You know what looks great in a trailer? Gear!

All actors are Actors. Extras are actors, too. Treat ’em all equally.

Read More

Preparation is the antonym of frustration

Get the script to the actors as soon as possible. Give them time to learn their lines. If they ask about their characters, talk with them and make sure they have all the character notes from the writer. The more they know, the better their performance will be.

Read More

There’s honor, and then there’s practicality

If anything goes wrong, the Director takes the bullet. If anything goes right, the Director thanks whoever did it. It’s unfair, but that’s the way it is, so if you’re the Director, suck it up and move on. Anyone who does it opposite comes across as an asshole and no one likes to work for assholes. Unless they pay a lot of money, but then it wouldn’t be a low budget movie.

Read More

But not the single malt.

Sometimes, after a late shoot, when everyone’s busted hump and created Great Things, it’s okay to overspend the Craft Services budget and treat ‘em to a few beers, or a hot meal at the nearby tavern. Everybody can use a little occasional decompression time with the gang.

Read More

The Director’s supposed to notice these things…

If you notice something that nags at your brain while you’re shooting, fix it then. Learn to trust that little voice. If you don’t at least speak up, then forever afterwards, you’ll see that same glitch and cringe inside. Chances are, three other people have noticed, but no one wants to be the first to say anything.

Read More

Practice, practice, practice!

Rehearse scenes before shooting. If possible, at least a day ahead to give people a chance to work out the kinks, and if not, give them a few hours break between rehearsal and shooting. Actors need to work on their roles, sleep on ’em, and dream a bit. It’s usually worth the effort.

Read More

It was brilliant!

If you can’t light your action, then at least try to light your set. Dark figures moving around in a room can be spooky and still tell a story, but poorly lit figures in a big black meaningless space is hilarious. And not in the way “hilarious” is intended.

Read More

Stay tuned to this spot for new Low-Budget Filmmaker tips posted as fast as we can defrost ’em out of the archives.

Read More

Although we might need a gritty reboot of Gilligan’s Island.

Pick one person to figure out what the actors are wearing during each “day” and to keep track of that for everything you shoot. Give that person the authority to keep costumes and props with them. Unless you’re shooting Gilligan’s Island, people change clothes once a day. The viewers will notice.

Read More

Where the buck actually does stop!

The Director determines the mood of the set. If the Director is cheerful and having a good time, chances are everyone else will be, too. If the Director is being bitchy and fussy and demanding, everyone else gets that way, too. It’s a law of nature.

Read More

Sand makes for a terrible foundation

Make sure the story makes sense and the script makes sense before you start. Cause and effect should make sense. Motivations should be pretty clear. What happens at different times and places should be obvious. The script is the blueprint, and everybody uses it. Where it’s weak, everything else is weak.

Read More

Of course, without a broom, you’re hosed…

Get it right on set – fixing it in post takes ten times as long and is twenty times as expensive as doing it again right there. Probably more, by the time you read this. Yes, I’m guilty of saying “we can fix that in post.” And for each of those instances, yes, I suck.

Read More

Jump in the Line…

Rehearse any physical effect or stunt. Film the rehearsals in case you need some handy pickup footage. If people are rehearsing a physical effect or stunt in costume, even better. After a half dozen rehearsals, you may find that you have the footage you need, with everyone relaxed and focused during shooting. But that’s just a bonus. Rehearse the crazy stuff regardless.

Read More

Safety Third!

Avoid the use of real guns. You can buy fake guns that look just as good as real guns and make realistic sounds in post. It’s practically impossible to hurt someone with a fake gun. Fake guns are cheaper, so you can buy more, which is useful because they often fly to flinders.

Read More

We are very happy to be able to start offering shorts, web episodes, and features through our site via HBM Theater.

Read More

Hellbender Media is thrilled and very proud to be in the script competition in the prestigious H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival, with our ferocious Lovecraftian script Shock Troops.

Read More

UPDATE: The Blood-Red Night of Hatchet Valley won Best Feature Script in competition! Woo-hoo!

