While the Friday the 13th franchise may officially be on hiatus due to an ongoing lawsuit, fans are taking over and putting their own stories on screen. One such fan is Vincente DiSanti, who brought us one of the most memorable and well-produced horror fan films to date, Never Hike Alone. Now, he and his talented crew are back at it, this time with a prequel titled Never Hike in the Snow.
Vincente talked with Horror Geek Life about his films, crowdfunding, and the Friday the 13th fandom. Visit the official Indiegogo page for more details on the film!
Horror Geek Life: With the first fan film you made, Never Hike Alone, were you nervous about making an original story for such a well-known fandom? Plus, not having the traditional final girl?
Vincente DiSanti: I mean, the whole thing was a risk. At first, it was just us kind of having fun. We were friends doing something on the weekends. We thought we were making a five-minute short that was going up on YouTube or in a couple of horror forums, and we were going to have some fun with it. It wasn’t until we started making it longer, started doing the trailers, and seeing the fan feedback, that we realized that we were starting to set an expectation that we had to meet. At that point was when the Friday the 13th fan in me kicked in was like, you only have one person, it’s not a final girl, you don’t have multiple kills. All the things that aren’t Friday the 13th in the movies were then lining up and I was like, how do I combat this? The only thing I could really do was just try to make the movie as good as possible.
HGL: Along with writing and directing, you also play Jason. What made you take on the slasher role?
Vincente: Just by necessity. Again, we were just friends, and I was building the cosplay that I’ve always wanted to build. I wanted to build something original and play with it on my own time, go to conventions, and take photographs in it. That was really all it was, and as it moved forward, it was like, okay, now we’re responsible for this.
I was lucky enough to partner up with a stunt actor by the name of Bryan Forrest. When we brought on Jessica Erin Bennett as our stunt coordinator, she very quickly was like, “You can’t do all the stunts because if you get hurt, you gotta go to the hospital we can’t shoot.” I was like, that’s a good point. It’s going to be tough to shoot without a director. So, when Bryan came on, it became a double challenge because I had to act as Jason, and then I had to teach someone how to act like me and hope that both I was acting right as Jason and they could match me, and no one could tell the difference between us on set. It became these simple things made out of necessity that turned into, because of it being related to Friday the 13th, a big responsibility.
The only way we got around any of it was just because we focused and tried really hard. We thought about the fans, we thought about the fans inside of us and what we expected, and as we met our expectations, I think that helped us meet fans’ expectations.
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HGL: The response has been very positive for Never Hike Alone. What has been one of the most surprising or memorable moments that you’ve had so far since going on this journey?
Vincente: That’s a good one. I think it is the positive outreach from not only the fans, but the alumni as well. Every alumni I’ve met along the way has been encouraging, they’ve patted me on the back, the guys who made the game had me include a kill in the game and invited me out. This was before the movie came out, they were just excited that a fan was doing something.
What I’ve really been surprised about is the way the film has sort of united the fan base in a way that hasn’t been before. When you talk about films with most people, you can’t get people to agree on the same film, never mind throughout the entire franchise. I talk to fans, and they love Part 6, they love Part 3, or they love Part 4, but it doesn’t matter which one they love as the core of the franchise, they still have an appreciation for Friday the 13th. I’m hoping that’s because within our little movie, we were trying to pay homage to Friday the 13th and the fan. Focus on things that other films have maybe touched upon or glanced at, but never focused on it in a way that fans would have liked them to. We tried to take that approach and focus on things that all of us fans have talked about on forums over the years, or conventions. We’ve talked about the things that we’ve wanted to see and haven’t seen, and we’re trying to apply those theories of, okay, if we get those things that we say we want to see, what does that look like? I think that’s where fan films come from; they come from that love of the unknown. Where could these films have gone if they were just focusing on the story of the characters and moving forward from there? That’s where a lot of these fan films find their passion, in these ideas that we know the studios will never follow through.
HGL: Going back to the franchise alums for a moment, you have now worked with several F13 franchise actors across films. What has that been like?
Vincente: It’s been amazing. The first person that that contacted me was actually Douglas Tait. He sent me an email and I thought that that was extremely sweet. He said he saw the film and he liked it, that’s how we ended up talking. He almost played Jason, but, unfortunately, we had a scheduling conflict when we shifted production, so he couldn’t do it anymore. Bryan and I stepped back into the role, but that was really encouraging. Shortly after that was Tom McLoughlin, director of Friday the 13th Part 6, which is my favorite film. He’s also my favorite director from the series, and now I get coffee with him every now and then chat about films. Meeting Deborah Voorhees, Kane Hodder, C.J. Graham, Ron Sloan, Judie Aronson, Tracie Savage. We got to sit and have dinner with Joseph Zito because I’ve worked with Judie on 13 Fanboy and we became friendly.
