Few sensations are as unnerving as an insect scuttling across your skin in the dead of night. Is that tiny pinprick on the tip of your toe just an itch or merely the beginning of an infestation that will ravage your skin and destroy your sanity? As bed bugs make a global resurgence (sadly), writer and co-director Charlie Carson Monroe brings these maniacal little villains to the screen with their unnerving short, Biters and Bleeders. Following the death of her mother-in-law, Penelope (Raven Angeline Whisnant) and her domineering husband Tad (Christopher Malcolm) move into his family’s ancestral home hoping to save their floundering marriage. Unfortunately, what they find in the Georgia estate will drive Penelope to the brink of madness.
Currently on the festival circuit, Biters and Bleeders has been winning rave reviews for its deft blend of gruesome special effects and emotional horror. With eyes on the future, Monroe and Whisnant, who also co-directs, have partnered with their indie film company New 32 Productions to expand the 22-minute short into a feature film. With a dynamic social media campaign and a galvanizing mission, this quest has become one of the most exciting crowdfunding campaigns of the year. In anticipation, Bloody Disgusting recently sat down with Monroe to chat about the emotional language of horror, finding beauty in the grotesque, and just how many bugs and bleeders they plan to include in the expanded film.
Your introduction video describes Biters and Bleeders as a “deeply personal film about generational trauma.” Why do you think horror is a good vessel for exploring trauma?
Horror is an agreed-upon space to explore the darkest sides of life. Literally every human being has trauma. No matter how protected you might be, the world is a brutal place, and you will get hurt. Not to get too Lemony Snicket on you. It just happens to be true.
You write horror actively hoping that your audience will feel uneasy, uncomfortable, frightened, disturbed. Horror—more than any other genre category I can think of—is a genre about feelings. And by that same token, audiences seek out horror, by and large, because it’s a safe way to experience these emotions. For that reason, horror is the ideal vessel for exploring the shared, collective trauma of being a person. I just think that’s so beneficial to society.
How did you approach expanding the story from a 22-minute short to a full length feature? Did this present any unexpected challenges?
The real challenge was turning the feature film idea we had into a short film. There’s just so much to explore in the Southern Gothic, the contagious effects of generational trauma, the power of the final girl taking back her voice, the way domestic abuse distorts your psyche and sense of reality. There are also so many opportunities for a movie about huge demon bed bugs to have a bunch of brutally disturbing scenes—we have a whole dossier of storyboards that never got a chance to be used! We’re hopeful that this Indiegogo campaign can raise enough funds to get all the depraved things in my brain out into the world!
Your campaign video also teases lots of blood, gore, and most of all bugs! Just how many of these huge demon bed bugs are we talking about and what should audiences expect with the full length feature?
Have you ever had a cockroach wriggle across your body in the middle of the night? It invokes a sort of primal disgust, and discomfort in your own skin.
Well, bed bugs are similar, but more sinister. Do you know what it feels like to lie awake at night, knowing that these tiny BLOOD-SUCKING monsters are in your walls, your mattress, even between the pages of your books? Constantly feeling like there are things crawling on your skin, only to turn on a light and see nothing there? But then waking up the next morning, covered in little red bites, sobbing with the hopelessness of knowing that you literally can’t afford to leave?
This is what we are hoping to make the audience feel: trapped. Surrounded. Paranoid. Infested. And while I think we made a great attempt with the short film, we simply needed way more bugs to fully communicate the horror. We want this house to be crawling with these monsters. We also made the decision to make our bugs like four times bigger than normal bed bugs, which meant that they were expensive to animate and we had to pick and choose our bug scenes.
But if this Indiegogo campaign gives us our full Bug Budget…oh boy. I promise that you will never have seen a movie that makes you as terrified of these disgusting predatory demons.
I’m captivated by the title It’s Time for Penelope to Purge Herself. As a squeamish horror fan, I’ve recently found a lot of comfort and catharsis in extremely gory horror. Can you tell me about the purpose of blood and bugs in the film?
A lot of horror is about escaping something. This is a movie about escaping an abusive house. The purpose of extreme gore, to me, is to make that attempt to escape feel even more visceral, impactful, and real to the audience.
That’s where the catharsis comes in. To achieve catharsis, you need to first feel that sense of being trapped inside something horrible. The scorching Georgia heat, the domineering husband, the ancestral spirits, the never ending bites. Biters and Bleeders is a movie about Penelope purging herself of the things that have wronged her, but to feel any sense of catharsis for her journey, we first need to feel just how bad it was for her. Gore is a useful way of achieving those ends. (Also, fake gore is just so much fun to play with.)
In a behind the scenes video clip, Raven Angeline Whisnant, who co-directs and stars as Penelope, mentions finding beauty in horror and gore. You’ve also described the film as a Southern Gothic. What visual references and aesthetics are you working from when creating the look of the film?
