’t look like it was a wreck, and they must have walked somewhere. We started playing with the cast. I had the mythology, all very worked out, but I refused to tell it to the cast because I didn’t want them…. sometimes the monster is what’s in our mind. Years ago you would mention a UFO and people would look and think you were drunk. Now, it’s on the nightly news because every government is raising their hands saying “hey we might know more about that.”
My father was a geologist and a palaeontologist, and he was a man of science. But he would always encourage me, whether it was ghosts of the Loch Ness monster, bigfoot, he would say “science is not finite.” Science doesn’t become real until we discover it. 200 years ago, nobody knew what gorillas were. Now we know 100% what a gorilla is. What I did with the cast a lot was we talked about personal stories and everybody, for the most part, had someone in their family that maybe has something that is unexplainable. Grandmother, she went to psychics, and that someone swore they had a haunting, and that really helped us as a cast. We were out in these woods, in the middle of nowhere, on a teeny tiny budget, and you begin to hear things and what you hear begins to play itself in your mind. I think that was really my hope and my intention was I wanted the audience to leave questioning what happened.
We did a screening for a lot of college students that had gone so well and everybody started raising their hands and they all had a different opinion. It made me so happy because it made me feel like that is exactly what the psychological horror of the mind should do. It wasn’t being able to just point a finger and say “well there’s the boogeyman. He’s right there, he’s outside the window.” That to me was not scary.
Was there any trepidation at all? The idea was inspired by something real; you’re all talking about spooky things, you’re in a creepy location. Were you not afraid of tempting fate?
I think that’s a huge part of it. It’s like us, we went into a cemetery that’s closed, and we are going to tell ghost stories. Then something scary happens to us. So what started one thing or the other. I remember as kids, we’d play in the neighbourhood and we’d do seances, and we’d have the Ouija board and then the Ouija board would move a little and we’d freak out. Then that would be the question of well, are we freaking ourselves out because we went and got a Ouija board? Or are we freaked out because we didn’t think we would be freaked out and now we are?
I think you’re right, the notion of tempting fate…if you pass a haunted house, you can keep driving, or if you stop and decide to go inside, are you tempting fate? I love all the paranormal shows and I used to love Most Haunted. They’d be in there and they’d hear something creepy and you’d be like, “you should all run right now,” and instead they’d be like “I’m petrified with fear. Let’s go towards that noise,” and they’d get more afraid, and I would be, “well you are tempting fate.” Halloween is such a specific time. My son and I just went to Universal Halloween Horror Nights, which is just fantastic. It’s a scary night of haunted mazes. You know going in those are actors. They’re not going to axe murder you. There is nothing that’s going to happen because you’re in a theme park for Halloween. Yet, you turn a corner and someone jumps out at you and gives you a jump scare, and you just are wiped out by it. I think tempting fate is a big significant factor for the film.
Much of the film is set within the confines of this small RV, what challenges did this throw up?
This was very low-budget, practical, I knew we were going to get an RV. If I was doing a big-budget movie, I’d cut that RV in half and I’d split it, and I’m inside, I’ve got a green screen… there was none of that. This was, we found an RV which was pretty much what I have written my visual for. We found it, it was an old RV, we got it running again and our DP and I, with the cast, we sort of rehearsed in there. We tried to shoot as much in order as we could, because, as it became more and more destroyed, on our budget there was no “we have five RVs” we had one RV and no matter what happened in that RV, whether it was blood or broken glass or anything, we would were just in continuity mode.
There was no space so I’d be under a table, I would be in the bathroom with my monitor. Sometimes I’d be crammed into the window shield holding the monitor. So about half of our movie was that way and I think it helped. This was not a move in which you yell cut and everyone went to their trailers and had a cup of cocoa and came back. This was a movie where we sat there and shot all night. While it was challenging, I actually found it really creatively freeing because it felt more real. I liked the idea that the RV was like a fort. You’ve got windows, and you’ve got doors, and you feel maybe a little safer than a car. But then there’s more room and then you’re thinking, what’s behind that? How do I get out?
A lot of horror these days just jumps straight into the action, but Blue Light spends a lot of time with the group before turning. Why was it important for you to take the time in setting the characters up?
It becomes a little bit of a risk because everybody’s so used to forty-eight jump scares in the first fifty minutes. I love those movies as well, but I think that the psychology of getting to who our people are and then understanding something about your own group of friends is great. How would you do with friends you grew up with when you’re in a very terrifying situation? Could you rely on them? Who would you rely on? I really felt like the more we could understand their relationship and that we could just get to know them and just be with them that as the Agatha Christie Ten Little Indians, And Then There Were None was happening. You would, at least, know who they were. For me, once you start killing so many characters I become numb.
