Horror and small Texas towns go together like chainsaws and massacres, but those onscreen communities are often a broad pastiche of real life. Not so in Austin-made and cosmic horror-tinged terror Man Finds Tape, where the fear springs from authenticity. “It’s very representative of what small Texas towns are,” said star Kelsey Pribilski.
Directed by Paul Gandersman and Peter S. Hall, the locally made chiller arrives on the big screen and on VOD this weekend from Magnet Releasing. To celebrate, the filmmakers will be hosting a series of Q&A screenings at the Alamo South Lamar, with cast and crew in attendance.
At the heart of the story are Pribilski (Landman, Rondo and Bob) and William Magnuson (SKAM Austin, Inbetween Girl) as siblings Lynn and Lucas Page, who are forced to re-examine their family history when Lucas finds a mysterious tape. The strangeness doesn’t stop at their front door, instead infecting the whole community of Larkin, including their old friend, Wendy (Nell Kessler, Lilith) and local preacher and host of local evangelical TV show, Salvation Hour, Reverend Endicott (John Gholson, Fuck My Son, Make Popular Movies). And there’s an outsider known only as the Stranger (Brian Villalobos, Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood, Accidental Texan, Rats), who has been attracted to the strange goings-on for his own dark purposes.
However, it’s not like everyone forms a Mystery Machine gang and tries to solve the enigma. Not even Lucas and Lynn are on the same page as they try to process old family wounds connected to their current nightmare, wounds that have driven them apart. “They definitely dealt with it in their own way,” Pribilski said.
For Magnuson, having them be siblings is more than just about their relationship but a way to examine how people respond to a shared experience. He explained, “There’s so many different ways you can react to trauma, and develop your ego or your shell around that. So having one of them flee and the other hunker down and digging in – both of them are in denial in a totally different direction but it’s a circle.”
Their strained bond is completely unlike Pribilski’s own experiences growing up as the younger sister to elder brothers. “I feel bad for them, because I was a little turd,” she said. “We’re a military family, so the boys are supposed to be very structured and I was the clown of the family.”
“I was chained up in the basement. Had to eat rats to survive,” Magnuson lamented of his own childhood. Actually, he was the middle kid, and therefore always battling with his siblings. “As brothers you’re always at odds with each other, and it’s not until you’re adults that you go, ‘What was that even about?’”
However, for Pribilski what makes familial relationships fascinating is how they don’t change. “I feel like there’s a specific moment in time in every family unit where everybody is perpetually that age. Once I walk across the threshold of my parents’ house, I’m eternally 13 years old and we all relax into what our little archetypes were growing up.”
“My psychiatrist has a term for that,” Magnusson added.
Pribilski laughed. “Arrested development.”
So what age are Lucas and Lynn stuck at? Pribilski said, “Lynn grew up quickly because their parents got sick when they were pretty young, so she took over a lot of the responsibilities of the house, and that’s why she left Larkin when her family dissipated. … That’s why she’s so resentful when he goes, ‘Hey, I need your help.’ What’s new? She’s been helping you all that time.”
As for Lucas, Magnuson said, “He has a big heart and he is an intelligent person, but he emotionally is a child, stunted, and has trouble seeing beyond his own needs.”
The evil that pervades the town doesn’t just hover over the siblings, but reaches into the lives of everyone, including Wendy. “The evil brings her groceries,” said Gholson, who plays the local preacher with secrets – not least that he’s hired Wendy to be his surrogate.
But what is that evil? A defining trait of the film is that whatever has its claws into the community isn’t obvious, and some characters know a lot more about its nature than others. So how much did Gandersman and Hall fill the actors in on the sinister cosmology?
That very much depended on what their characters would know. For Gholson, it’s the point of connection with the touchstone of found footage horror, The Blair Witch Project, where the cast was famously given character outlines rather than having the mythology explained. “The actors only knew what the actors knew, and they were only given instructions for themselves and they were allowed to improvise based on the instructions that they had, without knowing the other actors had their own individual instructions. It may not have been intentional on the part of Peter and Paul that, ‘We’re making a found footage, we’re going to [make] it like Blair Witch’ but they kind of sideways backed into it because we only knew what we knew.”
