I am Haunted: Living Life Through the Dead (25 page)

The type of film rig we used is the real breakthrough of this movie. It’s a unique point-of-view camera rig designed by Devin and the film’s director of photography, Mark LaFleur, and it truly is the most innovative thing ever. It’s a motorcycle helmet fitted with a camera rig and a counterweight system that looks like the shrinking gun from
Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.
I’ve never seen anything like it, and Devin and Mark made it from scratch. The goal of this system is to see everything through the eyes of the lead actors, from a first-person point of view. I was there for the initial test runs, and I was amazed at the perspective it provides the viewer.

The actors wore the camera rig fitted with a remote-control follow focus, which meant that a cameraman could do the focusing back at video village where all the monitors were set up, and the directors and producers could watch what was going on and adjust the cameras remotely. This method of filming was a huge challenge for everyone involved with the movie. It was a risk, and whether or not we could pull it off was anyone’s guess. It had never been done before, especially on the small budget we had to work with. My name was involved with this film (as was Devin’s), not to mention the money I had riding on it, so this rig had to deliver. It was the biggest wow factor of the photography, and it had to be good.

“[The movie] went from the initial concept to the script to casting within a year, and…we were always in that mode of, ‘We are making this movie and we are bringing these pieces together.’ It was like a runaway train where it just always kept moving. We really hit high gear probably in October when I went to Zak, and as soon as he got excited about it and came on board it just shot off. We went right into casting and we started filming at the end of December.”

—Devin Lawrence,
Filmmaker Magazine
interview, July 2014

The helmet weighed 15 pounds, and there were days when the actors would wear it for eight to ten hours a day. I can say from experience that being on camera is a demanding job, but actually
wearing
the camera is something else entirely. Some of the scenes were up to five minutes long, so they not only had to act out these long scenes, but wear a 15-pound helmet the entire time. Melinda even got injured once when a piece of the camera almost gouged her eye out, which was a scary moment.

As we were making the film, we were renting a house in northern LA and had a lot of issues with the homeowner. We took over his house for three weeks, filming all day and all night, and the whole time the hot-and-cold owner was picking fights with the crew. At one point he almost got into a fistfight with a crew member who grabbed a pair of pliers to defend himself. I wasn’t on set a lot since I was filming
GA
at the same time, but I got calls every day. I was constantly calling the homeowner and settling altercations, and over time the crew began referring to me as The Wolf, like the dude from
Pulp Fiction.
It was a madhouse.

I had a small part in the film, which was a lot of fun—and even a little dangerous. I played a guy who chases the Justin character (played by Lea Coco) after he steals my car. To film the car chase, I rode in a pickup truck while Lea sped away from me in my own Dodge Challenger (the same one from the Pioneer Saloon episode of
Ghost Adventures
). Was I nervous about using my own car? You bet. Especially when things went very wrong.

In this scene, I was in the passenger seat of the truck with two thugs. We filmed it on a remote road north of LA (in Santa Clarita, the same city where
The Fast and the Furious
actor Paul Walker died and we filmed the Heritage Junction episode of
GA
). We started filming early in the morning, and Devin was sick as a dog. He had a high fever and looked like death, but he was still there. He’s a true professional. The scene involved me hanging out the window and yelling at this guy that I was going to kick his ass. Six takes went fine, but the seventh one didn’t.

Since we weren’t big-time enough to stop traffic during filming, there were cars on the road that day. Matt Mourgides was driving the truck, and we were following the Challenger and swerving on a one-way road. Matt cut the wheel hard left, and my door suddenly flew open at 45 miles an hour. I reached out and grabbed the window frame just in time to keep myself from splattering all over the road. I remember looking down and seeing the road whizzing by and thinking, “This can’t be my time.” Obviously it wasn’t, but when it was over and we stopped, I was shaken up. It was a really close call, and I had to take some time to calm down afterward.

I should take this opportunity to make an apology. Later I got to appear in another scene where my character pulls the Justin character out of the Challenger, and in every take I hurt our star, Lea Coco, because his stomach would scrape against the door.

SORRY, BRO.

So you want to be a documentary filmmaker?

I’ve made two feature-length documentary films. The original
Ghost Adventures,
released in 2004, won the Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary at the New York International Independent Film and Video Festival and was nominated for Best Feature Film at the Erie Horror Film Festival. I was young and inexperienced in filmmaking when I made it; like any artist, I’ve gotten better with time and experience. Making that documentary (and all 100-something episodes of the show that we’ve done since) sculpted my mind and trained me to become a better filmmaker. My next feature documentary,
The Demon House,
which will be released in 2015, is amazing.

