Humble Beginnings

    I wanted to make movies for many years. It began when I was obsessed with Japanese monster films as a child and wanted to make my own Godzilla films. Later, when I got my hands on my family's camcorder, I commenced my efforts. They weren't that great, made with stop motion Bandai figures and a camera shutter that made smooth stop motion impossible, but I enjoyed making them enough to continue. Over time, the projects got a little higher in ambition and I attempted to make a slasher film at the age of 14 where a possessed mask makes a man kill people. I got the camera confiscated when I ran after a pickup truck dressed as the protagonist holding a rake (it was on the other side of the road and I used its passing by as a signal to start filming, but still). However, a year later I got my privileges back and was back in action and I worked on some crude music videos to try and figure out how music synced with video.

    The Big Toe would be my first "more serious" production, inspired by Alvin Schwartz's story of the same name from a children's book, Scary Stories to Read in the Dark. It was made with friend Neil Cicierega who acted and scored, a clay toe and edited on a computer for the first time with black and white filters imposed. It was an 8 minute homage to gothic horror films that took me a year to complete as I went back and added a scene in 2003. The results were good enough to make me want to continue filmmaking. While looking like what it is, the work of a teenage boy (but a cinematically inspired teenage boy), it does have a level of atmosphere that feels weirdly compelling and is my favorite, to this day, of all my "early" films.

    Also made around the same time period when I wasn't fighting with people on the internet is the incomplete Agony and the Ecstasy of the Puppets, a film that tried to be the Sada Abe story crudely done in Neil Cicierega's basement with puppets and The Boy Who Cried Wolf: Extra Gory Version, which is better not mentioned at all but is weirdly appealing in its moronic sense of humor.

    Later, I made such films as the Aquatic Observations films, which were a trio of fish with classical music films, the first two of which are actually amazingly well done. I aborted a project called Voodoo Zombie Bloodbath which I tried to make on Super 8 and then did Harold on 8mm film as well. Unfortunately by the time I shot Harold, my second-hand-procured Super 8 camera had malfunctioned and the footage started coming out badly. Harold was another adaptation of an Alvin Schwartz story that didn't really work out well. However, after the sort of failure of that film, I decided to go back to an idea I had wanted to do for many years: a "gory version" of Little Red Riding Hood.

Trailer for Agony and the Ecstasy of the Puppets and The Big Toe

Copyright J.L. Carrozza, 2008-09.