I also didn’t want the audience to know who potentially might become the hero or not, who potentially might be good or bad or not. I felt it was easier to spend time with them. The cast was really game for it. Every now and again somebody would say, “shouldn’t we have killed somebody here on page fifteen?” There were a lot of conversations about the maths of killing and I was like, “I’m okay in this type of horror film. ” If it was a play, we’d be meeting all these people and then something would begin to happen, but we would know who they’re happening to.
Blue Light also fits in nicely with this new wave of teen focused horror. They’re different to the likes of Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer that were big at the turn of the millennium, and are more realistic, dealing with real issues that audiences can dig their teeth into.
I love that you said that. I was a kid of the 80s, but I loved watching all the 60’s and 70s horror films. I remember in The Changeling, the red ball comes down the steps and just a simple red ball was terrifying. For me as a kid in the 80s, every weekend it was Friday the 13th Part 2, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween. They were all about kill rates. Now there is a lot more thoughtful progression when it comes to horror films and people talking about psychology. Some of my favourite films have been in the last decade because of that.
I have to talk about Heathers, that show just ran and ran at The Other Palace, it even got a filmed performance, cinema release, and Blu-ray release. What was it like being a part of that madness?
I had loved Heathers the movie. It was a product of my teen years. When we went in for the moment, can we turn it into a musical? The big question became that it was dark. Dan Waters the writer, and Michale Lehmann the diretor, Denise Di Novi, everyone was, “I don’t know if it feels like a musical,” and with my partners Larry O’Keefe and Kevin Murphy our idea was, it’s all here. We like the idea of ending on hope. When Heathers the movie was made there was no Columbine school shooting and then when the movie came out that was after and before us and our big question was, we had done so well in the States and when we got the call Paul Taylor Mills from The Other Palace called we were like, “does anyone know Heathers in London? Will anyone care about Sherwood, Ohio, at the end of the 80s?” By the time we opened with Carrie Hope Fletcher and with Jamie [Muscato], it had changed everything. The crowds had just gone so crazy. Our fans, the corn nuts, had become so crazy that it was just great seeing that transition.
Much like Blue Light where we were dealing with a lot of grey areas of who’s right and wrong and is Veronica redeemable at the end? We have a line that was always important to Kevin Larry and I, where Chandler says, “I don’t see you calling the police”, and while Veronica does the say out loud, to the whole world, when she’s on TV, “I killed them” and nobody believes her. There’s the responsibility of I guess one could argue, “well I tried to admit that I might have been involved in murder, but we’re going to move forward.” I really love grey areas like that. I love in 13 going on 30 the fact that Jenna’s character is in the grey area; we find out all these negatives she did in the years between thirteen and thirty. We find out she wasn’t a great character. You find out that you want to love Jenna, right? But you find out, oh, during those years she was not a great person.
With Veronica, we witnessed Veronica’s pain, but she has blood on her hands. She, and so same with Blue Light, all of a sudden there is a question of who’s guilty and who’s not guilty, and are you guilty because of something you did ten years ago? Are you guilty because you pulled out the Ouija board?
The opening of Blue Light feels very much like the opening song in a musical, is that your stage work seeping in?
That’s a great way to look at it because I think in theatre, especially in musicals, our beginning is always the launch song. What do you want? In 13 going on 30, Jenna wants to be thirty. In Heathers, Veronica just wants to survive senior year of high school. In the beginning of Blue Light, it was those characters coming together and that great reunion. I think that we do that in the theatre, it’s our job to help the audience get there as quickly as they can, to be focused and committed. Sometimes in a movie there’s a lot of extra characters that you’re not sure whether or not you have to follow them or not. I wanted to be as tight as I could with the story and really just focus on our core seven.
You’re currently working on the stage version of 13 Going on 30, how’s that going?
Yesterday was the first day, and this is one of the joys of working in the UK, with this type of cast, is reuniting with Jamie [Muscato]. He’s just finishing Moulin Rouge. Lucie Jones, I was just such a massive fan of and we were trying to find something that would maybe connect. All of this cast… you just look over and pinch yourself. The music is so great. And we’re really excited because we will launch the workshop but the buzz has been… we made People Magazine. So I figure when you make People Magazine and you’re a workshop, you’re doing something right.
Blue Light screens at FrightFest Halloween, why should people buy their tickets?
Here’s what I love; the perfect way to see this movie is at FrightFest, surrounded by people who love this genre. I am a big believer that horror films are great to be shared. I’m a big believer that coming out at night in a dark cinema where there’s just a sense of you don’t know what’s on either side of you, I think it’s a great way. This movie is a labour of love. I’ve done all these things, but this is a real labour of love. Every time I’ve had the pleasure of, as we’ve been getting it out and again seeing it with audiences, seeing their reaction… but afterwards, it’s been a lot of, “huh, we weren’t expecting that.” I really love the interaction with audiences, so I would love everybody to come out and see what they connect with on the film, and see if they can answer the questions.
Blue Light screens at Pigeon Shrine FrightFest Halloween on Saturday 28th October 2023.