Unlike the rest of the cast, Kessler had worked with Gandersman and Hall before, having starred in their first short, 2016’s “Givertaker.” For the part of Wendy, she was given little information about the larger forces lurking in Larkin, and the directors instead encouraged her to settle on her own interpretation. Kessler explained, “It’s appropriate that the truth that I’m living in the movie is different from John’s truth. … John said something earlier in interviews today that changed my interpretation of who I thought Endicott was in general. So we’re still learning things.”
Yet while she only had hints about the bigger universe, she had a strong grasp of who Wendy was. Like Lucas and Lynn, Wendy has been shaped by a life of trauma, but unlike either of them she’s never tried to avoid the consequences. Kessler explained, “She’s somebody who’s always been taught that you’re not handed anything in life. … She’s not someone who’s used to relying on other people.”
For Magnuson, Lucas not really knowing what’s going on is a defining part of the character. Indeed, his feckless dedication to his version of the truth, no matter the personal cost or cost to others, reminded Magnuson of Fox Mulder from The X-Files: “Ultimately, they are very naïve characters just trying to validate their own existence.”
It’s not just that such mysteries are unexpected in a small town like Larkin: for Pribilski, the setting is perfect for true strangeness to fester and prosper, unseen in plain sight. “They’re their own little hubs, and having that conservative lifestyle, as in ‘this is the way things are done because it’s worked for so long,’ and having new forces outside of their control coming in and interrupting that, against their will – or in this case, against their knowledge – I think that’s what makes it so scary.”
On the other hand, the Stranger knows more than anyone about what’s going on, and so did Villalobos, who was given much more background on his enigmatic character and his mysterious motivations. “Not the whole thing,” he noted, “but they gave me pieces of how this thing is laid out and where he fits.” In fact, he’s really in a different film: All the other characters are in a horror-mystery, while he’s in a heist film. Villalobos laughed: “That’s true! … ‘Everyone’s an idiot, just give me the shit I need and let me get out of here!’”
In between the two extremes of blissful ignorance and callous manipulation is Endicott, who is shown to be messing with forces that may well be beyond his ken. Gholson recalled that, over dinner, Gandersman and Hall “laid out who they felt Endicott was – backstory, motivations, that sort of thing – and I didn’t have any other particular insight beyond what was in the script. They didn’t take me aside and say, ‘and here’s what the Stranger thinks of you, and here’s what Wendy thinks of you.’ It was more, ‘here’s what we think he is, here’s how he’s been living, how much of a human he is or not.’”
When it came to creating his version of this small-town pastor, Gholson said, “I knew I could talk like him, and everything came from there. I knew I could make an approximation of the way that someone from a pulpit in small town Texas sounds, and then, OK, let me create a character. So the simplest in was not necessarily this wide gathering of information and immersion so much as ‘OK, I know I can do the voice. I know I can stand up there and preach and sound like a preacher. Now can I also be a human being? Because there are parts when Endicott is not up there and he is interacting with other people. … Is the person we see in the pulpit the same person we see dropping off the groceries at Wendy’s? Is it the same person we see on Salvation Hour?”
Indeed, Gholson’s version of Endicott is more human than what was originally on the page. Gandersman has said that their original vision was for a “a Tom Noonan-type,” looming and imposing, while what Gholson brings is more avuncular, affable, and, in some ways, more unexpected. For Kessler, that’s important. “The trust that the people of Larkin have in Endicott is more believable because of that John Gholson warmth as opposed to if it was some creepy Slender Man-looking guy who looks like a monster. Thinking about Wendy. This is someone that she agrees to be a surrogate for. There has to be a certain trust and warmth.”
Man Finds Tape opens in theatres this weekend. Get tickets for the Alamo South Lamar Q&A screenings at drafthouse.com, and read our interview with writer/directors Paul Gandersman and Peter S. Hall, “Man Finds Tape Exports Texas Terrors to Tribeca.”