Plot

Rock star Johnny Splatter kills himself on camera. His family and friends are called to his house for a reading.

Audiences would get to vote which character lived and died. ^[4]

Cast

• Corey Feldman as Johnny Splatter

Production

Netflix approached Roger Corman with the project.

10-to-15-minute segments of a horror story in which the kill in the second . The second segment must be written, made, edited, and on the air one week later. Then the audience will vote again! ‘ I took the idea just because I thought it would be fun, that this is something new and an incredible challenge to do everything in seven days but six, as we had to wait for Be killed. ^[5]

Corman tried to hire Richard Matheson to write the script aim He Was His busy and recommended her, Richard Christian Matheson. The director was Joe Dante, with whom Corman had worked in the 1970s. ^[6]

The series was shot over eight days at a mansion in the Hollywood Hills . ^[6]

The original intention was to shoot the first installment and then wait a day for the audience to vote for it beforehand, shoot, edited and post the next one over six days. “I wanted to see if I could do this stuff again,” said Corman, who had been feature films in such short time spans before. However he realised it would be too logistically difficult. His wife proposed a solution. “We would shoot The Deaths of all five and then, as the votes come in, we do a little shooting May pickup to tie things together,” Corman says. “Then We would edit The Deaths in.” ^[6]

“We have to have everything ready for when the first vote happens,” says Joe Dante. “When the first vote happens, we have a rough version of all of these different possibilities and the same thing for the third week. You have to shoot everything three times. There are all of These logistical issues you-have to carry around in your head. ” ^[6]

Dante later recalled:

They [Netflix] wanted to get into video streaming, to show people that they could show movies directly via the internet, without having to post movies in boxes back and forth. Bears were their test case to prove that they could stream the successes to the computers, and so they were partners on the series, but when it came to pick up the entire series for redistribution beyond its first screening, they only wanted the three episodes ……… The rest of the. I think if you go to the Netflix site, you can still see the three episodes that were run, but the series was designed so that those three episodes would not be the same. ^[7]

Dante says that the film was challenging:

For example, in the script, there are several different versions of each scene, depending on who is currently still alive! When you shoot the scenes, you have to set them up where you can move one actor out and move another actor in and have them say the lines in that version of the script. So it becomes a kind of assembly line of changing actors. You have to shoot a master shot and then you shoot all three or five versions of many characters there are. When you do the close-ups, you have to be sure that you will not be disappointed. It frankly can get a little wearying – you can get very easily confused as a director as to where you are in any given scene. When the writer, Richard C Matheson, wrote the original story, He did not account for every single possibility of transitions according to whether they were existing or not … So it was quite a jigsaw puzzle to edit. It was a solvable problem, but it was not like any other movie I’ve ever made, and I do not think I’ve ever made a movie as fast as this one! Even my first picture, which was made in 10 days, was a breeze compared to this, because it was intensive labor. ^[7]

There were ten episods in all. “The first episode is always the same, and then the others vary depending on the audience vote,” says Dante. “The exact details escape me, because I’ll never get away from them anyway!” ^[7]

References