Written and interviewed by: Ryan Dailey
Horror-Nation
So what made you guys choose the zombie sub genre of horror?
Diana
We love zombies.
Brit
We’ve always wanted to make zombie movies, we’ve always wanted to explore the horrible fascination of living past death, and trying to kill other people.
Diana
You know, I think everybody is afraid of dying zombies, you know, the zombies free you from that, because even if you’re dead, you can still party, you can still have a good time,you can eat people.
Brit
Our movie is very dark. But we’ve always been interested in the whole zombie genre. And I’ve always wanted to make a zombie movie. And so this movie almost kind of made itself. So everything just fell right into place like we would be looking for locations, and we wouldn’t be able to find them. And then right before we shot the scene, the perfect location would just appear, oh, the characters, we cast an amazing crew of local and international stars, they were amazing. And everyone just did such a great job. And when we got home to read, to review all the footage we’d recorded every single shoot, we could use basically 90% of it, it was so good. And this, this was a book originally we had begun writing about two years ago. And it’s so intricate. And it’s different from other zombie movies, because it’s more focused on the relationships of the characters than it even is the situation surrounding them. It’s a family trying to survive during the horrible zombie apocalypse and trying to deal with the fact that one of their family members is going to turn into a zombie. Enoch is the older brother. He’s played by Alex Hohn, and he was bitten by the zombie while saving his younger brother Aaron, who’s played by Bobby Batson. And that dynamic between the two brothers is that Aaron feels incredible guilt for being responsible for getting his brother accidentally bitten. And Enoch has to deal with the fact that he is going to turn into a zombie and his whole family will be left on their own. And so through the whole story, these two brothers are trying to protect each other. And they’re in this hopeless situation that there is really no way out of. And it’s just really a lot of fun to explore. So we’re really excited about it.
Diana
There is some comedy in the film. I wrote in comedy.
Brit
She(Diana) wrote all of the action scenes and all of the funny parts.. She(Diana) invented the character of Dakota who was awesome.
Diana
You know, I’m, I stand for women empowerment. So of course, I throw in a lot of empowered women because we have four years and they’re out bashing zombies. And they’re all women, beautiful women.
Brit
There is a young girl character that we created. It was my mom’s idea to add a girl named Pyro and she’s played by Megan Eddie. And she is a young spunky little firecracker of a girl who kicks real ass and has to save our main characters several times during the movie.
Horror-Nation
Yeah, I was reading a little bit of the press kit that was sent to me and, you know, speaking of the woman empowerment thing, I think it’s great that you guys banded together and you’re actually putting women in a position in the horror genre. That’s not the final girl, you know, you guys are actually, you know, you’re producing material, you’re providing lore and stories for the community, which is really great. You don’t really see a whole lot of females, you know, filmmakers and whatnot. So that’s, I think that’s great. That’s really awesome.
Diana
Yeah, we get contacted all the time by women in the industry. I have several friends who are producers and their lives. They tell me, Diana, you and Britt did it the right way. You started out making your films instead of working your way up through the ranks working on everyone else’s films. Instead, you created a whole studio and went out there and get gas and made your own projects. And right now we have two films, an audio book and a comic book.
HN
I actually saw that on the website that comic book looks really good and being a comic book nerd, I’ll probably have to check that out. But yeah, absolutely again kudos to you guys for just like he just said diving right in, you know, you didn’t start at the bottom on other people’s projects and work your way up. You went in knowing what you wanted and you got it. That’s awesome, I love it.
Brit
My mom decided to reach out to legendary actor Tim Curry. And also Doug Bradley and both of them said yes to be in our other animated film Dagon troll Chronicles and it was one hell of a day when that happened. We were so excited.
Diana
We’re both big fans, fans of Tim Curry and also Bryce Papenbrookis in our film. And as everyone knows, he is in like 47 animated films. So he’s legendary in his own right.
