Editor's Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on December 1, 2006, and we're proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
Ten years after Scream ostensibly put paid to the conventions of slasher cinema, the subgenre continues to flourish on the independent film scene. Not a month goes by without another low-budget movie or five utilizing the time-tested premise of a mysterious stalker bumping off a group of young friends in some isolated location or other—no doubt, in some cases, to the derisive laughter of seen-it-all fright fans. But Holla, directed and produced by husband and wife H.M. Coakley and Camille Irons Coakley respectively, takes the approach of being in on the fun itself, making an awareness of the conventions it’s using part of the appeal. Lionsgate is opening the movie in Houston and Atlanta; more theatrical playdates may be forthcoming before the DVD release, tentatively set for next spring.
The basics of the story are, well, basic: TV actress Monica (Shelli Boone) heads up to a mountain cabin with her boyfriend Dwayne (Charles F. Porter) and several good-looking friends for a weekend of R&R. They wind up with some unexpected company—Dwayne’s fast-talking ex-con cousin Troy (model/BET personality Young Sir) and Monica’s pushy agent Greg (Michael Bergin)—but soon find themselves with an even more unwelcome visitor: a mysterious killer who begins stalking and bumping them off one by one. Despite the obvious influence of slasher movies past, Camille says that Holla’s initial inspiration was derived from real life. “I came up with the concept based on my friends and I going camping up on Big Bear Mountain every year,” she explains. “The premise came to mind: What if someone followed us and started killing everybody while we were up there? So I hired a writer [Byron Taylor] to come up with a script based on a treatment I did, and then H.M. came on and also worked on it. They captured exactly what I hoped to accomplish: making a black horror film, which is different, and I wanted to be sure we captured those differences.”
As opposed to making a movie based on Black issues, the Coakleys aimed for a feature that would simply play strongest to black audiences. That meant a number of lines designed specifically to evoke crowd reaction (“Y’all acting like you’ve seen O.J.!”), the acknowledgment and occasional subversion of the expected archetypes and what Camille describes as “reactions to situations. You always hear black people talking about, ‘We couldn’t make a horror film, we wouldn’t last five minutes. We’d run first and ask questions later.’ So that’s something we did. Like when all the lights go off, and everyone goes running outside and asks questions later in the car. As opposed to a mainstream horror film, where the characters try to find the killer—‘Well, like, why did he do it?’ It was little things like that.”
Holla also tweaks a few specific racial conventions of the form; the cliché of the token black character dying first has been widely noted, so here the initial victim is a token white dumb blonde (Greg’s girlfriend). There are also a couple of nods to Night of the Living Dead and its star, Duane Jones, one of horror cinema’s first Black heroes. Dwayne’s name would seem an obvious homage, but H.M. notes, “There are really two parts to it. Many of the characters are based on Camille’s friends, one of whom is actually named Dwayne. We changed all the others, but we kept that one because of Night of the Living Dead—and I figured if [that friend] was to say something, we could tell him, ‘No, that’s not you, that’s because of Duane Jones!’ ”
Initially, H.M. intended to serve only as a producer alongside Camille on Holla, which was conceived as a $2.5-million project for the couple’s Rockstone Pictures company. A couple of directors were considered, and “the one who was on the longest,” he says, was Craig Ross Jr., who helmed Killjoy for Full Moon as well as episodes of Standoff, Cold Case and Bones. “He’s a great guy,” H.M. notes, “it’s just that he became busy, and our budget and schedule kept changing and it became very difficult to keep anyone on board. So I decided to direct it too, basically so that Camille and I could control it as much as possible.”
Holla wound up going into production at a cost of under $1 million—provided entirely by a solitary investor—and the budgetary limitations wound up factoring into the casting. “We had a list of actors we wanted,” H.M. recalls, “and most of those guys didn’t want to work for the money we were offering. So we figured, ‘If we can’t get who we want, let’s spend a lot of time finding unknowns who have acting ability.’ So we spent about three months doing nothing but casting. We looked at about 3,000 submissions and interviewed around 600 actors. It was a really intense process. But since we didn’t have the money, but we did have the time, we thought, ‘Let’s just find the best people we can get, who will work for this rate.’”
Lionsgate wound up getting involved fairly early on in the postproduction process. “We had been in touch with them, because they were our number-one choice,” says Camille, noting the company’s large library of urban horror titles. “We just kept developing that relationship; every time we had a new rough cut, we would send it to them. And then we did a screening in Harlem, where we gathered our own test data. We asked people what they thought of the film and how they would rate it, and got outstanding results. We sent all that to Lionsgate, and they were like, ‘OK, if you make these changes’—of course, they didn’t want to pay for those changes—‘we may buy it from you.’ So we ended up doing reshoots.”
Among that new material, lensed over two days, was an opening sequence reworked to be both scarier and sexier, plus additional scenes with Troy; “They really liked him and wanted to see more of him,” Camille explains. Lionsgate responded strongly enough to the results to back its limited theatrical and nationwide DVD release—which its creators hope will be successful enough to prompt the production of a sequel, inevitably titled Holla Back. “When you shoot a film like we did, really quickly with a lot of inexperienced actors and very little resources, it’s hard to get all those little nuances just right,” H.M. says. “The thing about doing a horror movie is, selling the scares takes a lot of setup time. Everything has to be perfectly choreographed and storyboarded, because everything works within a split second, the sound and movement and lighting.
“So that was my biggest complaint: There were a lot of things I wish I’d had the time to execute properly,” he continues. “Hopefully, if Holla does well, we can get more money and time to do the next one, and it can have more fun things in it.” The Coakleys actually have a number of irons in the fire, including “a couple of broad comedies, a drama and this really cool gangster flick called O.B.B. That stands for “One Bad Bitch,” which I’m sure sounds a lot harsher than it is. You’ll have to see the movie to understand that title.”
One planned project of interest to Fangorians is called Jumbi. “That’s the name of a ghost in the Caribbean,” H.M. explains. “The story is about this Caribbean guy who gets his dream house and moves in with his family, and it turns out to be possessed by this spirit. His wife runs out and goes to live with her parents, but he decides he’s not going to leave, and it’s about the battle between this really stubborn guy who has just gotten his first home and the Jumbi, and how he ends up unraveling an unsolved murder by figuring out who the Jumbi was.”
Camille reveals that the duo are contemplating a tropical setting for Holla Back as well—specifically a resort hotel in Jamaica or some similar location. But it won’t be a honeymooning Monica and Dwayne being threatened by a new round of murders. “We’ll have all-new characters,” she says, admitting to a financial imperative behind this decision as well. “We’ve seen horror films where they go back to the stars, they start demanding all this money and things get crazy. So we’ve decided that in every film we do related to Holla, the people who survived will only come back in the first five minutes, and then we’re going to bring in a whole different cast. We want the freedom to work with all-new people, because we enjoyed working with fresh talent. And you can only really do that in a horror film, so I want to do it again.”
