In these days of Letterboxd and (seemingly) infinite online access, one element of cinephilia that has fallen by the wayside is the joy of discovery: that thrill when you stumble across something that no one else has seen. But as much as it sometimes feels as if there’s nothing new under the sun, there is still one genre which still holds undiscovered gems: regional horror. Shot on a shoestring, often on 16mm or VHS, these grimy, gory labors of love wait to be discovered on moldering VHS tapes, dusty film reels, and, often, solely in their directors’ closets. This was literally the case for Eric Swelstad’s Heartland of Darkness, which was shot in Ohio in 1989 but remained unfinished until just this year, despite impressive gore effects and a supporting role from horror icon Linnea Quigley. In honor of the film’s long-belated release (including a special edition blu-ray which was released this week), I spoke to Swelstad about pig guts, the challenges of shooting film on a budget, and the possibility of a sequel.
BOSTON HASSLE: How did you get your start in filmmaking?
ERIC SWELSTAD: I went to Ohio State University, where I studied film directing and writing, and really just fell in with a bunch of great guys– fellow filmmakers and such. We loved movies, we loved writing about movies, talking about movies, and making movies. So it was a really, really good place to fall into.
BH: This was your first feature film, is that correct?
ES: Yeah. First feature film, made in 1989. Long time ago.
BH: How did you settle on the story?
ES: I read a book called This Present Darkness by Frank Peretti. It was about a guy with his daughter that move to a small town, and encounters angels and demons and really creepy stuff. And I thought, “Wow, that’s kind of a neat idea. What if I did it with Satanists?” This was the height of what they call the Satanic Panic in the mid to late ’80s and early ’90s. People were seeing Satanists, Satanic cults, everywhere. And I just kind of fell upon the idea of setting it in a small town with a father and daughter. It was in the news, those kinds of things. And I just capitalized on what I’d read about and seen all around me, so it was a really cool thing– back in 1989. Today, it’s not quite the same, but it’s great to have the film come out finally.
BH: You had a lot of very impressive special effects, and gore effects especially. What was the process like putting that together?
ES: We had a great practical effects guy, Scott Simonson. Awesome, awesome guy. He did research and found how people were cut open, and the ritualistic aspects of bodies and what you would see. He utilized a lot of body cavities, and created those kinds of effects. In one particular scene, we have a character that they stumble upon, and he’s been eviscerated. I mean, he’s been totally cut up. Scott Simonson went to a slaughterhouse and found actual pig guts– and, unfortunately, it was the dead of summer in Ohio, where it gets over 100 degrees with humidity. He left those in his garage for the weekend, and on that following Monday we shot the scene with the actor in the dirt, and he had to dump those stinking, rotting guts onto the actor. Everybody was heaving. All of us were getting sick because it was so intense. The actor, to his credit, didn’t get sick, but he was shivering because it was cold in the dirt, and he has these pig guts all over him! But that was one of the best memories of doing that. We used a lot of real practical effects in making the film, and that was a big one.
BH: One of the other more notable things about the film is, of course, that Linnea Quigley is in the cast. Was it difficult at all getting her? What was it like working with her?
ES: Oh, it was great working with her. We made up a list of actors or actresses that we would love to have in the film, because if you’re going to make an independent, low-budget film, if you ever want it to see the light of day, you have to get a name to be in the film. And Linnea was top of our list to get, but we never thought that she would find time in her schedule. Remember, this is the late ’80s– she had just done Return of the Living Dead, she did a bunch of Fred Olen Ray movies. It was shocking that she said yes. And a big reason why she told me yes was that I wrote a part where she got to play a witch, Julia Francine. Linnea told me, “You don’t realize, I always wanted to play a witch! I’ve played hookers, I’ve played zombies, but I’ve never had a chance to play a witch. I was thrilled that this character was a witch!” And that’s why she said yes. We wrote the part for her, but she got to play a character she’d never done before. And it was great. She was terrific to work with. She was always the first on the set, the last to leave. She was just great. It was a real pleasure. We paid for her to go up to Ohio to be in this low-budget film, and she did just that. So today, the film, up until this release, was considered “the lost Linnea Quigley film.” People were asking me all the time, and asking her, when is the film ever gonna get out? And we were like, “Well, I don’t know,” and she’d say, “I’m not sure.” But now, finally, the unreleased Linnea Quigley film is seeing the light of day.
BH: Why wasn’t it released at the time?
ES: We ran out of money. It was that simple. The amount of money to shoot 16mm negative– which is all they had back then. Nobody was really shooting feature films on video. It just didn’t look the same. To buy the negative– it’s silly today, but back then a can of film would cost several hundred dollars. So you’d have to buy the film, and then you’d have to process the film chemically, and that’s equally expensive. But you’re not done, because in order to edit the film, even back then, you had to digitize it so you could edit it on video, which was state of the art back then. So we could do most of those things, and we did as we were making the film, but quickly we realized we’re not gonna have enough to finish it. There’s no way we’re gonna be able to raise tens of thousands of dollars to get this movie finished. Eventually, we just shot the last few things, we got that processed, and that was it. We ran out of money to transfer it over to digital to start editing. So for many years, it sat on a shelf. And over the years, I’d get people that would say to me, “Hey, you’ve got that film. Are you ever going to finish it?” And I’d say, yeah, I’d like to, but I still got a big bill that’s due to do that. I’d work on other films, the actors would work on other stuff, and we all kind of got busy. We never forgot about the film, but it was just something like, “Well, we’ll get to it.” And we never really got to it, until like a year ago. We were like, “Okay, dammit, we’re gonna finish this thing. We’re gonna finally get it out there.” And we did, 33 years later.
BH: What was the process like finishing it now after all these years? Was the film completed, or did you need to finish anything up?
ES: We had to go back and reshoot some things. We had to take all the master film elements, we had to retransfer those– today, it’s digital, back then it was tape, so we had to transfer it to digital. Obviously, we had to do a really good mix on the film, because back then it was shot in mono, so we had to add the stereo channel. Then we also had to add visual effects. We’ve got an explosion that takes place in an office, we’ve got lightning effects, we’ve got gunshots– we didn’t have any of that stuff when we made the film! So we had to go back and add those things together to release it, and it was great. Even the titles, we didn’t have done yet. So we had to add those things, and the editing wasn’t quite done yet, so we had to finish that. We’d work on it here and there, and then finally we got a big push at the end to get it across the finish line, and we were able to finish it. And now it’s coming out on video, so everybody can check it out!
BH: Now that it’s out, do you have any plans for a sequel?
ES: Nobody’s asked me that yet! We could certainly do one. I don’t want to give away the ending, but there’s definitely room for the characters to continue. The problem is, the actors– 33 years ago, they would have loved to have done a sequel. We talked about that. But today, we’d probably have to cast most of the film again. Our lead character, Reverend Donovan, he’s around acting, but he’s gotten a little bit older too, so we’d have to make some alterations to the story. He dies at the end, I’ll give that away, so maybe he comes back? I don’t know! But yeah, the answer is we’d love to do a sequel. If people love the film, and they want us to make a sequel, we’ll find a way, dammit! We’ll find a way to make a sequel to the film.
Heartland of Darkness
1989/2022
dir. Eric Swelstad
101 min.
Available on special edition blu-ray from Visual Vengeance
