PopHorror Let's Get Scared
The Scout is a found footage horror film that takes the perspective of an in-progress, behind-the-scenes documentary on a fictional, micro budget horror film gone wrong. We wanted to share our chat with Writer/Director Michael Kallio about the film.
PopHorror: Hi Michael! Thank you so much for agreeing to do this interview with PopHorror. I had a chance to watch your film, The Scout [PopHorror review], on Amazon Prime. It was such a fun film! Congratulations to everyone involved. Can you tell us a little about your background and how you got started in filmmaking?
Michael Kallio: Sure! It’s the “typical kid who saw Star Wars at an early age” story. For me, I was 6 when I saw the sci-fi epic. From then on, I was saving allowance or paper route money to buy Super-8 film and borrowing my grandmother’s Super-8 camera to shoot my movies. I’d recruit the neighbor kids, and we’d make all kinds of movies. The most ambitious one was an Indiana Jones movie called Indiana Jones and the Curse of Death Island.
When I got older, I joined the Detroit Producers Association. Well… I started hanging out at their events and parties, worked a lot in the industry in the Detroit area and got to know a lot of people. I got a job as a production assistant on a horror movie that became a cult hit called Hellmaster, which lead me to meeting even more folks in the world of film and video. I ended up doing some art department things on that movie and befriended the special make-up effects team, whom I would work for after Hellmaster wrapped. I also became infamous character actor John Saxon’s stand-in on that film.
In my early 20s, I made my first feature film, Hatred of a Minute, a psychological thriller starring Gunnar “Leatherface” Hansen and myself. Bruce Campbell produced it. A second feature followed, titled Mutant Swinger from Mars, a ’50s sci-fi spoof. Mutant was inspired by Ed Wood movies, the Tim Burton movie, and the Jerry Lewis film, The Nutty Professor, which featured the acting debut of The White Stripes front man and guitarist, Jack White.
I’ve had my hand in pretty much every aspect of the film industry working not only as a writer, director, producer, actor, and editor but also as a special effects artist, a production designer and an art director. When I wasn’t directing, I was working art department on things like Eminem videos, lottery commercials, and the like.
PopHorror: What was the inspiration behind The Scout and are there any parallels—besides the murder, I hope—that you can draw to your actual experience as a filmmaker?
Michael Kallio: A lot of the things that happen in the film, especially the funnier and more absurd things, are based loosely on things that have happened to me or crazy stories I’ve heard that people have told me. A few of the things in the film have also directly happened to me almost verbatim. For instance, I was casting a movie when I first moved to LA in 2004 and a woman came in thinking it was a porn shoot. She began to list off the things she would do and the things she COULD do. It was very awkward, and she actually didn’t believe she was at the wrong audition, but we finally convinced her, and she angrily left. We laughed after the fact, but at the time, it was very strange. The business is beyond bizarre at times, so I used a lot of that motivation to create scenarios. No one was actually murdered for inspiration of The Scout… or WERE they?
PopHorror: You’ve managed to take a very small budget to add to the movie’s theme and plot in a brilliant way. Do you have any advice for indie filmmakers that are just starting when it comes to making a budget work?
Michael Kallio: First off, thank you for that nice compliment. It’s not every day something I do is considered “brilliant,” but I’ll take it! My suggestion for making a budget work is to write what you know you can afford. Robert Rodriguez did it amazingly well with his first film, El Marachi. He wrote around the things he had available to him… a motorcycle, a bus, a guitar and its case, and so on. He kept it simple. I did something very similar for my ’50s sci-fi spoof, Mutant Swinger from Mars, but I was lucky enough to have an entire studio with props and old set pieces from the sequel to the movie, Flesh Gordon… NOT Flash Gordon.
Flesh Gordon Meets the Cosmic Cheerleaders was an R-rated sex comedy follow-up to the adult film, Flesh Gordon, and randomly enough, they did all the special effects and a few pick-up shots in the Detroit area. My friend, Rolfe Bergsman, had purchased the company and everything inside of it, which included all this crazy sci-fi stuff from the movie, and an awesome old school matte painting from Evil Dead 2. When I came up with the idea after seeing all of this great stuff, I wrote an entire period sci-fi movie spoof because of all the amazing things at our disposal. I was lucky, in that regard, that I had a great little studio to shoot an old school science fiction movie on 16mm film with all the trimmings for next to nothing. Our total budget was only $22,000.
