UNO Documentary: Son of Celluloid

Editor’s Note: Renowned for its haunted history and local legends, New Orleans holds a special place in the heart of the occult community. Luckily, local horror fanatics like Mange Vorhees are dedicated to preserving this reputation, working to organize film screenings and other events that showcase the city’s vibrant underground culture. Events like Bar Redux’s Son of Celluloid bring together horror fans, allowing them to enjoy obscure horror gems that have been ignored or forgotten by the mainstream.

What: Son of Celluloid

Film by: UNO student and documentarian Ian Glotfelty

Editor’s Note: NolaVie partners with students of UNO professor László Zsolt Fülöp, pairing them with artists, non-profits, environmental groups, and cultural entities to facilitate a live curriculum that results in a short documentary. This documentary short was made Ian Glotfelty, a student in the Film and Theatre Department at the University of New Orleans, about Son of Celluloid and other local events for horror fanatics.

|Read the full transcript of the interview below|

[Full transcription of Mange Vorhees]

Son of Celluloid is an attempt to try and get a little bit of exposure for underground cinema around here. I was offered the chance to do movies at The Scrapyard of Bar Redux and they wanted to start hosting horror films and doing stuff that’s a little bit more off the beaten path, things that we may not even get an American premiere for. When we did that, I started looking towards making a night where once a month we could showcase movies that were really hard to get a chance to see in the theaters, such as the recent Nicolas Cage movie Mandy or films that maybe never even got to America, especially a lot of the Japanese and Korean horror films that are coming out.

It almost always occurs at Bar Redux. We have the once-a-month when the weather does not get too bad. We have had a couple showings around the city but it’s kind of whenever we have a big event, so for example, the once a year Loup-Garou Festival. That usually will be about the only time that we use a different venue.

So I’ll tend to use more of the, you know, creature films, splatter films, things like early Peter Jackson work, you know, monster films, things like that simply because it’s a little bit easier to create a cool design of a creature than it is to make an entire film where you never once break the build up of atmosphere because you’re discussing a paranormal idea.

There’s a lot of very cool films out there that I cannot get a copy of in America, or I can’t afford it for years. Raw Head Rex was a hundred dollar film to buy. They recently released it for 15 bucks on DVD. Someone finally bought the rights again. I try and go for films that have not been in theaters in America at all or have not been in theaters for a very long time, and I usually want to have a theme, so I’ll do zombies, or I’ll do you know monsters or occult horror. A great example, again going back to Mandy, I paired Mandy with The Void which came out last year and is one of the best films I’ve seen in years. It’s got great creature design, it’s got a solid plot. Those two go well together, so usually I’ll try and match the two movies of the night just to give it a little bit more cohesion.

There are four or five troupes, companies, whatever you want to consider them, each doing their own bit to kind of help get more horror films and such around here. There’s several yearly festivals, you know, there was a NOLA Horror Film Fest, for example, very recently and we all kind of started coalescing and giving each other information back and forth, assisting with things. It just keeps it in the public eye that this is a town that advertises based off of its foothold in the occult community worldwide. It has a certain reputation for being a haunted town, for example, and in doing so it almost seems like you really should have a large community here. I think we have a strong community, and I think that we’ve helped with that. We’re definitely building the larger community.