Brit
Tim Curry did such a chilling job for our evil villain neck refer. It was just wonderful. To hear him really bring that character to life. He brought such a sinister personality. He was also quite sexy. He completely changed the direction our character was going to go and made it his own. And it was a lot of fun to hear him do that.
HN
Moving on to my next question, who are some of your major influences, be it film, you mentioned comic books as well written prose. Just any major influences in any of those mediums?
Diana
I love Stephen King. And I also love JK Rowling. And I grew up watching a lot of cheesy, old scary films. And when you know when you’re used to things that aren’t that scary. Later in the 80s, I watched Hellraiser and it shocked me.I was like, used to old, old things that weren’t scary when I saw a hell raiser. I was terrified. I think pinhead is one of the scariest characters I’ve ever seen. And Freddy Krueger, of course, is terrifying. I would love to have Robert Anglin in one of my films. Hayo Miyazacki has also been a big influence. I love animated films. I started out as a graphic artist and an art teacher. And so the arts is a really big thing for me. And so I was influenced a lot by animation, and I like horror animation on things that are a little bit creepy. A little bit unusual, a little bit scary. I loved Coraline. Um, you know, I’ve just always been addicted to the great dark side.
HN
We talked a little bit about Scoffer Studios, and we’re going to go how you guys pretty much dove right in and started from the ground up. And why have you? You wanted to go into the origin a little bit more than that. I like what prompted you to say, hey, you know what, we’re gonna go ahead and do this. We’re not going to play by anybody else’s rules. We’re just gonna dive right in and do our own thing. Well,
Diana
Actually, when we started making our own studio, we had some ideas about things and we threw them out there online. Like we had made a poster of Dagon. And we hadn’t even started out making the film yet it was a book. And people reacted to the poster, you could say it was kind of like a, you know, like a tryout because we were releasing little things like, Oh, do you think this should be a film? Or do you think this would make a great movie? Or what do you think of this character? And we started hearing back from people on Twitter, on Facebook, you know, and we were just amazed that people were so still there. We’ve always been very independent. Brett and I are both sassy and independent. And we like to do things our way and we won’t take no for an answer. And so many people were interested in our projects, and contacted us and said, “These are amazing projects” that we felt really confident going forward. with creating Dagon, and making it into a full out animated film, with stars packed in there, I mean, we’ve got like 14 big stars, we’ve got also Leon Hendricks is now in there. And when we did the zombie film, it was kind of just an idea. And Britt is the one responsible for that. She’s like, you know, do you think we should make this film? Should we make a zombie film? I said, Hell yeah, let’s do it. And, she just went forward with it. And everything just fell into place, our studio is kind of magical. When we start something, usually, it just explodes. And everyone starts looking at it and gets tons of attention, and stars are drawn to it. And pretty soon, it’s just magical.
Brit
All of our projects are based on relationships and emotion. That’s at the core of all of our projects. It’s not just oh, there’s a zombie apocalypse. And countries are fighting each other. And zombie hordes are running everywhere. It’s the two characters, two brothers trying to survive trying to protect each other. And in life, you usually only have a few people who really, really care what happens to you. I mean, you can have friends, and you can have, you know, relations and everything. But there’s usually only two or three people who genuinely are there for you in times of crisis. And those relationships are precious, and when they’re threatened, you will do anything to protect them. And so in this zombie film, we really explore that and the characters, they’re flawed, they have human issues, they have human frailties. Aaron is the younger brother, and he runs. He’s 14 years old. And he runs and by the time he realizes what just happened, and he just abandoned his brother, it’s too late. And so Enoch, is also flawed, because with these dilapidating bites, but uh, slowly turning him into a zombie, he is now weak, he can’t protect his family as well as he used to. And in wanting to protect them, he actually puts them in more danger quite often, because he’ll go off by himself and try and do something and then Aaron has to go and try and save them when all hell breaks loose. But it’s a lot of fun. It’s just, we had a blast making it and we met some incredible people. We got Luke Truan, who does a lot of the music for the Discovery Channel. He did all of Shark Week’s Music. And he’s writing some of the main soundtracks for the film. We also have Robert Wilson, who’s a great local artist. He’s doing a lot of the music. Dark Hoffman, who just designed our amazing poster and I got so excited I posted the draft cuz I’m just that way.
