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Take Back the Knife: Lena Headey and Nicole Pacent step into “Satan’s Closet”

Take Back the Knife is a monthly column about women in horror by genre writer/director Stacie Ponder.

Man, I hate introductions. I suppose they’re necessary when you meet a person for the first time, but they’re generally so dull, aren’t they? “Oh really? Where are you from?” “Why yes, I do enjoy things.” “Pants, you say? What a novel idea.” and so on. Those awkward initial conversation volleys bore me to death so I tend to jump from point A to, oh, at least point R when I meet someone. The way I look at it is, let’s try to discuss something interesting right away and forget the small talk – if we hit it off enough to speak again (read: you don’t flee in confusion), then I’m sure I’ll learn soon enough where you’re from and what your views are regarding pants. All that said, I’m sure you can imagine how well I do talking with strangers in bars.

The point of this, however, isn’t my utter awkwardness when meeting new people, or pants, or anything like that – it’s simply supposed to be an introduction of a sort to kick off this bright, shiny new column of mine. Before I make it crystal clear that I can be just as awkward on The Internet as I can be in Real Life, here’s point A: I really like horror movies. I write about them for Rue Morgue Magazine, AMC TV’s website, my blog Final Girl, and now, for AfterEllen.com. Somewhere along the way, I decided that I’d like to make horror movies as well, so I started doing just that.

My first feature, Ludlow, is currently embarking on the festival circuit as I try to figure out a way to make it available to the public on DVD. I’ve acted as cinematographer on a few short films. I’m writing and directing a new sci-fi opera webseries called Space Girls. I did the same for a horror webseries called Ghostella’s Haunted Tomb that ran right here at AfterEllen.com. My love of cheese borders on the unholy. There – now that the boring stuff is out of the way, let’s get down to point R.

My latest endeavor went online earlier this week: it’s a fake trailer for a film called In Satan’s Closet. “Fake” means that movie will never be made; “trailer” apparently means – to me anyway – “short film,” as it clocks in at around nine minutes. As this column purports to be about women and horror, I figured hey, why not talk about In Satan’s Closet? It falls within the horror genre and the last time I checked, I’m a woman. Here, why don’t you watch the trailer right now? I’ll wait. Perhaps I’ll have a snack whilst I do so.

A word of warning to the faint-stomached: there’s some barf in it, which is kind of gross. It’s not real barf though – it’s made with movie magic. And cream of mushroom soup.

Oh, and another word of warning – as the title In Satan’s Closet may have indicated, there are religious themes and devilry at play here. If these sorts of things offend you, then you might not want to watch. It’s strictly PG-13, but still. I get it.

If you are at all familiar with Ghostella’s Haunted Tomb, then you may have noticed that In Satan’s Closet would fit right in as an episode; it’s horror by way of goofy, it’s completely random, and it pays homage to a subgenre I love – in this instance, possession movies, particularly Italian ones that were born in the late 70s in the wake of the success of The Exorcist. People ask me all the time where I get my ideas, and it’s really this simple – sometimes, I think about something I like, then I think about why I like it, and then I make something in a similar vein or genre.

OK, so no one asks me where I get my ideas, but my point remains. For the silly stuff I make, at least, that’s generally how it goes. Sometimes I create the title first, as I did in this case; in fact, almost every film featured in Ghostella’s Haunted Tomb was borne of title first. See, I came up with a list of 50 fake horror movie titles for my blog and I just pulled episodes from that. After I decided that In Satan’s Closet would be a possession movie dipped in 1970s European flavoring, I had to figure out exactly what that meant and how I could make something similar in sunny, modern Los Angeles. Basically, this is what I came up with:

1) Since this was a trailer, I wouldn’t really have to worry about, you know, plot or characterization or any of those pesky aspects of script writing. Why, I wasn’t even going to write a script for this – I was simply going to come up with crazy crap that would happen and some crazy crap that actors would say. I didn’t have to concern myself with any of it actually making sense, which, for me, is simply delightful.

2) I knew the possessed woman (it’s almost always a woman, you know) would have to get “gross face.” I love the chewed-up oatmeal faces that characters get when they’ve been possessed! They’re simultaneously hilarious and terrifying, and I dig that evil spirits manifest themselves by giving you weird eyes and a severely chapped face.

