Yahoo Lifestyle Inside ‘Portal to Hell,’ The Wacky Horror Comedy Starring a Horny Demon Played by Richard Kind — Slamdance
Even though writer-director Woody Bess’ debut feature “Portal to Hell” turns the underworld into a fully tangible place, he’s less interested in major crimes than “low-grade evil.”
“Every day we kind of deal with low-grade evil, be it wealth inequality or sexism, racism … we all just tolerate it,” Bess says. “It’s just around us and the world goes on. Every day I pass a homeless person. I don’t have much money as an independent filmmaker, but I could probably change that person’s life, or at least make it better. That’s where hell comes from in this; there’s this objective evil, and the one guy who says, ‘Oh, I’m going to do something about it.’ He’s odd for doing that.”
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“Hell,” set to debut at Los Angeles’ Slamdance Film Festival tonight, begins with a focus on the mundane. Dunn (played by producer Trey Holland) is a medical debt collector who spends every day getting cussed out by angry patients. But one night, he casually sees a portal to hell open up in his local laundromat and is approached by a demon (voiced by Richard Kind), who says he’s there to take Dunn’s kind neighbor (Keith David) to hell. Mortified by this realization, Dunn is offered the chance to save his neighbor if he sacrifices three souls to the portal, which sends him on a mission to dispose of what he perceives to be society’s worst people, such as predators and drug dealers.
Bess, a horror fanatic, found genre film a great vessel for philosophical thought.
“There’s a freedom in it,” he says. “It’s mostly about the audience. As long as you scare people and make them feel like everyone’s on for the roller coaster ride, you can really say something unique. ‘Get Out’ is the quintessential example. It’s such a great vehicle to get a message across, and the reason so many filmmakers like Mike Flanagan and Jordan Peele start in horror is they have the freedom to say what they want, as long as you scare the audience.”
While Bess had plenty to say about death and morality, the self-financed “Hell” shoot took two-and-a-half years to finish. Bess, a cinematographer by trade, owned the camera and the anamorphic lenses they used, saving rental costs. He would collect money from an array of gigs — including “a billionaire’s daughter’s music video” — to keep the production moving along. Bess was also able to tap some college friends — who went the finance route, instead of into the arts — to invest in the project. Much of it was shot in his apartment, and the production’s flexibility helped in drawing bigger names. David’s busy schedule meant waiting six months for him to be available, while the L.A.-based production flew out to Brooklyn to make shooting work for Kind.
“We just tried to be nimble,” he says. “At the drop of a hat, if someone was available we would make it work, or we would wait.”
This scrappy approach to filmmaking created some of the most memorable moments in the film, such as a hilariously awkward scene where Kind’s demon disguises himself as a human (also played by Kind), who is very eager to try out sex in his new body. Another throughline involves the 2011 hit song “Tonight Tonight” by Hot Chelle Rae. This earworm becomes a running punchline that escalates with a cameo from Ryan Follesé, the band’s lead singer and a longtime friend of Bess, who was happy to lampoon his rock star persona.
Ultimately, as the film explores decency, crime and punishment in its reflective third act, it offers Bess a way to show that human nature is a lot more complicated than black and white, and the afterlife is probably a lot more nuanced than a traditional perception of heaven and hell.
“A lot of my favorite people are fuck-ups and have made mistakes,” he says. “But it’s those mistakes that make them great people.”
See the “Portal to Hell” poster below.
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