Diana
Dark Hoffman is in our movie Dagon Troll World Chronicles. He’s one of the voice actors. He’s also responsible for doing some of the background art. And as you know, Dark Hoffman is amazing in his own right, he’s a fabulous artist. He does artwork for things like Hocus Pocus and Hotel Transylvania. And he’s just amazing. He’s amazing posters with anything AI art. And we’re also going to have him do some other things for us in the studio. He’s just amazing.We had some UK actors come down from Britain, and we had Louise White, and we had Aysen Djemall. And then we had Charlotte Jenner, and they did a fabulous job. Aysen Shin plays a reporter, Daphne Albright. And just to go down in a cave in the dark looking for the undead and it’s a terrifying scene, right? Terrifying and I can’t think of anything worse. And we were down in that cave for hours getting the shots. It was truly terrifying down there.
Brit
Yeah, one of our stars was a 13 year old boy, we stuck him down in the caves with Aysen and he was so scared.
HN
Now, when I watched the trailer, one thing I noticed and this is kind of how I’m wired. When I’m watching something I kind of focus on writing sinceI write, so I focus on the story and then effects in that order. So when I was watching your trailer, I noticed that the physical effects in the trailer alone were pretty, pretty darn good, in my opinion. And I was just wondering, was that like a budget choice or like a personal choice, or maybe a mixture of the two?
Brit
Um, if you watch through the Walking Dead, there’s a scene where one of these zombies is crawling across the ground, and she has no torso. And when I was watching that, I noticed that the blood on the grass was floating about an inch off of the grass because they’ve animated the blood. And so it just threw the whole thing off. And I’m like, “Oh, I was into it. But now when blood is floating over the grass, I don’t think I can get into this now.” It was just kind of wrecking the moment. So when before we started filming this I stocked up on so many gallons of red food dye, it was ridiculous big gallons of blood, we had various different edible and non edible formulas for blood we had. We still have blood everywhere.
Diana
We have legs and arms and I think some of them got bitten and eaten during the filming of this movie, it was crazy. The actors would get so excited that they’d start eating our props. Like literally, and it looks great on camera.. Everyone is probably majorly sick of chocolate syrup now because we had this mixture of gory, horrible zombie vomit, and they stick it in their mouth and they just let it dribble. And it looks amazing on camera. It’s really nice though. And we attracted tons of insects. Yeah. Which was fun because you know, in the scene, they’re dead.
HN
You got added production value.
Diana
Exactly.
Brit
Everyone would say, “I’m gonna throw up” and I was like “I’m just gonna keep filming if you want to throw up,go for it will look great.”
Diana
But it was amazing. We had so much fun. It was like a big family. And of course, whenever we got together it was like a love fest. I mean, we had so much fun filming it and everyone pitched in. We would have giant tables of food and we’d supply most of it. But we also had help from local food trucks like at the curb food truck and catering that was from a local business. In Mountain Home Arkansas. We also had several people bring supplements like Gatorade for the kids and all this stuff. It was a lot of fun. It was like a big barbecue slash monster murder fest.
HN
Okay, so we talked a little bit about influences a little couple minutes ago. Basically, what I want to ask you guys. And this is a question I have for every independent filmmaker. If you had an unlimited budget, total control, what franchise would you take over personally, and just completely do it in your way?
Brit
Well, we literally did that exact thing with the zombie film. And with our other film, too, we just, we take over, we’re like, we don’t care what rules there are, we don’t care what what you say, We’re gonna make this film, even if we don’t have a million dollar budget, even if we don’t have Tom Cruise in our movie, you know, whatever we got Tim Curry is just as good in our opinion.
Diana
If we could, we would have a Blood Brothers series. And just continue because there’s so many episodes that we could spin off like this. I mean, we could continue with this forever.