Hellbender Media is thrilled and very proud to be competing in the screenplay competition at Shriekfest this year, this time with two scripts: The Blood-Red Night of Hatchet Valley and Shock Troops.

Read More

Hellbender Media and Jeff Punk Rock Martin team up to bring you a 15th anniversary of our first feature film “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath,” based on a turn-of-the-century fantasy novel by H. P. Lovecraft.

Read More

Hellbender Media will be at Versus Comic Con. In addition to our merch table in the vendors’ room, we’ll be hosting game demos for our new game Hacked Off, and hosting a discussion on low-budget filmmaking.

Read More

Hellbender Media is deeeeeelighted to announce that our short Smooth Moves is one of the films in the bumper competition. Starring Brandie Sylfae and Bill Kelley, Smooth Moves is part of a web series called Head of Household about a delightful family of murderers. Yay!

Read More

Writer/Director Edward Martin III is interviewed on Shriekfest Radio. Listen in to an hour of some of the most breathtaking, funny, and inspiring stuff this side of the Moon. Also available on iTunes.

Read More

We’ll be vending at the Film Festival, and our new script The Knot is in competition.

UPDATE: The Dead won Best Comedy!

The Oregon Independent Film Festival premieres two of our latest projects, The Dead, and Terminal Reflections. The Director, Producers, and members of the cast will be present at the showing as part of the Q&A session afterward.

Read More

The Hellbender Filmmaking Workshop – in glorious color, 100% gluten- and GMO-free! A weekend-long workshop where participants learn hands-on about filmmaking by making a movie that weekend.

The Living Dead Horror Convention will be screening our otherworldly short film Amino Korvoj in their shorts block. Hellbender Media will be there as vendors, sharing all their new zombie-riffic games and movies, too!

This prestigious weeklong film festival is now featuring a special Lovecraft At Midnight channel, including many Lovecraft-inspired movies and Lovecraft adaptations. Hellbender Media will be there presenting our two films Innsmouth Legacy and Come to Us.

Fright Night Film Festival is showing our feature film Flesh of my Flesh, our short film Animo Korvoj, and the script for Through the Night is in official competition.

A review of Samuel R. Delaney’s book Dhalgren.

I have read this book many times in my life.

The first time I read this book, I was about sixteen years old and even at that early an age (for this sort of book, that is a fairly early age), the imagery haunted me.

Read More

A review of Bruce Taylor’s book Edward: Dancing on the Edge of Infinity.

There are two aspects to Edward: Dancing on the Edge of Infinity. They are very different aspects, but I love both.

First, the story. From birth to death, Edward is followed throughout his life, in each major moment, and major place. Where he makes decisions, where he regrets, where he tries to reach out beyond his grasp. Sometimes we are watching him from above, and sometimes we’re right there in his skin, next to his soul.

This is beautiful and heartbreaking all at the same time.

Bruce Taylor brings a great voice to this story. I’m a fan of Vonnegut’s absurdist view of humanity’s position in the Universe, and I love reading a thread of that in this book. I’m a fan of Disch’s sad keening for broken dreams, and I love reading a thread of that here, too. But Taylor’s not simply walking a path previously walked — these are only touchstones of familiarity. Taylor’s voice is different. Soft at times, hard at times, unforgiving at times, but not once does he lose track of the fact that we all struggle toward a better us, that we’re all deeply scarred, but still struggling to be better. Even despair feels hopeful.

That aspect alone makes me love this book.

Then there’s a technical aspect.

Most of us have written papers in one or more word processors and used the footnotes feature. Automatically formatted footnotes are great.

For people who like to push technology, this is a challenge.

I may be totally off, but in my mind’s eye, Taylor sat down and faced off against his computer and declared a State of War thusly: “If you think you can footnote anything, then it is on, my digital friend!”

I don’t know how many footnotes are in Edward: Dancing on the Edge of infinity. Hundreds, perhaps.

But wait — these aren’t ordinary footnotes. No, no!

Taylor has woven a completely different narrative in the footnotes — one that weaves itself independently throughout the principle story of Edward’s life, as well as billowing in maniacal directions all of its own.

