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Welcome To Summer Camp – Hope You Survive The Experience (Or Why You Should Support Slashermania On Kickstarter Even Though It's Pretty Much Dying)

Published Sun, 23 Nov 2014 10:00:17 -0600

Russell Hillman writes,

I'm Russell Hillman. I'm a British small press comics writer and self-publisher. You may know me from… well, you probably won't know me from anywhere, which is almost certainly a big part of the problem.

Anyway, I've got a project running at the moment on Kickstarter. There's not very long left on it, and we're doing really badly. I can't understand why this kinda pricey OGN by nobody you've ever heard of in a frequently derided subgenre that 's not that well covered in the medium I've chosen isn't blowing up all over the inter… oh.

Enough of why it's failing, let me tell you why it shouldn't be. Here's the premise:

1983. Troubled teens from New York and Los Angeles are taken to a summer camp facility to be trained as counsellors and mix safely with other people their own age. Little do they know they are being watched by an audience hungry for sex & violence. They are the designated victims for a bizarre contest of murder and mayhem – WELCOME TO SLASHERMANIA!

Masked maniacs from across the USA, Canada, Italy & the UK compete in various categories: Best Male Solo Death! Best Female Solo Death! Coitus Interruptus! Sin Punishment! Most Creative Kill! Biggest Multiple Death! The coveted Slasher of the Year award!

"And the Slashie goes to…"

HIGH CONCEPT

The elevator pitch a mate of mine came up with for Slashermania is The Hunger Games meets Cabin in the Woods. A group of kids are taken off to an out of the way place and have to fight to survive, because a super-secret organisation is making them live through a deadly scenario straight out of a horror movie.

SON OF CLICHÉ

The slasher subgenre is one of the most rule-defined, cliché-ridden, trope-filled subgenres in most of fiction, let alone horror cinema. Entire movies have been made (the Scream series, Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon, the aforementioned Cabin in the Woods) to point this out. Slasher movies follow a very defined formula.

That's what makes them so much fun.

You know there's going to be a group of dumb teens. You know there's going to be a killer (probably masked) who stalks them one-by-one, dispatching them with a variety of household implements while they indulge themselves in inappropriate acts, until one lone teen makes a stand againt the killer.. You can take those elements and make something as powerful as John Carpenter's Halloween , or as shambolic and ill-thought out as… well, you fill in the blank.

Some of the clichés needed a bit of a wash and a lick of paint to make them shine, others just needed to be looked at from a different angle. If you like those clichés as much as I do, they're all present and correct. If you don't, I've given them just enough spin to make them more palatable.

THE DEADLY ARTS

The art team I've assembled for this is truly amazing. How they're not already out there in the mainstream is a mystery. I really think this stuff is beautiful, and it elevates the story from low-grade tits and innards stuff to the level of… well, breasts and entrails.

There's not a thing I've been able to throw at them yet that they've not been able to draw. A girl with a drill through her head, her eyeball dangling off the end of the drillbit? No problem. A guy getting his head crushed in the door of a walk-in freezer? Easy.

WORDS ARE LIKE WEAPONS, THEY WOUND SOMETIMES

This is the part where I blow my own trumpet – or possibly an organ. I think the dialogue is one of the true selling points of this book. I'm juggling an immense cast, but even the earliest victims get a moment to establish some kind of personality before they're slaughtered – the cannon-fodder isn't just cannon-fodder, they're actual people. Anyone in this book could end up as the last survivor, or as the next victim.

I didn't want Slashermania to be the empty gorefest that people tend to imagine when they think of slasher movies. I wanted to make something more like the slasher films that exist in the hearts of the fans – where their imagination makes the budgets a little higher, the cinematography a little less basic and where everyone can actually act.

KILLING IN THE NAME

Given the task of assembling a cast of slashers, each with their own individual look and backstory, I think I've put together a decent enough bunch. Some of the points of inspiration are a little more obvious than others, but every one of them has their own individual motivation and method. I feel that I've created characters strong enough to feel like they have an existence outside this story, and this is just a big crossover story.

COMICS ARE FOR EVERYBODY

An early piece reviewing the preview pack mentioned with some excitement the presence of a couple of female slashers, along with a multiracial cast and even some LGBT characters. I just felt that it would be missing something without them. You can't tell from the trailer, but there's a decent amount of male nudity to go with the female – equal opportunity objectification.

The slasher movie fanbase is incredibly diverse – a lot of the slasher fans I know are either straight women or members of the LGBT community – and I felt that the cast should reflect that. Everyone deserves a character they can identify with.

Just before I have them strung up by the ankles and torn apart with a chainsaw. Heh heh heh.

TRAILER TRASH

I love vintage trailers from the seventies and eighties. The 42^nd Street Forever trailer compilations (in the USA) and the Grindhouse Trailer Classics series (in the UK) are a big part of what inspires me – like Alex de Campi with her Grindhouse series, I wanted to bring that kind of feel to the world of comics. That's why, when the time came for me to make a promo video for Kickstarter, I opted for one that was more like a movie trailer than a normal talking heads piece to camera.

THE SOUND OF THE SUBURBS

To add an extra background detail to some of the scenes in the story, I've added period-appropriate music – everything from Motörhead to the Go-Go's to JoBoxers to Althea and Donna. Trouble is, not everybody has a copy of Jet Boy, Jet Girl by Elton Motello to hand when they read a comic. So I created a YouTube playlist of all the tracks, in order of their appearance.

Plus, as an added bonus, they're all tunes you can (broadly speaking) dance to. You could use this as a playlist for a party, if all of your friends are awesome people.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME

Of all the pathetic pleas for you to buy my book, this is probably the most desperate. The end date for this campaign is a couple of days after my birthday. Do you want me to have an unhappy birthday? Do you?

I DO NOT LIKE GREEN EGGS AND HAM

So, you don't like indie comics, you hate slasher movies, you don't support Kickstarter projects – why should you support me? Well, if you're that opposed, I'm probably not going to be able to persuade you but thank you for reading this far anyway.

But please think about supporting us anyway – remember, if you pledge and we still fail, it doesn't cost you anything. And if we succeed, you get a book that you might enjoy. Or someone you know might enjoy. Everybody knows at least one horror fan, so send them the link, ask them to pledge some money.

So, that's Slashermania, and that's why you should support it – it's high concept, the clichés are well-served, the art is strong, the dialogue is workable, the villains are nasty, there's minority representation without tokenism, we have a trailer-style trailer, the soundtrack kicks arse, it's almost my birthday and you or someone you know might enjoy it.

Thank you for your time. I love what you've done with your hair, it looks great. It really suits you.

Russell Hillman is the writer of Deadly Burlesque, The Dark of the Forest and Fast and Frightening – A Comic About Roller Derby, all published through his Freaktown Comics imprint. He's a passionate tea drinker, a small press devotee and a dancing fool. This is the first time we've let him write for Bleeding Cool – we won't be making that mistake again.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Us0TQ_TIa0A [/youtube]

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