Brit
We are currently working on a sequel plotting it out. But I still have to go back and devote myself to the ending of the book, Blood Brothers:Life Harvest, which will be done later this year.
Diana
We have so many ideas and so many projects on the backburner, we can literally have a channel like the Shudder channel, we literally have so many creepy films, because everything we think up is creepy or scary. Like I have a ghos film that I could do right now off of a book that I’ve written, it’s almost finished. And then we have another one about witches.
Brit
And she has a children’s audio book. It’s about to be very creepy.
HN
One final question,IsBlood Brothers:Life Harvest going to be streaming digital, physical, and when can we expect to see it?
Diana
I’m hoping for a theater release, I’m talking to some friends in the UK. They’re talking about a possible theater release in the UK. I’m open to something here. Also, I would love to see it on the Shudderchannel, HBO Max or Starz.
Brit
We’ve been approached by five different distributors so far, but we haven’t chosen where we’re going to go with it.
Diana
Yeah, so we’re still waiting to see what happens.
Brit
We’ve sent it up to some distribution giants and see if they’re interested. And so far, they have said that they do want to see what we have for them. So we’re very excited. We have some help From Foster Castle productions. So we’re just taking in everything and we’re basically just in the trenches finishing all of our hard work up and seeing what we get at the end of it. We had five hours worth of footage that I was very attached to but I have managed to cut it down to two hours and 30 minutes. I can hopefully get even lower but it is painful because I love the fun extra scenes. It will be the special features.
Scoffer Studios is owned by Brit Sellers and Diana Sellers/Firefly. We co-write all of our projects and work on them together, along with an incredible team of talented actors, artists, musicians, and creative geniuses, many of which are members of LGBTQ or indigenous groups, we are also very excited about the Siberian group OLOX that has written nearly all the music for our animated film Dagon Troll World Chronicles. OLOX is owned by female Indiginous artist Snow Raven
About Live action horror Blood Brothers Life Harvest:
When a rabies like human virus floods the country and as panicking survivors become just as deadly as the infected, brothers Enoch and Aaron must fight to protect their family no matter what, but when Enoch is infected with the virus and slowly begins turning into a zombie, Aaron finds that he can no longer trust his older brother and comes to ask himself the question; is blood thicker than water?
Directed by Brit Sellers
Executive Producer Diane Sellers
A Scoffer Studios Productions Original Film
In association with Boster Castle Productions
Starring Alex Hohn, Bobby Batson, Maehgan Eddy, McKenzie Eddy, Rae Dickens,Tommy Kramer, Nathan Kirby, Cherish Sellers, Louise White, Aysen Djemal, Issac Morton, Kyria Johnson, Richard Morton, Robert Wilson, Rosalinda Morales, Syrah Mian, Joshua Robinson, Maggie Batson, John Potzman, Lilly Robinson, Gideon Bristol, Rhonda Burris, Missy McCutcheon, Anita Bruffet Karr, Erric Toddy, Kristina Elizabeth DelBart, Travis Peterson, Benjamin Lewon, Robert Manning, Devin Newton, Cheryl Vanwinkle, Justin Land, Daniel Ryan, Hunter Redfern, Rikki Manen, Rudy Ledbetter, Jamie Phillips, Scott Lee, Shane Bridges, Donald Curle, Kenneth Carter,
Music by Luke Truan, Robert Wilson,
Sound by Steve Lee
Trailer editing by Jason Hurley and Charlie Brady
Trailer music by Soundridemusic
About the Studio:
Scoffer Studios is a local female owned and run grassroots film studio that creates horror films. Scoffer Studios Productions is an all-woman created, directed, produced, designed, and owned animation and live action studio. Scoffer Studios loves what they are doing, love their actors, and especially love all of their fans!
Blood Brothers Life Harvest IMDB:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt21443306/
Blood Brothers Life Harvest Youtube Trailer:
Scoffer contact info 870-436-4140