It’s weird being a guest badge member to the Friday the 13th alumni association where I kind of got a pass to come in and talk to people. Adam Marcus has been a good mentor of mine over the last couple of years. We met each other at film festival and I’ve been friends ever since. I got to be in the Hearts of Darkness documentary and talk about Jason Goes to Hell, which was a lot of fun, and getting to meet Peter Bracke.
Friday the 13th is such a big community, and it’s just been really humbling for me to meet not only the alumni but the people who run all the websites and everything. Being a part of this this group that I’ve always been a part of my entire life, but didn’t know there were so many other people out there.
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HGL: Now that your projects have so much attention from people who care about the franchise, what was the pressure like going into this follow-up film?
Vincente: The pressure is immense, especially when you’re coming off something that is successful. You want to repeat that success, but the formula for what made Never Hike Alone successful really wasn’t repeatable. You know, it wasn’t just the movie itself, but it was the process in which we made the movie. It was the drive behind the movie. So, to recreate that would be really hard. Again, we just had to focus on what do we think fans want to see, how does this add to our overall story of what we’ve got the ball rolling on, and how can we surprise people? I think that that’s ultimately what we did with the first film, we surprised a lot of people. They didn’t expect the camera work, they didn’t expect Thom Mathews to show up, they didn’t expect a lot of the stunt work, visual effects work, and the level of production care that we brought to the film. Now, they’re expecting that.
What we really focused on was delivering quality content. Getting our shots, finishing our days, and finishing the production. I think that’s ultimately for every fan film what the goal should be. We’re responsible to the fans when we crowdfund, which a lot of people look down on. It’s really kind of faux pas in a lot of people’s eyes, but you recognize that and it becomes double the responsibility to finish your project and get it out to the fans. They’ve entrusted you with it.
With Never Hike Alone, I didn’t know how people would like it, and it’s up to the fans again once again for how they’re going to feel about Never Hike in the Snow. I know talking to my crew and watching it myself, we’re very happy with the way it came out. We think it is going to do well, but the fans are always on our mind because they put a lot of trust in us.
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HGL: Since your first film, we have seen a whole sea of fan films released or in production. Are you worried about the over saturation within the space?
Vincente: Not really, I think more fan films for Friday the 13th are a good thing. Friday the 13th fans need to be vocal, and fan films are a great way to be vocal. We’re showing the studios that without them, without Sean (Cunningham) and Victor (Miller), while we’re all waiting around for everyone to figure it out, the fans are just going off and doing it themselves because we want Friday that bad. I think that should show Sean and Victor and the studios that we’re ready for more material. When that material comes out, we’re gonna support it. These productions will be paid for because we’re gonna give you our money to go to the theater and see it. We’re going to buy the Blu-rays, buy the dolls, and all the new stuff. But, if we can make one request, can you please listen to us for once, because I don’t think you’ve listened to us for about 30 years, and it’s been about 30 years since you’ve made a film that everyone’s kind of really loved.
These fan films are a great tool for studios to look at to see what fans want, to see the things that studio heads who aren’t fans of Friday the 13th can understand about us. I think that that’s something they’ve struggled with because even Friday the 13th fans have gone into their films in the last 30 years and come out with mixed emotions. Those mixed emotions have affected the box office and affected overall sales, even though a lot of these films go on to have their cult following later on, no matter what. But I think studios, more than anything, are looking for that immediate box office victory, and I think it comes from listening to fans.
Going back to the other fan films, I’m not really worried about what other fan films are doing because they’re not telling our story. Everyone’s telling a different story, and I think that that’s a good thing.
HGL: With this sequel, what made you decide to put our favorite summertime slasher in the snow?
Vincente: When you’ve been on the forums long enough, talked to enough people at conventions, and just being fans ourselves, we wanted to see him in the snow. They were going to explore that in a sequel to the 2009 remake, it’s been talked about a lot, but it’s never been executed. Even when I was making Never Hike Alone, I was getting a lot of phone calls from other fan film makers saying, “I need to come up with a premise! Do you have any premises that you can just throw at me?” and I was like, “Put him in the snow!” I must have pitched it to about two or three other people saying, you should put him in the snow because you can do something short and get a lot out of it because of the production value. Nobody took me up on that, nobody wanted to shoot in the snow and in 2018, I tried to privately raise the money and make Never Hike in the Snow in secret. I wanted to just release it onto the world.
