When one thinks of coming of age horror film about a group of hormonal teenagers who go camping in the wilderness, one doesn’t immediately envisage hand-drawn animation. Filmmaker Zack Passero (May, Motel, Isolation) did just that in The Weird Kidz. Mainly working as an editor in the industry, Zach spoke with Creative Screenwriting Magazine about his creative process and cinematic intentions.
Our opening question was, “Why animation for a horror film?”
“As cheesy as it seems, animation is magical,” he responded. “You are making inanimate drawings move. There’s this moment, this spark, that engages in a certain way. It engages the subconscious and engages the imagination. And because it is a morphous art form, you can draw or render anything, so animation opens up the world to possibilities,” adds Passero.
The beauty of animation is its relative lack of budgetary restriction if you’re doing it yourself. A location or sequence that might be prohibitively expensive in live action can be drawn with relative ease in animation.
The Weird Kidz is an unusual fusion of coming of age, John Hughes YA story and monster horror. He quotes Gremlins, The Gate, Dazed and Confused, and the Bill and Ted movies as his prime creative drivers.
Passero has been interested in horror and sci-fi movies for much of his life. “I have always been attracted to these genres because I feel like you’re able to get away with certain things with those types of stories. There are fewer confines and people attempt stranger, different types of stories within those genres,” he continues.
Zach Passero also believes that life is darkly funny; scary funny. “I think it’s hard to go through life without a sense of humor about things.” He originally conceived The Weird Kidz as a comedy rather than a horror film. He harnessed the way teenagers interact and joke around each other in daily interactions even in the face of cult rituals, amputations, and puberty.
“Levity is also important. And I think, especially adolescents, really start playing with comedy as far as teasing, insults, and acceptance. Comedy comes into play as a coping mechanism.”
Zach Passero
Puberty is Scary
“Puberty is such a strange time. The Weird Kidz is a story about three pre-teens and two teenagers. [This is an important distinction]. It’s a time of living through the body horror. Your body’s changing, your view of the world is changing. The protective barrier that was placed around you by your parents is gone. The world was one thing, and all of a sudden, it’s another thing. There’s a lot of anxiety involved in it.”
The genesis of The Weird Kidz began when Zach and his wife were expecting their first child. The realities of parenthood sunk in as they realized that their child will eventually go through puberty. “It’s not necessarily nostalgia, but I was flooded with memories of how I grew up and how I was gonna contrast it against this child.”
The pre-teen years have a special interest to Passero. “I think about how I grew up and what I went through. My influences and the things that sparked my imagination. I would go on adventures with friends, but sometimes there’s an element, especially in the pre-teenage years, where you’re still also kind of a man, engaging group imagination. Your adventures seemed a little more grandiose when the teens weren’t there.”
In terms of cinematic influences that shaped The Weird Kidz, Zach quotes “the movies that I watched growing up, like the coming of age movies of the 80s, and the independent cinema of the 70s and the 90s.”
“I’m also a sucker for the 40s and 50s horror movies, especially the creature films like the Universal monsters. I always identified with and sympathized more with the monsters than the humans.” The filmmaker used this sentiment to create The Night Child, the creature in his film. “Empathy started to become an important background theme as the kids understand it more than some of the adults in their world.”
Meet The Characters
The core cast consists of three pre-teens – Dug (Tess Passero), Fatt (Brian Neely), Mel (Glenn Bolton), and Mel’s dog, Grumbles. “I focused first on their interactions and infused a lot of my memories of what it was like going through puberty. It’s a retrospective with some distance so you see what was really happening in those times as an adult now thinking about it,” continues Passero.
The teens were Dug’s older brother Wyatt (Ellar Coltrane) and his girlfriend Mary (Sydney Wharton) who are about to graduate from high school. They’re on the cusp of adulthood. “Wyatt’s this older cool jerk.”
“Mary’s a personification of raging hormones. But then, those barriers start to break down as they all start to learn about one another and why Wyatt isn’t as confident and cool as he thinks he is.” When the encounter The Night Child, all bets are off and they have to survive.
The Writing Process
Writing, directing, and editing the script gave Zach immense creative freedom.
Zach Passero’s editing background heavily guided his writing process. “My editing brain really served me through the whole process, which is weird because I feel like I edit from a director’s point of view and then, I was able to write the script from a director and an editor’s point of view.” It really tightens a script when Passero questions the necessity and purpose of every scene.
He wrote the story in ten page segments and completed the screenplay in just over ten weeks. Passero then did a read through with his director/ producer Lucky McKee. “And through that, I was able to hear and feel the flow of the actual story and the dialogue and see where it was clunky, where it was getting hung up and where more or less explanation was needed to smooth out the storyline.”
“Because I’m an editor, and because there was an animation process at hand, I continued to rewrite the story as I animated. There’s an aspect of me that likes having a little improvisation and flow when it comes to animating or filmmaking,” he says.
Rather than using the traditional storyboard method for creating animation, Passero drew thumbnails of each scene to facilitate the flow and avoid getting bogged down in too many details.
“I would thumbnail a scene, I’d read the script and pre-visualize it in my head to determine what the story is and what’s supposed to happen.”
Much of the dialogue had already been recorded, so Passero proceeded with the animation process. “It was this slow motion editing and rewriting process which lasted throughout the whole project.”
The Weird Kidz touches on some familiar horror movie tropes – a secluded camping spot, a town in the middle of nowhere with creepy people, and a monster hell-bent on killing them.
“It’s the ultimate ‘telling ghost stories around the campfire’ setup. Then you meet Duana (Angela Bettis), the town local with the grocery store. And eventually, we learn more about the whole community that lives by this campsite.”
“I think a lot of it had to come with a combination of taking it seriously, but also giving everything levity, and also letting these different aspects reflect on one another,” he explains.
“And when it came to the townsfolk, I didn’t want them to just be throwaway tropes of them out to get the outsiders. They are relatable and have their own lives. We understand and empathize with them.”
“You can understand they’re kind of stuck in this belief that makes them not do good things. I think a lot of us play in the realms of the blind belief there, where a group of people that intensely believes something can be scary and dangerous, especially if you’re an outsider.”
“You start to see the personification of what the contrasts are in the world around the kids as the town sees them as a threat. They feel like an alien in their lives. We get a sense of the way that they interact with the other adults. And then, with the night child there’s this parental figure.”
This is the same intention with The Night Child. “I wanted a sense of nature and empathy.”
I like playing with the amplified extremes of things
We asked Zach Passero to define his writing voice. After a long pause he responded, “I just love odd… I think humans are really weird creatures. I think our existence is really strange. It has different parameters that shift depending upon what age we’re at and what our perspectives are. We’re all just trying to do our best. There’s something that I like about telling stories about humans being humans in different situations, and choosing personalities, and letting them organically go through experiences based on that.”
“We live a pretty anxious existence and, you know, whether it’s self-created or it’s external, from different institutions, ourselves, our parents, our friends.”
“But also we find camaraderie, understanding and love. All of that dynamic is so interesting to me. Maybe we grow and learn something or, come out of it on the other side, hopefully better or changed?“
