Savageland

Savageland (2015)

Horror Has No Borders.

When a small town near the Arizona-Mexico border is wiped out overnight, suspicion falls on the lone survivor. But a roll of photos the survivor took that night tells a different story.

Date of release
2015-11-01
TMDB
6.6 / 10 (147)
Runtime
1h 21m
Genres
Horror, Crime, Thriller
Director
Phil Guidry, Simon Herbert, David Whelan

Casting

Interesting facts

Savageland is a 2015 American mockumentary horror film written and directed by Phil Guidry, Simon Herbert, and David Whelan, concerning the events massacre on a US-Mexico border town of Sangre de Cristo that leaves every citizen dead except for an illegal immigrant amateur photographer who is accused of committing it.

Production

David Whelan, Simon Herbert, and Phil Guidry were colleagues at UCLA and began writing with the goal of producing an independent film outside of a film studio. In an interview with Ross Kiefer, Whelan explained, “All three of us were writers, but with the cost of entry and cost of filmmaking, maybe there is something we can do instead of going the spec script route and hoping that the studio would take something on.

Whelan, Herbert, and Guidry's guiding philosophy was that every component needed to feel real. Whelan wanted the film to be something that, if the viewer didn't realize it was fictional, they would begin Googling.

Whelan noted: “Well we can’t shoot in a courtroom, but we know a guy who can do courtroom sketches. That would feel real. Phil knew an architect, and we had him do an architectural rendering of the town. We started pulling from all these different places to put as many layers on top of each other, to keep that feeling of ‘Yeah there’s something here!’. Because if it doesn't feel real the whole thing falls apart really fast.””

Noé Montes, the actor who plays Francisco Salazar, is a photographer and artist whose work deals directly with immigration.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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