Blood Widow: Interview With Chad Coup, Screenwriter

26th May 2014

With Ian Davis, Screenwriter Chad Coup fleshed out the first in what’s hopefully a long series of films chronicling the killing sprees of terrifying new femme-monster the Blood Widow.

What exactly is a ‘Blood Widow’? — or shall we rephrase that question to, WHO is the Blood Widow?

Now that’s the million dollar question. Without giving too much away from the backstory, our Blood Widow happens to be a very damaged individual. She used to be enrolled in a boarding school, bad stuff happened to her, and somehow she wound up back in the same place where her life had turned to horror. There are things we wrote to be featured in the set design that tell the story better than relying on pure exposition. I never liked straight-up exposition, and even though we had to fall back on it a little bit due to time and budget, we feel there is a lot left up to the audience’s interpretation.

Did you come up with the idea for this unique character?

Our director, Jeremy [Buckhalt], came up with the design of the character. He’s a very talented artist, and he spends a lot of his time drawing and sketching characters, vehicles, suits of armor, maps, spaceships, and whatever else he wants to get out of his head at the time. The character that would eventually turn into Blood Widow was just a sketch for a side character to be used in a comic book idea he had many years ago. Jeremy has pounds and pounds of drawings in his portfolio, and when he pulled out that specific sketch, we were all in agreement that it would be a great slasher star. A majority of slasher villains are large dudes, and having a lithe, efficient lady doing the killing was just the edge we needed. The origin story was more of a groupthink effort, with Jeremy exploring what he would like to tackle.

Did you, as a writer, play with different looks for the character? Was it a mix-and-match situation? How did you settle on the version of the character we see in the film?

You know, the character stayed pretty much the same throughout based on Jeremy’s initial sketch. The mask, with the buckles and studs, always stayed consistent. The variances were only minor, which was great for the wardrobe people. Jeremy and the team made sure the functionality made sense because Blood Widow would need a wide range of motion. He and the team actually built a prototype costume that one of our friends modelled for him, and he then could make changes based on feedback. This was months before we had cast Gabbie as our killer.

Always wondered, is it more difficult co-writing with someone else than it is writing something on your own – with only your ideas to consider?

That’s a great question. I love collaboration, and while getting your own ideas solidified first is certainly one way to do it, I find that you can get on-the-spot feedback before you wind up making a boneheaded decision that you’d have to change down the line anyway. Now, that’s not to say there weren’t disagreements or times when the writing had the brakes put on, but that’s to be expected. If you have foresight with picking your partners or peers for feedback, it will end up being beneficial—that’s what situation we had. Jeremy worked with Ian and I on the script the entire way, because it helped him visualize what he wanted to see. Jeremy had the last third of the movie worked out in his head before we even started the treatment, so the script was this intense logic problem to work backwards from what he wanted.

When you came onboard, was the film already financed or was your eventual script going to be used as a tool to obtain the funds?

We didn’t have funding or a distribution deal before we started working on the story. We had drawings and test pictures first, Jeremy had what he wanted, and then me and the boys hammered out the treatment. Once we got a meeting for the pitch, Jeremy, Phil (our art director and one of our executives), Derek (our production designer), and I got in my truck and drove seven hours up to the Florida panhandle to meet with our investors. We wrote the first treatment on the ride up from Orlando, printed it out the next morning at Derek and Phil’s parents’ house, put together a scrapbook of sorts, and then the pitch happened. It was so intense. We read the treatment aloud, explained our intent, and detailed key scenes. The meeting took several hours, and once we found out we got funding a couple of weeks later, we were elated. We had all worked on no-budget shorts in the past—and even an as-yet-unreleased cop drama feature, and actually having funds to make things bigger and better was a dream come true.

Horror never dies – it’s one of the most enduringly popular genres around. Why do you think that is?

That’s another great question. I have always felt that horror is so enduring because it hits upon a few key things. First, it’s about toying with the human need to be safe. As an audience member, it’s a challenge to be passive while watching other people get in situations they have little control over. You know from the beginning that bad stuff is in the works, and it’s fun to see how the story will play out. Second, horror is dynamic in the way you can approach it. You can have the threat be supernatural or corporeal—or even a mix of the two, and that makes people’s imaginations go in all kinds of different places. It can be rooted in logic or be amorphous in how it is represented on screen. I have been a lifelong horror fan because there are just so many different varieties of horror. Third, horror can rely on special effects to elicit an emotion, and most of the time, they are unpleasant to watch. It reminds people of their own mortality, and horror asks people to confront it.

With Freddy and Jason all but a memory these days, would you like to see Blood Widow spawn a franchise? There’s definitely a void to fill!

That’s usually the first thing that audience members ask us when the movie’s over. We would like to do another one. It’s more a matter if we are able to. Jeremy came up with some ideas while shooting this one, but we made this movie with an ending that would work on its own merits whether or not a sequel was in the works. It’ll end up being a surprise to us and whatever fans we get should the opportunity present itself.

Blood Widow is released on DVD June 3

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