Deep woods, a rough coastline, long winters… is Maine an inherently scary place?
Maybe, maybe not. But as Halloween and winter approach, Maine filmmakers are once again celebrating the dark and spooky aspects of Vacationland, with "Damnationland."
Now in its sixth year, Damnationland brings together ten "dark genre" films for a scarifying evening of horror, comedy and even documentary. It premiered in Portland and is showing around the state for the rest of the month.
Allen Baldwin is the co-founder of Damnationland; he told me about how he and his partners in terror put together the showcase.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snpnMwmbYmk
Nora Flaherty: How did Damnationland come about, and what has it become since then?
Allen Baldwin: We started it seven years ago. My friend [and co-founder] Eddie Bowlz and I were having drinks at a bar and he mentioned the idea and I thought, "yeah sure, let's do it."
Then he went out and booked a screening without telling me, so we had a date and we had to do it, so we did it. And since then, it's gotten really big — at our premiere we had 755 people at the State Theatre in Portland. It's grown to be a really amazing event.
NF: Tell me how it works.
AB: Every year, we invite a number of filmmakers to produce a film specifically for Damnationland. We don't really tell them what to produce, we invite filmmakers that we know are going to produce great work to produce something for us.
After Damnationland, they take their films elsewhere, and a number of them have been sold. We had one filmmaker who actually just got his Damnationland film on a national anthology series. So they take their films and run with them after the fact. But it's a kicking off point for a lot of people here.
NF: So this is a Maine film festival. What does that mean?
AB: It means that all the films are either produced by Maine filmmakers, or shot here in Maine. We have had Maine filmmakers produce things in LA, but they're Maine filmmakers so we consider that a Maine film. We've also brought filmmakers from out of town to make their film in Maine.
We want to support the Maine film industry here as much as Maine filmmakers — we want to increase the interest that out of state filmmakers might have in coming here to make work. I think by supporting and encouraging filmmakers to come here and make stuff, we're only doing the production community here a good service too, because we're saying come here, you can make a movie in this beautiful state, but also with some really talented people that also happen to make films here.
NF: Why horror? Would you say Maine is an especially horror-driven state, or is there something else about it that appealed to you?
AB: I do think that Maine, outside of the Northeast in particular, has a certain brand, I guess, for horror. I think it probably comes largely from Stephen King, and also from other writers, you can go back as far as Hawthorne, or any of those early American writers that talked about the darkness in the Northeast and particularly in Maine.
I think, Maine is a dark edge in the country as well, it's a place where not a lot of people know what goes on, and we have a lot of nooks and crannies here that fascinate people, I think people are kind of interested in seeing behind the scenes in Maine, so I think there is an amount of dark branding that we have, so why not use it to support local filmmakers?
Also, giving people a perimeter for making a film really helps begin the process for them. I know that I'm not really a horror filmmaker, and I would never call myself one, but I've made a couple films for Damnationland because it's just fun to try that out. People like to have a little bit of a challenge.
NF: I say horror, but these aren't actually all horror films. You have some comedy, you have some science fiction, a documentary…
AB: We just tell filmmakers to make something they think would fit our bill. So it has to be dark themed, but other than that it can be all over the place, we've had a couple science fiction films over the years, there's definitely always some comedy in the program, and then we had our first nonfiction film this year, a really fascinating documentary about what kids are scared of. And it's a little bit of a scary film in itself.
It's a very wide, wide range in the program. We try not to say the word horror because we don't want people to avoid it because they think it's a traditional horror program, but we also don't want horror fans necessarily to be disappointed when the walk in and see a documentary.
NF: Were there any of these films that you found particularly surprising?
AB: Every year there are some surprises. A good example this year is there's a bit of a musical sequence at the end of one of the first films [Misandry] that we didn't really know was coming.
What always surprises me is once we kind of suffer through the production woes of getting this off the ground and going, kind of sitting back and watching them and realizing they're all really good films by Maine filmmakers.
NF: The program features sort of a callback to "Tales from the Crypt," with a scary interstitial narrator. Why did you decide to do that?
AB: We all kind of grew up with the Tales from the Crypt, and USA Up All Night. I very fondly remember staying up late at friends' houses who had cable and watching. There's a lot of nostalgia, at least for me and for a lot of the filmmakers, for that kind of programming format, so we decided to have some fun with it this year.
This interview was edited for clarity and length. Allen Baldwin is one of the founders of Damnationland — to see if there's a screening in your town, or to check out trailers and behind-the-scenes comments from the filmmakers, visit damnationland.com.
