It’s poor form to have to ask a director his age, but The Horseman is a unique film, and the man behind it, Steven Kastrissios, is still a bit of an enigma.
“I’m 27” he says, embarrassing no one but the humble interviewer. The question almost begs re-asking out of disbelief at the scale of what he’s achieved, but I doubt Steven is in any doubt about the matter. He is 27.
Few ever achieve the almost impossible trio of being the writer, director and producer of their own film. Steven has already managed this with his first feature, and delivered a hard-hitting revenge thriller to match any example of the genre you care to mention.
The dark retributor at the heart of this Australian film is the broken middle-aged father Christian, who learns that his almost estranged daughter was drugged, raped in front of a camera, and then left for dead at the side of the road.
A downtrodden pest controller by day, the failed dad goes on a rampage to exact bloody revenge on the bastards that had anything to do with his daughter’s death.
A desperate and some might say futile exercise in trying to find answers where there are none.
The Horseman doesn’t hang around in getting to the crunch, as just two minutes in, the opening titles barely over, and a particularly seedy individual has already had his nose cracked open with a crowbar.
Kastrissios is all too aware of the need to leave an impression: “I knew we were going to have to write on a budget, but I also knew that we weren’t going to have any big actors in it.
“As such, the film had to start with a bang so that any festival programmers and distributors were hooked within the first five minutes.”
The ‘hook’ of violence is twofold, as Christian employs a toolbox of seemingly inane household objects to help extract the confessions he wants, and to get the leads he so desperately needs.
Some fish hooks here, some suggestive angles there, and an agonising tugging of fish wire had the male audience members at London’s Frightfest horror film festival screaming along in howls of agony.
As god-awful as that may sound, the film holds it’s strength through the delicate power of suggestion, a force seemingly forgotten in a world of ‘show-everything’ cinema. “It doesn’t matter how perfect your make up is, if your actors aren’t up to it then it’s not going to be convincing”.
The film hinges on the central performance of Peter Marshall as the father Christian, and the veteran of the Brisbane stage was still new to proper film work with this being his first major role.
Marshall more than rises to the occasion, filling the character of the down-at-heel father with a bristling frustration and struggling to find any resolution in the aftermath of his daughter’s death.
Gruelling as the violence is to the viewer, the leading man brought a lighter touch to the shoot: “Peter’s just this big kid, very happy, very friendly, so we pretty much just spent the whole time laughing our arses off.”
Puppy-eyed and ‘normal’ as Peter Marshall is, he brings to life a role which is anything but your typical ‘hard man’. There are no snappy one liners, no flourishes of balletic violence, no easy get outs for him or the viewer.
These are all the hallmarks of the revenge thriller, and The Horseman holds a place in this sub-genre of horror films which focuses the terror very much in the real world.
Kastrissios cites Shane Meadows Midlands-based revenge tragedy Dead Man’s Shoes as a seminal influence in making The Horseman: “I really enjoyed the film, and was struck by how simple it was. I’ve always wanted to do a revenge film, and a few weeks later this idea just popped into my head.
“I was so taken by this one line description of The Horseman that I’d put down that I fleshed out the outline and characters for two weeks, spent a month writing a first draught. From that I went on to shoot the short film and then after that a few more polishes of the script and then on to shoot the feature.”
Kastrissios was 23 when he started draughting The Horseman, and now almost five years later the film is finding UK-wide DVD release, following a successful limited run nationwide for Hallowe’en last year.
Going from first draught to film school short, Kastrissios was able to sell the film to gather the funds he needed to turn it into a proper feature length film.
The film buzzes with the vigour and passion of a first time director putting everything he has into a compact 96 minutes.
There are bits where the film is a little rough around the edges, not just in terms of the violence, but also in it’s pacing, it’s struggle to find a clear and direct narrative.
While the camera artfully shies away from showing any explicit gore, the brawling and fighting at the end of the film almost refuses to give up.
Yet the camera work, the acting, and overall impact of the film confirms the vision of a filmmaker who knows exactly what he wants.
The few shaky moments are more than made up for by some absolutely superb shots, more often than not just showing a broken father crumbling behind a stony face.
This film won’t be for the mainstream, and it might even be a push for the Friday night multiplex going horror fan.
The violence is on occasion unrelenting, but not in the over the top way that Saw is. There is no catharsis, no satisfaction, no release. Just taught human drama and some agonising suggestion.
It will frustrate some viewers, and might even anger a few more, but is that always a bad thing? Kastrissios doesn’t think so: “you’re not making a good revenge, blood and guts movie if you’re not pissing off a few people.”