So, my advice is to create a story around the things you know you can get to add production value to your film. If you have little to no money, you want the movie to look and be the best it can be. My other bit of advice is to hone your script in… make the writing shine. The next best thing you have to money—if you don’t have that—is time. Time to write the best script you possibly can. If you don’t have a studio or production company you’re working for or answering to, you don’t have any deadlines—unless you make some for yourself. You have all the time in the world to polish your script. When we made The Scout, we were on a schedule, so the clock was ticking. If you don’t have that clock to answer to… Time is your best friend.
PopHorror: The Scout is a found footage film. Were there any complications that came from having the cast double as the camera crew as far as directing?
Michael Kallio: No, actually, because I told them what to shoot! (laughs) They were great with capturing what was important. Everyone really understood the concept of the movie and what their particular character would focus on during whatever situation they were in. For example, the social media guru, Jessica [Moore], filmed at those perfect times she needed to, but when things go south, her camera is never a part of her again. So, we don’t have any footage she shot because her character would have been too busy trying to stay alive. It worked out very well, because like the characters themselves, their footage became part of the texture of the film, and in a way, became their own characters… at least, an extension of the characters they are attached to. And, nowadays, everyone has a camera or some device to capture footage, so it just adds to part of the satire I interjected throughout the movie… we are always filming or being filmed. Plus, it sure as hell helped me tremendously in editing.
PopHorror: Expanding on the found footage question… you used several different cameras to create an atmosphere that really works for this film. Would you like to expand on that process and what cameras were used?
Michael Kallio: It all started off with an older consumer model Canon Vixia HF 100 that I bought off my cousin, Keith, years ago. That became the Hero behind-the-scenes cam. That Hero camera then became an iPhone 12 after I had seen a that test actor Eric Marq had shot and shown me. It looked so much better than the Vixia, so the iPhone with the Filmic Pro app took over. Jessica Moore, as the social media fanatic, used her iPhone 13 and some Sony vlog camera. When we did the Audition camera, we used a Panasonic GH4. We used older GoPros, the Hero 3 and Hero 4, as the security cams. Derrick Zonca’s character, Sam, used either a Canon 5D or a Canon 7D. When we, as the audience, come out of the found footage world within the movie, the linear end scene was shot with a Black Magic Cinema Pocket Camera.
Spoiler Alert
And the killer ends up using them all to create their own film… so to speak.
End Spoiler Alert
It was something I’ve wanted to do for a long time now, ever since my first film, which had a lot of different realities. There were flashbacks that I wanted to shoot in black and white Super-8 film and hallucinations in color Super-8. All the police procedure scenes I wanted to shoot in video, and the rest of the story in 16mm. But back in 1995, that would have been trickier than it is today. Now, there are plug-ins and effects to do all that stuff in post on your digitally shot movie, but back then, it would have cost more money. So I decided to just keep it consistent and shoot 16mm. I used color correction and editing techniques to break up those different textures and realities.
For The Scout, I was able to use different video textures that ended up almost being characters themselves with each video look being connected to a certain character. You have cameras connected to each of the actors, the killer, security cameras and the real world camera at the end when you leave the found footage world and enter what I’ve been calling the linear movie world where the movie becomes an actual movie and that found footage feel then becomes its own reality and character in the movie. It sounds a lot more complex than it is, but if you watch the film, it’s easy to see… or maybe I just suck at explaining it. (laughs) Either way, it’s there in the movie.
PopHorror: I’m no stranger to horror films with this sort of budget, but I have to say, you really found some gems in your casting. They outshined a lot of actors in other films I’ve seen with this budget level. How was the casting process?
Michael Kallio: The casting process was actually pretty easy. Because I rewrote a lot of the script, I wrote characters for people I had in mind. Those people were available, so I was able to cast the majority of the film with friends. Then they all blew me away on how dedicated and prepared they all were. I trusted my instincts knowing they had the chops, but I underestimated them. They were all pretty darn amazing. I’ve gotten A LOT of compliments on the acting in The Scout. I’m very proud of the level of talent I was able to get and proud of all of them because they were all 259% in. They got what we were going for. I got very lucky, so much so that I cast a lot of them in the quirky Christmas rom-com I’m currently shooting. If someone wasn’t in the Christmas movie, it was because they were too busy on their next project to be involved.
PopHorror: The film is bookended with scenes with someone we only know as The Producer making it almost feel like part of an anthology or series. Will we see any more of him in the future?