3) It’s an exorcism movie, so there’d have to be, umm, an exorcism scene, and during said exorcism scene, someone would have to get puked on. Luckily for me, Heidi “Ghostella” Martinuzzi is always down for my antics and was ready to do it – she even went so far as to volunteer that she’d do it with her mouth open. Now that’s commitment.

4) As I said, there was no script, but I knew I wanted two lines of dialogue to be uttered: in response to the question “Am I mad?”, a character would intone “You’re not mad … but you are insane.” Additionally, I wanted someone to say (preferably in a British accent) “You’re all going to die down there!” – my little shout-out to the line uttered by the evil computer program in Resident Evil.

5) Characters! Ah, yes. Those things. Well, there had to be the possessed woman. She’s played here by Shannon Lark, with whom I’ve worked numerous times before (most notably, she’s the lead in Ludlow), and therefore I knew she’d go all out for this like she does in everything. What I didn’t know is that she’d always wanted to play possessed and she had so much fun in the various stages of contorting, groaning, flashing-teeth-ing, and barfing that she never would have stopped if I didn’t force her to.

I desperately wanted to do a satirical take on that old horror movie stereotype, the Hispanic maid. In films such as Dolly Dearest and Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell, the housekeeper is the first to figure out that there’s something evil a-brewin’ in the house. She’ll go on to talk about her “funny feelings,” she prays, and inevitably she’ll die before she can properly warn anyone of said danger. This character is as much a staple to low-budget horror movies as The Final Girl, The Dorky, Annoying White Guy Whom You Hope Dies Quickly and The Black Guy Who Dies First. Stepping up to the plate as the maid in In Satan’s Closet is actress and former Miss Alaska Stacey Storey. She provided her own costume, so you can thank her for that.

The rest of the cast of Characters Doing Random Things features faces you’ve undoubtedly seen on one screen or another. Feed‘s Amanda Deibert slapped some contacts in her eyes to portray the Hot Blind Chick with a Dog – a character that’s a nod to the Hot Blind Chick with a Dog in the insanely awesome 1981 Lucio Fulci film The Beyond. As I mentioned, that’s Heidi Martinuzzi as the unfortunate “Sister Mary Abstinence”. Her cohort in holiness is played by Brea Grant (Heroes, Friday Night Lights), all but unrecognizable beneath her habit. Don’t worry Brea fans – her head didn’t really explode.

Any AfterEllen.com reader worth her salt could probably sense that there was something new featuring Lena Headey on the internet the moment In Satan’s Closet went live – perhaps even before. Having appeared in several of my productions before, she’s accustomed to my ways and didn’t even blink when I mentioned that she’d be attacked by a remote-controlled spider. And yes, that’s her Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles television son Thomas Dekker running from some unseen force and disappearing into, well, into Satan’s closet.

And then there’s Nicole Pacent as the Satanist who starts the whole possess-o-ball rolling – yeah, it’s a bit of a departure from her work on Anyone But Me. Never having worked with Nicole before this, I was unsure how she’d react to my unconventional, scriptless trailer-shooting style. Lucky for me she was more game than I could have anticipated and pounced on any idea I threw her way – Satanic chanting in Latin? Sure. Pretending to carve her hand open with a rubber dagger? Yup. Drinking a glass of fake blood? Indubitably. Yelling “Hail Satan!” in the backyard of a virtual stranger? Duh.

While I have had actors balk at my shenanigans before, I’m lucky to know a whole bunch of people who’ll join in with me. Still, I fully understand that these endeavors may not be every actor’s cup of tea; after all, this is just me and a camera, asking people to do weird things without context in front of said camera. Then it’s just a matter of throwing it all together with an appropriate soundtrack – and this soundtrack, which features music from the Italian horror movies The Beyond, City of the Living Dead, Buio Omega, and Profondo Rosso, couldn’t possibly be more appropriate unless I traveled back to 1978 with a tape recorder in hand.

So did we hit it off enough to talk again (by “talk”, of course, I mean we both stare at computer screens – how 21st century of us!)? I hope so, because I could talk about horror movies (and cheese) all day. So until next time, tell me – what are your views regarding pants?

In addition to writing and directing horror films, Stacie Ponder writes about them for Rue Morgue Magazine, AMC TV.com, and her own beloved site, Final Girl. In her spare time, Stacie enjoys a good laugh and looking at kittens.

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