Raven is the primary architect of the visuals, it was her vision to create a film that had a look that was completely at odds with the content of the film. A look that was soft and delicate, with vivid colors and beautiful pastel tones to contrast giant demon bugs and massive amounts of gore and guts. There was a lot of pushback, but she stuck to her guns, and the hazy smoky pink color of the film is now perhaps what the short is best known for.
The feature script will be visually more surreal than the short—it explores the way the mind processes trauma, the way memories get remixed and distorted. We don’t want it to feel like a conventional narrative, but to feel like stepping into a world that blurs the line between nightmares and reality. This is a movie that is trying to depict a psychological state of mind more than anything else.
So that’s where Southern Gothic comes in as an influence. How can we paint a picture of the South at the peak of summer? How can we portray a house decaying, in the most dreamlike and delicate way possible? There’s something about soft, ethereal horror that keeps us feeling vulnerable and uneasy. A bright veneer over a dark and rotten core. Look at season one of True Detective, or The Devil All The Time, or even that extremely weird movie Skeleton Key from 2005 (which I watched way too young and gave me bizarre nightmares). These are stories where everything feels hazy and illusive and gritty and beautiful and mean, all at the same time. That’s what we’re shooting for.
God…Skeleton Key is a weird movie though.
Raven also mentions disliking horror and that you’ve given her a bit of a crash course. Kudos to you for spreading the horror love! I’d love to ask what films you’ve shared with her and if there were any specific genre references you’ve used to convey the vibe of the film?
The first movie I forced her to watch was The Ring, to establish a baseline for what Raven found scary. She rated that movie as a four out of five scary, so upon realizing that her scare-threshold was a lot lower than mine, I adjusted my plan.
We also did It Follows, Midsommar, The Babadook—you know, that whole wave of 2010’s films that suddenly made mainstream movie critics like horror—because I wanted her to see an example of how much artistic intent can go into a horror movie. Giving Raven lots of warnings about when to close her eyes to avoid certain gore moments, of course. I do still want to take us back to some older movies like the original The Amityville Horror from the 70s. I’d be curious what your readers would suggest! What’s a good well-rounded syllabus for a new convert?
‘The Ring’ (2002)
You and Raven have been collaborating since you were kids. Can you tell me a little bit about your relationship and the experience of working together as a directorial duo?
Raven and I met when we were 11, we did theater together in high school, we took acting classes together, we wrote scripts that — thank god — will never see the light of day. We’ve been magnetically drawn together as collaborators since day one.
Raven is so fun to collaborate with because she is a self-taught cinematographer and brilliant editor who has put well over ten thousand hours into learning everything about lenses, lighting, and color. She’s an incredible writer, director, and the most mesmerizing actress I’ve ever seen on screen. Meanwhile, I’m a depressed English major with a vague interest in 19th century Romance. So at our extremes, Raven would probably be making a gorgeous visual phantasia with minimal dialogue, and I would be writing pretentious one-person plays where I pretend to be possessed by the ghost of Emily Bronte.
Raven’s would be better, but together, we form a style that really stands on its own.
Your Indiegogo campaign mentioned cleaning blood off the walls and even the ceiling which tells me I’m going to love this film. How will you approach special effects in the full length feature? Will it be practical, VFX, or a mix of both?
It will certainly be a mix. They both have their own charms. We love creating practical effects, it’s a very fulfilling creative process, with lots of trial and error, but the pay off is so sweet. As far as the giant demon bugs…we just kinda need VFX for certain shots (like the bug wriggling up out of Penelope’s mouth). The blood and gore will most certainly be practical though!
Budget limitations are always going to push us in the direction of practical effects, honestly, and I love that. While we obviously want our Indiegogo campaign to succeed beyond our wildest dreams and get to spend 800 billion dollars on our movie, we are lucky that we don’t need the kind of budget that most feature horror films are looking for, and that’s because we’re used to creative problem-solving! We pride ourselves on being able to pull off low-budget filmmaking that looks really high production value. But we also just love the process of going back to the basics, asking, “What actually scares us? How do we communicate the peril without needing to show an entire monster on screen?”
You pledge that the full length feature of Biters and Bleeders will be ethically made and inclusive. Can you tell me more about what this will look like in practice and why this is important to you?
This is a simple one: this industry is absolutely horrible to its workers. We want to do it better. It’s actually not that hard.
We believe that labor is always labor; that anyone who works on a production deserves actual compensation. We are committed to sets where we acknowledge the artistic value of every member of the crew. They’re not just hired hands, they’re creators we’ve asked to be involved artistically. We prioritize safety standards, intimacy coordination, and comfortable environments on set, where everyone is treated with respect. We are committed to elevating marginalized creators behind the camera. I’m a trans person, which comes with barriers, but I am also absurdly privileged to be making my own film, and to be a part of the community we’ve collected. I want to pay that forward to anyone who has not been given a fair shot in this very discriminatory and abusive industry.