Michael Kallio: An anthology? Huh? I never thought about it like that, but now that you mention it, it totally could be. A sequel has been brought up a couple of times but, I digress… (laughs) That’s actually a great idea. The Producer is infamous actor Carl Crew who is a legend here in Los Angeles. He’s a writer, filmmaker and owner of The California Institute of Abnormalarts AKA The C.I.A., a nightclub, music venue and museum that you have to check out as it’s a cool, weird spot to see when visiting The L.A./North Hollywood area. He was also one of the leads in the horror/cult classic, Blood Diner, from 1987. He is also appearing in and hosting podcasts about the paranormal and will be featured in a documentary I just recently finished about the Reptilian conspiracy theory. Carl has been a studier of the supernatural and strange for years, so he was a perfect fit to help make sense and possibly debunk and explain what exactly these so called “reptilians” are. You’ll be surprised on his and my other interviewee, Bryan Sadler’s, conclusions on the true origins of these creatures. It’ll blow your mind. But again, I digress…
Will we see The Producer again? It’s a very good possibility in some form or another, whether it’s a sequel to The Scout or a continuation of other twisted tales The Producer has to tell in some future non-canon project. It’s always a good time directing Carl and letting him do his thing.
PopHorror: Are there any funny or interesting stories you’d like to share about the time spent making The Scout?
Michael Kallio: Well, we did shoot 60 pages in two days, which is almost unheard of. A low budget movie averages 8-10 pages a day realistically. Sixty pages is nuts. The movie, as a whole, was a great time. I got to shoot a fun, weird, found footage, slasher picture with friends, some of whom I had worked with before, some we had only talked about working together for years but didn’t happen until now.
For instance, my friend Lisa Cole played Amber, one of the auditoners, in The Scout. She was a Fake Shemp—a stand-in for the lead actress—in Hatred of a Minute. We’ve been talking about doing a project together since 1996. We finally worked together on The Scout and have a new thriller project in the works now. So, it’s things like that that really made the whole experience amazing for me and hopefully the cast and the very minimal crew—there was basically two of us, Meredith Petran and myself—too. We were all talking about the next project, whatever it was going to be, while we were shooting The Scout, because we were having so much fun. It was very hard work shooting a feature film in 6 days with very little money, but we became a tight knit family very quickly and had a tremendous time.
The premiere at the Chinese Theatre in Hollywood was a true highlight, for sure. We got asked if we wanted to screen the film during the annual film festival, Screamfest LA, which is the premiere horror film fest in California. Rachel Belofsky, a friend and colleague, started and runs the festival every year. She saw the film, dug it, and asked of we wanted a screening. How could I say no to that? (laughs) So, we had a premiere/cast and crew/free screening for the public event. It went great, and the film was very well received. A lot of the cast and myself did a Q & A afterwards, and then we went out to celebrate the film and its reception. Not really a funny or an interesting story, but it was truly a great time.
PopHorror: I heard that this film references some of your other films. Would you like to expand on that in case viewers may want to watch the other?
Michael Kallio: There’s something peppered from everything I have done thus far in my career embedded into The Scout. The movie features a cameo by the band, The Radioactive Chicken Heads, whom I am currently doing a documentary on and soon a feature film. My love of everything alien is represented in the fake movie within the movie, Terrestrial Evil. My second film was a 1950s sci-fi spoof called Mutant Swinger from Mars, and Terrestrial Evil is my homage to that with a few nods to my first feature, Hatred of a Minute, thrown in. Mentions of Bruce Campbell and Gunnar Hansen are odes and tributes to just a few of the people in this crazy industry that have supported and championed me. The list goes on… I also have a reference to the movie It’s a Wonderful Life in everything I do. That’s a must-see movie.
PopHorror: Do you have anything in the works that the horror community should keep an eye out for?
Michael Kallio: I’m almost finished with the restoration and re-release of Hatred of a Minute. That will be released by Synapse Films. I’m hoping to finish up a full-length documentary about Gunnar that I started 2016 shortly after he passed away. The documentary is called Dinner with Leatherface. The goal is to premiere it at this year’s Screamfest. My ’50s sci-fi spoof is searching for a physical release and is available to watch on Tubi and Amazon Prime. I’m also in discussions about a few new horror projects. We shall see which one happens the fastest. Then, of course, The Scout DVD comes out June 7, 2022, and is currently streaming on several platforms now, including Amazon Prime, X-Box, iTunes and Google Play, among others.
PopHorror: Thank you for your time, Michael. It was a pleasure.