Being a documentary filmmaker is kind of like being an entertainer, like a singer or an actor. A lot of people want to be world-famous entertainers, but only a few have that magic something that helps them achieve it. They have a special presence in front of the camera, or an indescribable sound on the microphone. They can give themselves completely to the performance and take the story or song to a whole new level.

Documentary filmmaking is kind of like that. A good filmmaker can open up a story that people think they know the end to and add something meaningful to it. It’s like being an investigative reporter; you have to be able to search through your topic, find new twists and turns, and develop the story into a more dynamic experience. You have to dissect your topic so much that you end up adding more to the story than it had originally.

For example, when I found the woman who lived in the Demon House in the 1980s, she told me that she would have violent nightmares and that someone would die soon afterward, which added a huge plot twist. Her experiences built on and expanded the story and opened a door for a good documentary filmmaker to explore. Then I brought her to the house where she was attacked and her daughter was later possessed, which added a whole new story line to the original foundation and made the film so much more fascinating.

There are two types of documentaries: original stories and familiar stories told in a new and insightful way.
The Demon House
is original. No one has done it. “Who killed JFK?” has been done, but that doesn’t mean a good filmmaker couldn’t find a new angle or piece of evidence that would shed new light on the story.

To be a successful filmmaker, you have to be good at many different things. You have to be a great interviewer, producer, and director, and if you’re lacking in any one of those areas, the whole project will crumble. The ability to glue all the pieces together and make a flowing story that grabs the audience’s attention and doesn’t let go is absolutely critical. You have to be able to take what you’ve found in your investigations and develop it into something more—take an interview or a piece of research and dig deeper so that when all these puzzle pieces are brought together, they make your story unforgettable. That’s where you succeed or fail: You either have that ability or you don’t, and if you don’t, no one will watch the film, and all your work will be for nothing.

A make-it-or-break-it aspect of documentary filmmaking is finding your own creative vision for the picture and figuring out how you’re going to set the mood for presenting it. For me, setting a tone with a certain look brings the story to life.
The Demon House
is uncomfortable and uninviting on purpose. Because the topic is demons, which are cold, dirty, dark, and evil, I wanted the atmospheric shots to reflect that cold nature. To give the film an icy look, I used a lot of blues and grays and wintry environmental details like snow and icicles. I wanted industrial coal factories, abandoned buildings, and dead crops to enhance the sense of decay. The geographic shots are isolated, abandoned, and cold, with few people in them, so the film has a post-apocalyptic feel to it. When you’re cold and alone, you’re quiet and huddled up and hiding from the air itself. I think that mood is perfect for this film.

When I shoot the landscape, I use visual metaphors to enhance my storytelling. I find objects that speak to the mood or emotions I’m trying to evoke in the audience. A dead possum on the side of the road or a rundown playground overrun with weeds or covered in ice—those visual metaphors mean something. The possum means death. The playground says poverty. These images work perfectly in
The Demon House.

I’ve always been a visual person. I never learned from reading; I learn by seeing or doing things. When I interview people, I can see their words and envision what they’re saying. That makes it easier to put their words into images or to create reenactments of key events. When we put together an episode of
Ghost Adventures,
we always include interviews and stories because I think the audience learns better that way. Instead of talking to someone, you show them pictures, and they remember them. That’s the way my mind works, and I try to carry it over into my TV shows and films.

The one thing I truly love about documentary filmmaking is that there is no script. Movies are great, but I could never be a feature film director. A feature film is a play that follows a script, with set roles and no freedom. Maybe that says something about me. Maybe I don’t like boundaries, and I thrive in an environment where I can make things up as I go. I like guerrilla reporting, being out in the field and not knowing what’s going to happen that day. I like the rush of doing an interview and seeing it open a new door. I like being in a small car with a familiar crew driving toward the unknown, with our cameras ready to roll.

As a documentary filmmaker, you have to be the force that makes things happen. You have to dare yourself to push the limits of the story to create something incredible. You have to see how far you can push your investigation—a good documentary filmmaker knows no boundaries. You have to get out there and interview people. You have to know how to look for leads and follow up on those leads that take you from one interview to another to another to another. Each of those interviews gets you deeper and deeper into the story, to the point where you’re embedded in it and you may even be in danger, for all you know. Or you discover new information that no other media outlet has been able to uncover. Like a detective, you’ve got to have a mind, ear, eye, and voice for it.