This is extremely clever. Extremely. I haven’t seen a meta-narrative designed this well since I read Anthony’s Tarot series, and this book’s take on it is much more entertaining.

That aspect alone makes me love this book.

Two books in one, clever, beautiful, heartbreaking at times, and a genuine pleasure to read.

Please check it out!

Bruce’s book can be found on Amazon.

A review of J. T. O’Connor and J. Walt Layne’s book The Coming Of T’Loal.

O’Connor and Layne remind us that some of the trickiest bits of Lovecraftian horror aren’t the monsters or the rubber suits or the excess use of liquid latex on set.

One of the hallmarks of Lovecraftian horror is the cosmic aspect, the sense that human beings (and indeed, all of Earth) are simply grains of sand in the whirlwind combats between gods.

One of the other hallmarks of Lovecraftian horror is the sense that there is no recovery. There is no savior. In fact, most of the time, by the time we hear of the thing, it’s already done and the world is already doomed.

O’Connor and Layne hit both of those nails directly on the bobbing gibbering head with their short novel The Coming of T’Loal.

The novel takes the form of personal chronicles of three different people, each exploring what seems to be harmless history at first, but which quickly unravels into the darkest terror. As their chronicles unfold, they are all drawn toward each other, to play their parts in a cosmic climax that saves Earth — for now!

O’Connor and Layne’s book can be found on Amazon.

A review of Noel Figart’s book At the Foot of the Throne.

I enjoyed At the Foot of the Throne.

That might seem a somewhat simple statement to make, but please let me clarify.

My reading tends toward technical stuff, and science fiction. I read very little fantasy. By and large, I find fantasy annoying, for a variety of reasons.

At the Foot of the Throne hits all the highlights, though. I liked it.

1. It tells a story that is essentially fantasy without delving into mysticism and wizardy. No flying children. No witches. There are jerks, sure, and they do jerky things in the name of their religion, but there’s no actual magic. Kinda like real life.

2. It tells a story about the political connections and plays between two neighboring kingdoms in a straightforward fashion, without depending on a complex map in the front of the book, or a complex family tree in an appendix, or knowledge from the author’s previous 73 books to understand all the nuances between characters and their three-times-removed descendants. You don’t have to know a darn thing to read this book and to understand the way things work in this world — it’s all in that book.

3. It tells the story of a king and his people where the king and his people are ordinary. Sure, they’re royal in name, but they screw up just as much as anyone else, and they speak in ordinary language (I think there was not one occurrence of archaic language in it, which is a huge plus in any book!).

4. It tells the story of a woman who survives the destruction of her village and home, and who moves upward based on her own unique skills (the same skills which indirectly led to her survival when the rest of her village perished).

The book contains a lot of sensibilities that are modern. I think that might turn some folks off, folks who think that because someone else lived in a time before iPads, that they must be stupid. Authors who don’t treat people as real people drive me nuts, and Figart treats her characters as if they’re real people. Real people with real problems and real ways of dealing with a world that is small enough to grasp and real enough to believe.

That’s pretty neat, all told.

Noel’s book can be found on Amazon.

A review of Jonathan Moon’s book Stories to Poke Your Eyes Out.

Sometimes I read a collection of short stories and it feels like a roller coaster ride that I’ve been on before. I know the twists and turns, and I can anticipate each one. I have a great time. When I’m done, I feel lighter in my feet.

Not this time.

Read More

A review of Lawrence Wright’s book Remembering Satan, A Case of Recovered Memory and the Shattering of an American Family.

I lived in Olympia during the “capture”, interrogation, and conviction of Paul Ingram. I was working at the Cooper Point Journal with another fellow, Chris Bader, who was writing a regular column then called “Weird Washington” about various supernatural and unexplained events in and around Washington. Imagine our amazement when right under our noses, there seemed to be this hugely secret Satanic ritual abuse cult!

