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“SCARECROWS,” which it wasn’t, of course. When it was released, Netflix immediately purchased 500 copies of the DVDs and then put it on their new streaming service and it hit both hard, leading to more copies being purchased by Netflix and many other outlets buying copies. Before I knew it, I had sold over 1000 DVDs. It may not sound like much, but it was to me for sure at the time. The film began getting pirated everywhere and one website had the views at over 150,000. Even though I made no money from it, it was nice to see that people were watching it.
The story had a happy ending. Well, not really. Despite the success, I started to realize that my film wasn’t going over as well as I had hoped. I began getting death threats, terrible comments, bad reviews and a lot of negativity from other filmmakers, remarkably enough.
THE RECEPTION
Doing the whole “backyard filmmaker” thing and having only shown my work to close friends and friends of friends, it was a new experience for me to be viewed and critiqued by the public and they did not hold back. I was getting emails daily from horror fans that continually used the phrase “Don’t quit your day job,” and those were the nice ones. Some asked for me to kill myself while others demanded that I never make another film. Initially, my reaction was to finger-point. These people didn’t understand the circumstances I had to film under and what I had to endure just to make this movie happen, but, as time went by, I realized that good or bad, the credit belonged to me and what I allowed to take place.
Over time, a remarkable thing began to happen. RISE OF THE SCARECROWS started being placed into the “BEST/WORST” lists and a re-release from CINEMA EPOCH gave it new life, leading to an unlikely sequel and a chance to win some haters over and show a scarecrow film in the way that I so desperately wanted to do in the first place.
HELL ON EARTH OR HELL FREEZES OVER
In late August, I begin filming RISE OF THE SCARECROWS: HELL ON EARTH, a sequel, a re-launch, a redemption and an example of my progress as a filmmaker and storyteller. I had honestly never considered doing a sequel. The idea of a re-imaginging or just another scarecrow movie came into my head a time or two, but never a sequel. Unlike the 2003 film, I will have some money to play with here and have secured some rather great locations and special effects.
For the fans of the first, I will be flushing out the storyline quite a bit and explaining what the scarecrows are and why they are here. The original film became the red-headed stepchild of my collection, but I love it like I love all of my other children. So, I want to keep what made the first one popular but I want to go high production value with a much more quality screenplay. I will not be crossing out lines for actors that cannot remember or didn’t study their lines to begin with. I will not be picking up any actors at their homes and will not be forcing characters in to fill any void. This is going by the book and by the script and I expect it to be a horror film that the