Media 42: “I Know How Many Runs You Scored Last Summer” isn’t a spoof movie in the vein of “Scary Movie”. The title is really just flipping a finger at teen horrors like “Scream” and “I Know What You Did Last Summer” but what the film delivers is a hard-edged slasher with dark comic undertones, think “Severance” or the bastard child of “Shaun of the Dead” and “Friday the 13th”, but with far more nudity.

You could say it’s “post-spoof”, but we don’t wink at the audience.

HYB: Why a horror comedy?

M42: Anything we produce will definitely have a darkly comic quality. That’s just who we are.

The main reason we decided on a horror comedy for our debut feature film was that they are fun to make, for cast & crew, very important when no-one’s getting paid!

At the end of the day, we’re making a film that we want as many people to see as possible. There’s a huge community of loyal low budget horror film fans out there (including ourselves) who are clamoring for the next Freddy or Blair Witch that isn’t just another piss-weak Hollywood-ised teen horror.

HYB: Are there any particular targets being parodied, or just the slasher sub-genre in general?

M42: We don’t parody any films, but rather acknowledge (with respect) several seminal movies, but without making it into a 90 minute Geek’s Guide to Horror.

Being huge Jason and Michael fans, we naturally felt the film had to adhere to the strict rules of the slasher movie. You don’t mess with the sub-genres!

HYB: Name some influences; films, filmmakers, writers, etc.

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M42: Where to start? Tod Browning’s “Freaks” and Hitchcock’s “Psycho” would be a good place, though our shower scene is a fair bit more explicit than Hitchcock’s!

Certainly for the dialogue-heavy scenes we studied Reservoir Dogs and episodes of The Sopranos. For sheer suspense and chase scenes, Alex Aja’s “High Tension” and Carpenter’s “Halloween” are faultless.

Being both British (though having lived in Australia for the past 8 years), we’re also heavily influenced by Hammer House of Horror and Tales of the Unexpected, evil little stories often with a smattering of dark British humour.

For inspiration we often re-watch “A Clockwork Orange”, “Princess Blade”, “Old Boy”, “Assault on Precinct 13”, “Turkey Shoot”, “In The Cut”, “Se7en”, etc. The list goes on!

HYB: Can you relate any interesting experience, from seminal stages up to present, dealing with the production? Any story that illustrates your perseverance in spite of difficult odds?

M42: The first thing that comes to mind was the time we received a phone-call from our lead actor’s girlfriend informing us that he’d been attacked and slashed across the face in Bangkok. Shooting came to an abrupt pause for 12 weeks while he underwent plastic surgery and healed. As is often the case with shooting feature films, we hadn’t shot chronologically, so the keen-eyed observer may see a scarred lip appear and disappear from scene to scene. Moral of the story? Don’t get the shit kicked out of you in Bangkok .

We’ve also learnt that having corporate full time jobs and attempting to produce a feature film at the same time is a challenge, bloody hard work actually, but we were lucky enough to have a fantastic bunch working on the film with us. Fortunately they wanted to make the film as much as we did!