Spooptober Day 29: Through the Devil's Eyes

Starring: James Andre, Gyana Lua, Hannah Tippit, and Tristan S. Bradford
Written and Directed by: RJ Cusyk

Michael Lakota Dillon and Tristan S. Bradford

Come on guys, you should know me by now. I gotta shill myself a little bit. However, I'm not only going to share with you my honest thoughts on the movie, I'm going to share some things that maybe you didn't know before.

David Whitman is in a halfway house trying to reintegrate into society after being locked away in a mental hospital for years. During his stay in the house, people begin to turn up dead. David, being the new person in the house, is the immediate suspect. He sets out to find the killer and regain his memory of the tragic events that landed him in the mental hospital years before.

Damn, I'm not sure if it's due to taking up writing full time again or if I'm actually excited to talk about this movie, but that outline was pretty damn good, if I do say so myself. Okay, so does this movie sound like Friday the 13th Part V to anyone? Good, because that's where I got the idea.

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James Andre enjoying the fire

I may have talked about this before but I got really into Friday the 13th after the Dark Knight Rises shooting. It was a devastating thing that happened and for some reason I dove head first into horror movies. When I was watching Friday the 13th Part V, I realized that the idea of Tommy being the killer was interesting but was severely ruined by shoehorning in Jason.

My friend Marco Scioscia suggested that I rework the elements I like and turn them into a giallo movie. What the crap is a giallo movie? Marco then introduced me to a genre I came to love with movies like Seven Notes in Black, Four Flies on Grey Velvet, Cat of Nine Tails, Who Saw Her Die?, and many others. I decided to take his advice and took advantage of my grief and wrote Through the Devil's Eyes.

Fast forward about a year, I was finishing Invisible Diary of a Disabled Man. A lot of cast members on that movie began asking what my next project would be. The only other script I had was Through the Devil's Eyes. I had written it with a low budget in mind, but I wasn't really ready to take on such a big project...was I?

To this day, I don't know if I was ready for Through the Devil's Eyes. I honestly don't know if I ever would be, unless I took the chance. The entire production was a mess and I was completely unprepared for everything that came my way. However, it was a learning process.

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MLD Playing Dead

The mess was mostly with scheduling. I would schedule something and someone would be out of town, they would be on another film shoot, they would just plain not show up. Heck, the whole reason I met Ashley Runyan is because an actress didn't show up. Luckily, Bree Katz suggested one of her friends to be in my movie.

Ashley and Bree both did phenomenal jobs in Through the Devil's Eyes. So much so, I would invite them back to be in A Final Hit a year later. The whole experience was completely surreal, making a feature film at 24 with a bunch of people I hadn't met before then. I must have been fucking crazy!

When we premiered Through the Devil's Eyes, I spent the whole viewing in the hallway. I couldn't bear to sit there and watch the movie again. I felt so stupid making a movie that I was certain that everyone would hate. Surprisingly, they didn't hate it. They wanted to make another one!

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The Premiere

Through the Devil's Eyes isn't going to blow you away. It's not a great movie, it's not even a good giallo. However, it's a labor of love that I feel shines through with its story and characters.