Some directors premiere their film with a red carpet, fancy frocks, and the paparazzi. For her new mermaid horror, Erzulie, Christine Chen opted for beach towels, bathing suits – and mermaids.
Last weekend, Austin-based Chen had a hometown screening of her bloody folktale-inspired adventure poolside in South Austin, ahead of a weekend of screenings at AFS Cinema, and a three-state tour ahead of its VOD launch in June. “It was very much an experience,” Chen said. “There were mermaids, Miss Texas mermaids – apparently there are two, and I didn’t even do that was a thing – and people got to watch the film in a pool.”
For Chen, it was all part of the B-movie fun of her film, a harkening back to the days when producers like William B. Castle would make going to the movies an event. “I showed up in a swim suit and mermaid leggings. People were like, ‘Isn’t this a red carpet? Why are you in sandals?’ ‘Because it’s a pool.'” Not that every screening will be so relaxed. When the film screens at AFS Cinema, she laughed, “I will dress up and prove I can be a professional.”
The poolside drinks and chic environment was a far remove from the actual shoot, but then nothing about Erzulie was quite what Chen planned – even down to her making Erzulie. Before the pandemic, she was working on a much more serious project, “about PTSD among first responders,” but she realized it might not be the right time for such a project. She explained her thinking: “Once things open up, people aren’t going to want what I call an Oscar-bait film, and be in a theatre being serious. Let’s just make it a big party.”
What she wanted to make was something that would remind her of the adventures and thrills of The Goonies, or the thrill of sleepovers, “doing your nails and eating pizza,” telling your parents you were going to watch Disney but slipping on Empire Records instead. And what can be further from a serious subject than a killer mermaid in the Bayou?
So off to the swamps of Louisiana she went, and she was quickly reminded that they were quite treacherous enough without carnivorous sirens sliding through the water. May in the swamps means boiling days, “but then at night the temperature would drop and it would be so cold,” Chen recalled. Then there was the wildlife: two crew members were on permanent alligator and snake patrol, but no one could scare off all the insects and bullfrogs that might be invisible to the camera, but certainly weren’t silent. “At 6:30pm, the cacophony would start,” Chen said, but she soon learned to use that creaking, chirruping roar to the film’s advantage. “It really helps build up the scariness.”
That, and the location further emphasized that the story was born of the Pelican state. In the film, Erzulie (Leila Anastasia Scott) is the killer guardian of the swamp, and a spirit of vengeance for wronged women. Chen herself was a huge mermaid fan as a kid, but the softer, The Little Mermaid-side of the myth. In reality, she found the sea scary when she was growing up, and that fed into her ideas for the film. “I really wanted to showcase a narrative with not a princess mermaid but something darker.” She wanted to make a “female creature feature,” and she found inspiration in the story of the sirens, luring men to their deaths. Always men, she noted, not women. “What if there was a mermaid who killed off a bunch of guys, but in the name of being protector of women and children.”
Like a lot of indie filmmakers, she spends a lot of time in Louisiana, where she became interested in voodoo. That’s where she found her aquatic menace in Erzulie, “a Haitian voodoo goddess who has been linked to another goddess named Mami Wata. Sometimes they’re synonymous, and Mami Wata is half-fish, half-human, and a protector of women and children as well. So we took some liberties, and funneled it into the story.”
The research process also exposed her to what she called “an international fascination with mermaids,” both in mythology and modern pop culture. If Erzulie does well, then she’d like to further explore those differing local stories, from the horned ningyo of Japan to the France’s winged Melusine, and maybe even the Scottish Selkie, a shapechanging seal spirit. “It would be an X-Men of mermaids,” Chen said, far removed from the swamps. Next time, she said, “We’ll definitely be on a beach.”
Erzulie, AFS Cinema, 6259 Middle Fiskville, Sat., May 7, noon; Sun., May 8, 7pm. Release party, Kitty Cohen’s, 2211 Webberville, Sat., May 7, 7:30pm. Tickets at erzuliefilm.com.
ERZULIE Neon Release Party a Sunday, May 8 at 7:00PM Screening at Austin RoadThis article appears in Abortion Rights.
