Written & Directed by Keir Siewert | Produced by Alix Austin
A visceral horror rollercoaster in which a young woman's illness takes a disturbing turn...
READ OUR INTERVIEW WITH KEIR
Tell us a bit about yourself and your filmmaking background.
I grew up watching Westerns and a lot of 50s sci-fi and horror with my father. Then when I was teenager I discovered John Carpenter and David Cronenberg and became enamoured with body horror. After I graduated from university I started out making club promos and low-budget music videos. It gave me a lot of room to try out different techniques and experiment a lot with editing. I see myself as a DIY filmmaker with a real interest in formalist visuals.
What's your inspiration behind RETCH?
It was a combination of things. I’ve always been really interested in how nature is quite dark and horrifying. I remember reading about how lobsters have to periodically shed their shells and how it’s incredibly stressful for them physically. I think there’s so much of human physiology that’s so strange and weird. Then I was thinking of menstruation and how it’s the monthly shedding of the uterine wall. Which led to me expanding that into thinking, what would it be like if that was a cycle for your whole body?
What obstacles did you overcome while in the making of this film?
It was very cold. We were shooting in an industrial basement with no heat, in January in London. Chloe Wigmore who plays the woman transforming was naked except for some nipple covers at the time. She had contact lenses in, which meant she couldn’t see, as well as wearing a bald cap. Then she was covered in a cold clear goo. I kept thinking she was gonna get hypothermia. We covered her in thermal wrap between each take and had a heater on that she could stand by in the corner, but she never complained and did an absolutely killer job.
How did you achieve some of the practical effects for the film?
I love practical effects, so for me I really wanted to make the film feel very physical. Ultimately a lot of it is very simple. The clear vomit is egg whites, the skin being ripped off is dried glue. The final look is some flesh coloured nipple coverings with a bald cap, white contacts and lit with green gels.
Any hacks or tips for making a short film?
Use your environment. I get so many comments on the shot in which the water ripples after she screams. That was an idea I just had on the day. There was this area where water collected in the basement and I thought it would look cool if we could get it in the film. I used a portable fan that happened to be in the studio and that’s how I came up with the idea on the fly.
Tell us about the journey of getting your film to audiences.
We built a following through the horror circuit. Douglas Cox, our executive producer, had a lot of experience and so was able to give us advice on what festivals to target and how to plan a festival strategy. The good thing about Retch is that because it’s quite short and punchy, it was very easy to fit into festival programs. The horror festival world is also very inter-connected, so as soon as it got a good response at a bunch of festivals, we started getting contacted by more and we were fortunate to be off to the races.
Congrats on getting distribution with Alter. Any tips on how other filmmakers can distribute their films online?
Alter got in touch with us after they’d seen the film at London Short Film Festival. I would say when it comes to shorts, do your research on which platforms are licensing shorts and look at what they’re offering and what their viewership is. We’re very happy to be on Alter, but we’ve definitely made the mistake of tying ourselves into a relationship with a different platform in the past and it can happen that a film just gets dumped and then we can’t do anything with it. So it’s important to know who you’re doing business with and what they can offer you. A big thing to consider is whether it's worth handing the exclusivity of your film over to a platform. Some platforms simply ask you to be exclusive for a month, before reverting back to a non-exclusive contract.
What are you working on now?
Alix Austin, the producer of Retch, recently directed her own horror short Sucker, which I produced. That should be doing the festival rounds next year. We’re planning to team up as a co-directing team to make our debut horror feature next year.
It’s early days but it would be in the body horror vein with themes very similar to Retch and Sucker. We're also thrilled that the horror anthology Isolation, which we directed the London segment for, has been seeing success at Frightfest, Screamfest and coming to video on demand soon.
Any film recommendations that we should add to our watchlist?
My favourite horror film of all time is The Thing so if you’ve never seen that, you should 100% watch it NOW. But otherwise I would say some of my favourite underappreciated gems are Wake in Fright (1971), Ravenous (1999), Society (1989) Invaders from Mars (1953), Them! (1954), The Loved Ones (2009) and The Blob (1988)