I could go on, but if you’re interested in learning more about how we’re trying to set different standards for indie film, we have a lot of free tools and resources on our website to help make this accessible and practical to anyone running a film set.
The short version of the film is currently making its way through festivals. What kind of response have you gotten and what has it been like to watch such a personal story brought to life on screen?
It’s deeply surreal to sit in a theater with a group of strangers and show them the most vulnerable parts of yourself. A combination of the darkest, most disturbing things from your past and deeply twisted parts of your imagination. It’s exhilarating, it’s nauseating, it’s overwhelming.
Then the movie ends, and we get to the other side: it’s healing. If there’s one thing the horror community has given us more than anything else, it’s acceptance. When you can sit in a room of people, and show them your guts (literally), and they take it all in, understand it, and validate it, you feel truly seen. We’ve found horror creators to actually be the most lovely, bubbly sunshine people we’ve ever met in the industry, and I think it’s because we all have this perfect outlet for our pain. We’ve gotten an absolutely incredible response, and it’s been flattering, humbling, and cathartic, all at the same time. It’s freeing.
Your Indiegogo video also mentions that films about trauma can be hard to market. How have you approached raising funds for the project without giving away the story?
We basically realized all our most marketable moments are the big “OH SHIT” moments in the short. So we talked a lot about the tricky balance between “showing enough” of the movie to make people interested without “too many spoilers.” Ultimately we decided to err on the side of too many spoilers for the short: why not show off the biggest baddest moments we have now, and it just means we have to be bigger and better in the feature? It’s been a fun challenge to ourselves: how can we raise the bar? The short film trailer definitely spoils a lot, that’s part of our commitment to go even harder in the feature film. Because yeah, just saying “This is a movie about my trauma” doesn’t sell as hard as “OH MY GOD, THE BUG COMES OUT OF HER FUCKING MOUTH!”
Can you tell us about your Instagram account @new32indiefilms and your dedication to giving us glimpses behind the scenes?
Instagram has (very much accidentally) been one of the most important things New 32 does. We really started New 32 as a way to carve out a better on-set space for ourselves. We knew if we wanted longevity in the film industry, we needed more sustainable conditions. Raven started calling it “gentle filmmaking” really because she has been through hell and back in the film world, and honestly just needed someone to be gentle with her. She decided that person would have to be herself. It was really only once Raven started posting about this “gentleness” philosophy in filmmaking that we realized it wasn’t just us who needed better industry conditions…it was actually a lot of people. It dovetails nicely with our blog, where Molly Stein-Seroussi, author and journalist, is on a mission to collect the best tips, tricks, and stories of experience from creators of all backgrounds and identities, so that everyone can imagine themselves being successful in film. Because we know they can be.
In one of the Behind the Scenes clips, Raven mentions using horror to give something to the audience. What are you hoping to give audiences with Biters and Bleeders?
An immersive, shocking, memorable experience that lingers with you after you watch it, and also helps you reflect on the power dynamics of the relationship, the specific infrastructure that props up domestic violence. I’ve already had one person tell me that this movie has inspired them to leave an abusive family, and I don’t think I have to explain how incredibly poignant that is for an artist to hear. I have also heard someone tell me that they don’t know exactly what the lesson of the movie was, but the movie did give them nightmares—and honestly? That’s great to hear too!
Really, I want the audience to take from Biters and Bleeders whatever they happen to need right now. Fundraising to make the feature is, in my mind, primarily about getting more stories into the world that inspire people and/or give them night terrors. Hopefully both!
Is there anything you’d like to mention that I haven’t asked about?
I want to shout out one other element of horror we didn’t get to touch on today: sound. Cecilia Keristead, our producer and sound mixer, was not content to just find appropriate sounds in a sound library. No no no: she created the entire soundscape with her own customized foley. She was like a mad scientist of horrific sounds. She made me stab an orange wrapped in leather to make the sound a knife stabbing through squelching flesh. She crushed rice krispies into jello to make the sound of a bug crawling up a woman’s throat. She created every sound effect, from floor squeaks to wriggling bug legs. She created such a visceral soundscape that you could watch this movie with no visuals and squirm in your seat from the penetrating, guttural tones she’s made from her beautiful but deeply twisted imagination.
How can we support Biters and Bleeders?
No commitment—just go look at the video, read through our plans for the future of this film, and decide if you have the willingness and ability to support this project. We want to bring something special to the indie horror world, we’ve put a lot of work into the indie film world over the past decade, and we’re hoping this is our moment to take things to the next level. We’ve added a special perk just for Bloody Disgusting readers, so if you’re able, it would mean the world to us if you could check it out!
Sold? Make this short your next favorite horror movie!
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