Hellbent

Hellbent (2005)

When the night belongs to the Devil, the party goes to hell.

A night filled with beautiful people, music and dancing at the West Hollywood Halloween Carnival turns deadly for four gay friends. When two men are found dead, the friends find that they are the killer's next target. No one knows who will survive the night. A wild, relentless ride filled with unexpected surprises and shocking scares.

Date of release
2005-09-16
TMDB
5.5 / 10 (62)
Runtime
1h 25m
Genres
Horror
Director
Paul Etheredge

Casting

Interesting facts

Hellbent is a 2004 American slasher film written and directed by Paul Etheredge-Ouzts. Hellbent played the gay and lesbian film festival circuit throughout 2004 and 2005 before a limited theatrical release on September 16, 2005. The film's success helped spark a wave of similarly themed "gay slasher" films.

Production

About 2000, executive producers Michael Roth (Circuit), Joseph Wolf (Fade to Black, Hell Night, Halloween II, Halloween III: Season of the Witch), and Karen Lee Wolf (Children of the Living Dead) conceived the idea of a serial killer horror film featuring homosexual characters. They had a concept involving Halloween, a masked murderer, and the use of West Hollywood, California, as the location in mind.

Etheredge-Ouzts had never written a complete script before, nor had he directed a film. To prepare to write the script, Etheredge-Ouzts viewed as many horror films from the 1980s as he could locate. From these, he identified a film structure and stock character types ("the final girl", "the ingénue", "the slut", "the tough guy"), turning each type into a gay version of the heterosexual trope.

Etheredge-Ouzts kept the killer as anonymous as possible. He wanted the audience to project their fears onto the murderer, assigning a motive and background to him themselves. Adding details seemed to rob the character of menace, he felt. This approach led Etheredge-Ouzts to cut the killer's lines from the film, as he worried that a portion of the audience would not find whichever voice was used to be frightening.

He began working on a visual style for the film which would help disguise its low budget. The 1959 Brazilian-French film Black Orpheus was an initial guide, with the work of photographers James Bidgood and Pierre et Gilles and the 1953 science fiction film Invaders from Mars providing later inspiration.

Second unit filming on Hellbent began in October 2001. Etheredge-Ouzts only had a concept for the film and no script yet, but had already decided he did not want to use stock footage in the motion picture. The second unit was sent to the 2001 West Hollywood Halloween Carnival to "shoot anything cool." Although six hours of footage was shot, less than two minutes of it appear in the film.

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

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