As the case moved along, however, Chris devoted his entire column, week after week, to the new developments. It quickly and appallingly became apparent that Thurston County seemed to be either fabricating this whole thing out of whole cloth, or encouraging Paul Ingram to fabricate it out of whole cloth. I would read transcripts of the “interviews”. They were astonishing. At one point, Ingram’s “interviewer” basically promised the man his own fancy car if he would just sign the confession!

Remembering Satan digs deeply into this warped, freaky retarded case, this throwback to the Inquisition, and this demonstration that only the thinnest veil stands between “modern man” and “monkey-scared-of-the-dark”. Or maybe it reveals just how ugly people can be when they combine fear with power. Or maybe all of that plus more. Regardless, it pretty convincingly reports what most everybody who had half a brain realized all along — that this was absolute complete bogosity personified and paraded around as if it were real “news”, when in fact the only real “news” is that it went on longer than about, oh, three hours and a beer! The local newspaper (which won’t be named to confound search engines), reported each piece of the confession and the “crime” in successively more salacious detail, in the kind of hungry slavering tones normally reserved for drunken half-naked celebrities. Last I heard, the Ingram case was supposedly the only case in the history of the United States of “Ritual Satanic Abuse” with even so much as a shred of evidence. Yet, all the evidence turned out to hinge on Ingram’s coerced confessions (which were shown by the Prosecution’s own erstwhile advisor Dr. Richard Ofshe to be almost certainly confabulated), combined with the discovery of a single old cow bone on what was supposed to be a mass grave of aborted babies.

What I want to know is this: Where are those goddamn meddling kids and their goddamn dog and mystery van when you desperately need ’em?!

In April of 2003, Ingram was released from prison. It would be nice if it was because someone somewhere grew a brain, but that was not the case. The same local newspaper that oozed pustulance at the lurid tales of Ritual Satanic Abuse (or “bullshit”) made nary a peep when they announced his release, instead referring to his confession that he had sexually abused his daughters (they have to refer to his confession, since there’s no actual “evidence”). I think they should practice what they preach.

Here, read some more about this at The Ingram Organization.

A review of Barry Glassner’s book The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Well, this is the message our media keeps shoving down our throats, according to claims by Glassner.

In The Culture of Fear, he spins through a lot of different scenarios that we, as Americans, have been trained to fear. For each one, he drags out statistics and a point of view that reduces the boogyman to what it ought to be: an example of ordinary life, a standard deviation, blown out of proportion.

In particular, this becomes an issue because once someone has been reduced to fear, then they are much more easily manipulated.

As with so many other books, this is a concerned and cautionary tale of not allowing ourselves to be tweaked into being afraid.

A review of Carl Sagan’s book Billions & Billions.

An amazing book. This is a smaller book than his previous book The Demon-Haunted World, but no less powerful. Sagan makes a case and pleads for the sanity and safety of the human race.

While his previous book possessed a certain manic drive, this one is, by contrast, a more somber approach. This may be because Dr. Sagan knew, as he was writing it, that he was dying. Perhaps this knowledge was the instrument that most dramatically changed his writing voice, because it is changed. The message is just as strong, though: it’s up to us to save ourselves. No ultra-wise alien, no omnipotent god, no outside force is going to save us. If we’re going to take the next step, whatever that step might be, we’re going to have to take it ourselves.

We can’t see where we’re going, perhaps, but we have to go there.

It’s a beautiful book, a peaceful book, and a fitting final work.

A review of Ursula K. LeGuin’s book Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences.

Definitely one of the most lyrical books I’ve ever read. LeGuin’s stories and poems evoke an image of the rangy Coyote of the North American Indian mythos as a jeans-wearing, swearin’, spittin’ woman who’s seen too much of the world to take it too seriously, but can’t refuse a temptation.

Each story is a gem and I cannot recommend this book enough.

Difficult to find, but worth the hunt.

A review of Malcolm Godwin’s book The Lucid Dreamer.

The first time I ever heard about lucid dreaming was an article in The National Enquirer (back when it was still fun to read) and you know how factual that can be. Fortunately, I recovered.

