Horrorlake

Shit your pants and make a piss

Trash/horror/action, 37 min, Color, miniDV

Logline

Three friends go to the woods for a picnic. After bathing in a lake which is rumored to be of magic nature, they face a mysterious and gory enemy. To survive, they’ll have to overcome their own fears first.

About

Horrorlake was HHG’s first fiction and first fully digital movie, shot on Canon XM1 camcorder.

The main idea was to come up with a totally new approach to local low-budget filmmaking: to make films for the audience instead of other filmmakers or highbrowed critics. At least, it required a firm 3 act structure, which is still an undeveloped area for many Russian filmmakers. In addition, we tested the future movie at every step, from idea to the final cut, like a big studio would test a highly-commercial product. As the result, we made the first Russian amateur film with stunts, CG shots, multychannel sound and were the first of this category to have a very limited yet real theatrical release (two weeks in Moscow’s first digital film theater “Mir Iskusstva” which later starts a respectable “Artkino” film festival).

In St. Petersburg, the film premiered at Pure Dreams Film Festival and was available for visitors of “Unreal Club”, one of the first internet cafes in the city.

Having learned a lot about marketing and management from our fellow first-time producer Vyacheslav Khrapov (whose main job at that time was brand manager in Procter & Gamble), and having found ourselves right or wrong in certain aspects of our approach, we also realized that, although this time we succeeded and made many promising contacts in the industry, we still needed to learn a lot about filmmaking.