Just like Never Hike Alone, it was like maybe a six-page script and I was going to make it real quick, and then we’ll move on to the next stage of our production. As I was writing it, I became obsessed with this story and started to think, well, if I’m going to make it as a part of the Never Hike Alone universe and it’s got to fit the other films, I have to figure out how our actual characters play a role in this. I started shifting it around and rewriting it, and it turned into about a 20-to-30-page script that actually now meant something to our series. It was cool to start with the premise of let’s see Jason in the snow, but then turn it into something that helps us set up this story that we’re trying to tell if we were going to do a sequel to Never Hike Alone.
We needed to show people what we were capable of, and I needed to prove to myself and the crew that we could make more installments on a more traditional production shooting schedule, rather than Never Hike Alone, which was go up every weekend with five people. That’s a luxury we can’t afford anymore. It isn’t about one guy anymore, it’s about five or six different people and Jason, and it requires full crews and all these different things, so it was a much different production.
Never Hike in the Snow allowed us to take Jason to the snow and tell more about our story, but it also allowed us to really lock down on how we should shoot our days. I think that our growth from the way we shot Never Hike Alone to the way we shot Never Hike in the Snow is night and day. We’re really proud of Never Hike Alone, but even now we sit back and watch the footage from Never Hike in the Snow and realize, we got this in a tenth of the time and it looks ten times better and we’ve added more people to our team. We’ve got the right people in the right departments. I think it’s a culmination of all of that to be able to take this story and show people that we can continually deliver on the promises that we try to make to the fans.
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HGL: As far as the winter setting, I love seeing blood splatter in the snow. (Laughs)
Vincente: So, this is all I’ll say, without giving too much away. We wanted to make that count, and we took a lot of care, saying if we’re going to do this, let’s create something that really sells that idea and gives everybody what they’ve been waiting a long time to see. Blood splatter in the snow, in a way that is memorable, that makes it stand apart from others, like Dead Snow and other horror films we’ve seen set in the winter. Do something so there’s iconic imagery, and you’ll always remember and associate this with Jason.
HGL: This is a topic I’ve seen mentioned since the first film you made. Can you go into the not-for-profit side of fan films, and how the funds are allocated from the crowdfunding campaigns?
Vincente: One thing I think when I see fans make those comments is they really don’t understand the cost of running a crowdfund. Crowdfunding is an expensive venture; you don’t raise the money and you get to keep it all. We raised on paper $100,000 from Indiegogo, immediately the money that we got back was $90,000 after all the fees from Indiegogo. About $40,000 of that money is dedicated towards rewards and other things that go into the non-production side of the film. Originally, we weren’t going to do Blu-rays, but doing Blu-rays added about a $10,000 production charge in order for us to be able to create the master disc, get everything printed, get them shipped to us, and then ship out 1400 Blu-rays all over the world. Which, the price of shipping is going up, so you have that, and then on the back end you have $50,000 to run to production. That sounds like a lot, but in the film world, it is not.
I would say the first weekend of production that we did for Never Hike in the Snow cost $26,000 dollars. We added in all the visual effects, the people who were on set, and the production equipment that we needed to just get out there and shoot. We spent the rest of the money in the next two weekends to get it done, then there’s post-production and beyond. Never Hike Alone came out of personal funding in the end in order to get it finished. It wasn’t until after the film that we decided to do a Blu-ray because fans demanded it. I was actually able to cover the personal cost of the film because we only raised $19,000 in Kickstarter, I only got $16,000 of that, and most went into doing the shirts and things. This time, we were able to fund it prior to, which is nice and less stress on me, even though I did, again, take my personal funding to finish the project. This current crowdfund has paid for the rest of post-production, and is allowing us to march forward towards our next project. We’re setting ourselves up for victory in the spring when we start Never Hike Again, so the funding we raise then goes towards that film and not towards the project that we’re doing right now, which is fixing up the camp so we can shoot there again because a flood damaged it. Right now, we have no way to get cars up there, so we gotta figure out a system to like bring stuff up.