In a lucid dream, the sleeper is conscious of the fact that they are dreaming and furthermore can take steps and maneuver the dream any which way they wish. Godwin uses the dreaming state as an analogy for the state of existence, quoting from a number of “enlightened” people who have all declared at one time or another that the path to enlightenment begins when one realizes that existence is a dream.

There are some hokey spots, though:

“[Heisenberg] believed that this uncertainty arose because of the unavoidable disturbance of the object by the very process of measurement. Since those days, this idea has grown, and consequent experiments suggest that consciousness actually does appear to change the state of matter.”

Whoa. Was that a jump? You tell me. Nevertheless, this book is really terrific if you want to understand the nature of dreaming and particularly lucid dreaming better.

Safety note: One of the downsides I discovered while training myself to lucid-dream is that I got a little untethered as far as what was real and what was a dream. This is great if you are dreaming. This is not so great if you are driving.

A review of Walter M. Miller’s book A Canticle for Leibowitz.

High school students are supposed to read Canticle for many of their humanities classes, but they rarely do and those who have seemed to have been unaffected by it. Of course, maybe it’s the gas-pumpers I grew up with, I dunno’.

The book takes place in three stages.

The first stage is a bit after a planet-devastating nuclear war. Knowledge and writing have been forbidden in a vicious anti-intellectual pogrom (curious — do read Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World and try to convince me that Canticle isn’t a potential result of what’s described in Sagan’s book) the effects of which have just barely avoided small groups of monks engaged in the preservation of as much knowledge of the past as possible.

The second stage reveals a new culture of man, rising up from the wreckage of Earth with the knowledge that the monks, after a fashion, re-released. There are hints of the old jealousies and sins of Man, but there’s hope, too.

The third stage of Canticle reveals that no matter how much Man learns, the future only contains self-destruction and immolation. There is just a hint that something other than Man, that something purer than Man will now make its attempt on the Earth, but Man, as a race, is pretty much gone.

That a sequel to Canticle exists is, to me, most astonishing. Where do you go after the destruction of the entire human race? Ah well, I’ll just have to read the damn thing…

A review of Jan Harold Brunvald’s book The Big Book of Urban Legends.

Piranha Press publishes these Big Books pretty regularly, and somehow, this one is just perfect for the subject matter.

Hundreds of one-page stories, each one a different “Urban Legend”. In case you’re not familiar with the concept of an Urban Legend, just remember when you were a kid and the neighbor kid told you about a guy his brother knew who actually microwaved a poodle and it exploded! There’s your basic Urban Legend.

Lots of fun and invariably untrue (or at least not proved true). Each story is told in comic book format, by a different writer/artist team, so each one, in addition to being a story of singular perversity, possesses its own special flavor.

Very cool book, and it’ll stick in your brain.

I could tell you my favorites, but they’re all really great.

A review of Rick Geary’s The Borden Tragedy.

Rick Geary is probably my favorite comics artist and I can’t imagine anyone taking such a weird and horrific story of the Borden Tragedy and making it as whimsical and weird as he does.

The artwork is simply perfect for the story, as well as clean and crisp to read.

Geary examines carefully many of the facts surrounding the double murder, including leads that proved false and inconsistencies in nearly every person’s story.

I learned more from this book than I ever learned watching a made-for-TV version (not to denigrate all made-for-TV movies, just this one).

A review of Bernardo T. Arriaza’s book Beyond Death — The Chinchorro Mummies of Ancient Chile.

For thousands of years before the Egyptians mummified their dead, a small tribe of fishermen on the Arica coast of Chile mummified their corpses, using very elaborate methods.

Unlike the Egyptians, the Chinchorros mummified everybody — men, women, children, even fetuses in pregnant mothers who had died. It was an incredible amount of energy for a race which was just a few steps out of the Stone Age.

The book contains lots of unearthed details about the lives and deaths of the Chinchorros, as well as a few reflections on death rituals of other, neighboring peoples. It also contains lots of color photographs which will frighten people if they tend to look over your shoulder while you read on the bus. Just look at ’em grinning and say “Planning an early dinner tonight.” That’ll teach the nosy bastards.

I’m still wondering why they did it, though I have my own theories.