Elliot Jones’ (Thomas Jane) life mission is to exact revenge on the vampires who took the life of his daughter. The Stream Team: Jules (Abigail Breslin), Flynn (Kara Hayward), and more, have a hundred million followers and are invited to a vacation compound by the billionaire Beverly Rector (Malin Akerman)—at least that’s the guise she’s under. Beverly is actually an ancient vampire responsible for the death of Jones’ daughter. They all cross paths at the compound as a bloody and horrific slay-fest unwinds.
Also in the cast of Slayers are Jack Donnelly, Lydia Hearst, Ashley Reyes, Adam Ambruso, Julia Sandstorm, and Galen Howard. It’s directed by K. Asher Levin who co-wrote with Zack Imbrogno.
“It’s a different movie,” commented Levin, “I think that the best of the vampire movies don’t really operate in the horror genre at all. They are reflecting of society and whatever society is looking at those days… every generation needs its own vampire movie, and I think this movie is a vampire movie for Gen Z specifically, and a little bit beyond.”
Slayers will release in theaters, on demand, and digital on October 21, 2022.
Thomas Jane in Slayers
Jane's character in Slayers is a hardened man focused on killing vampires. He sports a beard, crossbow, and revenge on his sleeve. Not even the strongest of vampires would want to mess with him.
“You don’t get an opportunity to play that kind of guy too often… Elliot Jones is a great antidote to some of this other stuff that we’re being bathed in recently. Inspiration would be Kurt Russell in Big Trouble in Little China. I love the blend of humor and killing vampires. That alone makes you smile. He’s got a crossbow with steaks on it, he’s got all kinds of crazy [expletive],” said Jane.
“The Elliot Jones character, originally the character was named Robert Matthew, and it was a really historic character that was tied to Howard Hughes,” explained Levin, “because the original movie I wrote was set in the desert in Vegas, and it was all about Hughes being Rector.”
“He started out as a straight guy but got to tragedy with his daughter, and of course, he traced it back to vampires. It took him a while. He started his own crime show, he started out as an investigative journalist, just an honest guy trying to make an honest living, and then this tragedy happens. So he starts his own crime show as really an excuse to investigate the death of his daughter and uncovers this cabal of vampires that are running the damn world… he kind of automatically becomes this conspiracy guy… we get to talk about things that are really going on, and we get to do it through humor and through horror,” Jane added.
Practical and Visual Effects in Slayers
With any vampire movie requiring enhanced fangs, fighting, and gore, of course, there’s the usage of effects. Slayers has a combination of practical and visual, making for some sweet eye candy.
“There are a lot of practical effects in the film,” said Levin, “and then there are a lot of visual effects. I’d say, for a very small film, we have a lot of eye candy in the movie… we have a lot of practical effects. The blood obviously is all over the place, with buckets and buckets in this film—I really wanted it to be gory, and sort of in that Tarantino zone… and then some of the vampire stuff was practical, but a lot of it was enhanced. The eyes were enhanced to really make them feel electric… I wanted it to almost feel like there was a digital quality to the eyes. Aside from that, the graphic overlays, which are not technically an effect, but they are very much ever present throughout the movie. The scoreboard… all of that was really me and my desire to feel like you were scanning your phone late at night, and what it looks like when you go from Instagram to Google to YouTube and TikTok… we wanted it to look like what you are comfortable with already as an audience.”
“This is what’s great about genre… we’ve got certain moments that are expected, but they come at us in a fresh way. They hit the notes that you want them to hit. There’s a structure that you can follow with a good genre movie, but it needs to be surprising and unique. Finding those moments is exactly that. A good filmmaker will carve those out, they know how they are best presented, how impactful those moments should be, and we’ve got a blueprint for how to do that stuff. So, it’s a lot of imitation and a lot of inspiration,” said Jane.
Slayers comes to us from The Avenue.