We also take portions of funding and make donations to Penny Pines Reforestation Program, which helps replant trees where we’ve had forest fires in California. The other thing that we work on is the JD Martz Recovery Fund, which JD Martz was one of the co-directors of photography and, literally, I want to say four days after our last round of reshoots, it was just me, JD, and Andrew (Leighty) working to get some of those last scenes of the film, he was swimming in in Venice Beach and dove, hit his head in the sandbar, and is now paralyzed. He’s back home in Massachusetts living with his girlfriend, and they have a fund to help them afford all the things that they need for his recovery. They do a blog now about what life is like living as a quadriplegic. So, we try to help him out. We also donate to Special Olympics in JD’s honor every month as a continual thing.
HGL: Thanks for explaining that. You mentioned rebuilding the camp and a sequel. Can you talk about that more?
Vincente: We want to do the sequel that everyone is anticipating. Originally, when we were coming up with a story, we didn’t have Thom Mathews, so now that we do we want to tell Tommy Jarvis’s story and ultimately, that’s what Never Hike Alone II is, it’s Never Hike Alone from the perspective of Tommy Jarvis. It is everything that happens up to meeting Kyle (Andrew Leighty), and everything that happens after meeting Kyle. It’s a big venture, and as a feature film it’s probably hundreds of thousands of dollars, and that is really tough to ask for on crowdfunding. It’s a risky goal to achieve. So that’s why we broke it up into three parts, Act I, Act II, and Act III as a miniseries, to focus down the production cost and to say, we can do Act I for the same price that we made Never Hike in the Snow. Now that we’ve proven we can make Never Hike in the Snow for this price, I feel better about going in and actually putting this story I’m really passionate about at risk to be done on the crowdfunding level, rather than what I would really love, which is the studio to step in and help me make this for real. We have to take it one section at a time because it’s very challenging for an independent production of our size to tackle some of these things that we want to do; we have our sights set pretty big. But, we’re taking the steps necessary to inch our way up to the next level of production, being able to do the next level of stunts and visual effects, add more people to the film, or add more locations to the film.
Ultimately, what we’re going to see is once Kyle and Tommy escaped Jason at the end of Never Hike Alone, what we’re setting up is that Jason is coming to town. It’s something we haven’t really seen in Friday the 13th in a long time. We have Jason tracing through the woods and going to different houses in parts 2, 3, and 4, but we’ve never seen him pulling a Michael Myers, in a way, and just walking through town and going to the hospital because he wants to kill Kyle. And if he can get Tommy while he’s there, too, that’s even better. Jason has gone on this kamikaze mission to finally just end this once and for all.
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HGL: I’m going to end the interview with an important question…who is your favorite Friday 13th victim?
Vincente: You gotta love Shelly, he gave Jason his mask and it’s so iconic, and he’s just one of the funniest victims. It’s either him or Crispin Glover’s character, Jimmy. He was such a lovable loser and he gets it really good the corkscrew and meat cleaver to the face. It’s one of the best kills in the franchise, so I would say it’s a tie between those two.
HGL: Great answer, I usually have to go with J.J. from Part 8. I wanted to see her continue a bit longer, Right after they got on the boat, she dies.
Vincente: She did get one of the most iconic deaths. People complain about Jason with a bow and arrow, yet he kills a girl with a guitar!
HGL: I didn’t know people complained about that from your trailer. I feel like there’s not a lot of room to complain about a weapon Jason uses, when we’re talking about a franchise that deals with a variety of weapons, and even telekinesis.
Vincente: Bows and arrows were a thematic thing in Friday the 13th Part 1, and a lot of the time I go back to Friday the 13th Part 1 to really pull my logic, or I try to extend on a story thread from Part 1 to make sure it fits more than anything. It just skews so much through the franchise that it’s tough to take from this one and that one. I just say, all right, let’s treat Part 1 like cannon and then everything else is more like a guideline rather than a specific thing that happens. So, these events happen, but I’m not gonna try to weave my way through some of the logic that these films tried to go in. We just kind of say, yeah, something happened in the years that Part 7 happened, but we’re not going to try and weave telekinesis into our stories.
Going back to Part 1, Kevin Bacon gets the arrow through the neck, and that was one of the best kills in the movie. And then you have Bill, which I don’t know how Mrs. Voorhees lifted him up on that door and then lit him up with a bunch of arrows. That was one of the most brutal kills. Then you have Brenda, she almost gets hit by an arrow by the jokester in the beginning. We’ve never seen anyone actually fire a bow and arrow in Friday the 13th, even though they’ve been used multiple times, so I thought this would be cool.
We would like to thank Vincente for talking with us! Look for our official review for Never Hike in the Snow, coming soon!
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