Nicholas Brendon

I only recently moved to Queens, New York, but even longtime residents were stymied when I asked, "Where is Fort Totten?"

After several fruitless attempts at asking various friends, I finally looked the damn thing up and discovered that Fort Totten sits on a northeastern tip of the borough, right next to the neighborhood of Bayside, and has in fact been a working military base for over a century, protecting its tiny portion of the East Coast from...well, invaders from Connecticut, I suppose. The truth is that Fort Totten is in the process of being shut down, with many of its offices, buildings and barracks no longer in use, making it a perfect location to shoot - what else - a horror movie.

Well, maybe not. In fact, Unholy, an independent feature starring genre icon Adrienne Barbeau and "Buffy" regular Nicholas Brendan helmed by first-time director Daryl Goldberg, is kind of hard to describe. The director, the actors, and executive producer/screenwriter Sam Freeman all sketch out the basics of the plot but are cautious about giving too much away. With its bizarre mix of conspiracy theory, science fiction, occultism, Nazi mythology and domestic drama, Unholy may be that rare movie that incorporates aspects of many different genres into what its creators hope will be a unique and completely original experience.

"I think it’s a very distinct movie," muses Goldberg at one point during the afternoon I’m on the set. "Most of the time when I tell people that the movie involves Nazi witchcraft, they just immediately step back and say, ‘Whoa, I’ve never heard of anything like that before.’ I’ve been very hard-pressed to think of something to compare it to and still haven’t come up with anything, so I think it’s unique in that respect."

"A lot of low-budget horror movies always seem to follow the same formula and be on a direct line straight to video," says Freeman after he welcomes me to the location, an abandoned house on the grounds of the base that’s being used as the exterior for a cellar entrance. "That’s why I wanted to write a character-driven horror thriller, which might give it a chance, because actors like Adrienne Barbeau deserve to be on the big screen. Hopefully that will happen."

Long, winding roads lead through the base, past what looks like large storage facilities, a field, rows of empty barracks and a number of similarly deserted houses. There’s a sense of desolation and detachment here, particularly on a cold January day, even with the busy Van Wyck Expressway and Whitestone Bridge visible in relatively close range. With Goldberg’s camera (the movie is being shot on hi-def) focused on Adrienne Barbeau as she kneels before the cellar door, pleading with the actress playing her suicidal daughter below, the sense of loneliness is that much more palpable.

Barbeau plays Martha, a widow living in rural Pennsylvania with her son Lucas (Brendan, who finished on the film the day before) and daughter Hope (Siri Baruc), who comes home to find her daughter about to blow her own head off with a shotgun in the basement of their house. Martha doesn’t succeed in stopping her child’s horrific demise, but the girl’s death gradually leads the grieving mother to investigate a conspiracy that involves a legendary local witch, Nazi dabbling with the occult, and secret government experiments, with the plot even referencing the fabled Philadelphia Experiment.

"She’s just a suburban mom whose husband has passed, has one son into drugs that she’s sort of estranged from, and a daughter who we come to find out has been acting very strangely for a while," says Barbeau, sitting in her trailer between setups. "It’s a dysfunctional family. After her daughter’s suicide, she decides she’s gonna move away, she and her son, and start over. But they’re faced with some strange characters who allude to something that might have led to the suicide, other than just emotional trauma, so she starts investigating and uncovers this government plot."

Of course, Barbeau is no stranger to either horror or science fiction, with classics like The Fog, Creepshow and Escape From New York on her resume (she was also married at one time to Fog and Escape director John Carpenter). Her last foray into the genre was 2000’s wicked horror satire, The Convent, but Barbeau admits she doesn’t seek out these roles. "I’m not a horror fan at all. I don’t go to see ‘em! I’ve seen The Fog once, Creepshow once, and Two Evil Eyes (which she also appeared in) once. I thought The Convent was a fun, low-budget film. But I’ve never seen Psycho, I saw Halloween once - because I had to! - but I don’t enjoy them. I don’t want to be scared."

Nevertheless, the script for Unholy appealed to her: "The character and what she’s going through (attracted me), especially for someone who’s not thirty years old to have the opportunity," says the veteran actress. "Her daughter commits suicide, she’s not sure if her son is involved in a plot that led to that suicide...I was just interested in the opportunity to explore all those emotions."

One thing Barbeau has been able to explore for sure on this shoot is her resilience to outdoor shooting on the water in a chilly New York winter (the film was shot mostly in Queens, with some additional locations in Staten Island and New Jersey). "Physically it’s been hard, because we ended up doing it in the middle of this huge blizzard in New York," she admits. "There were a couple of nights where it wasn’t so much about acting, it was about getting the lines out without your teeth chattering so much that you thought you were gonna cut your tongue off! There were a couple of mornings, five in the morning, when we were right next to the water and it was probably minus six degrees out with the wind chill factor. Those were not easy!"

Luckily today is not one of those days. Although it’s crisp outside with the temperature hovering in the mid-forties, the sky is blue and the sun is shining brightly enough to make conditions bearable. Still, Barbeau has to continually run around the side of the house, drop to her knees on cold concrete, and bang on the cellar door, pleading with her unseen daughter. The scene is physically demanding and emotionally tiring as well. "It’s exhausting, especially when you have to tap into it over and over again for the master, the close-up, the other angle," Barbeau says. "But I have two friends who’ve lost children, and I think it’s probably the worst experience an adult or a parent can have."

Heading back onto the set, Barbeau goes through her paces several times as director Goldberg watches intently on a monitor just a few feet from the action. Barbeau plays it a little more frantically, then a little more controlled, as she and Goldberg search for just the right tone. At one point, shooting has to stop as some maintenance workers stroll casually into the frame along a road behind the house. While the crew sets up for another angle, Sam Freeman shows me the empty residence next door, which is being used for the front of Martha’s house, before taking me upstairs in the main house to an eerily empty room where we chat about the genesis of his script.

"I was reading through paranormal and conspiracy websites - I find they serve as good inspirations for the foundation of horror movies," says the 24-year-old Freeman, whose Sky Whisper production company (which he runs with partner Joshua Blumenfeld) counts Unholy as its first in-house feature. "I came across this interesting article about a classified military document that was found in Pennsylvania that indicated that after World War II, our own U.S. government smuggled in Nazi technology to continue experiments right here that the Nazis were conducting in Germany. They believed that Hitler was onto something with this study of witchcraft and the occult that the Nazis were working with. This document suggested that we actually took these experiments and continued them on our home soil."

Intrigued, Freeman began exploring these theories more, and also began thinking about the legendary Philadelphia Experiment, an alleged 1943 government experiment in which an electromagnetic field was thrown around a Navy ship to determine if it could be rendered invisible. According to the myth, the experiment left many of the men on board insane, suffering from severe radiation burns, partially embedded in the decks or walls, and possibly projected through time. The existence of the Philadelphia Experiment has never been proven, but it fit nicely into the scenario that Freeman was cooking up.

"There’s also a theme or commentary going on about how far we are willing to go to theoretically help the greater good of mankind," says the screenwriter. "Are we willing to take on some of the evil of Hitler if it means saving American lives in the future? Where do you draw the line? The film is all about, ‘Beware the experiment.’ So who is part of it, and what does it mean if they’re part of it? Are they Nazis? Or is there something more to it?"

Freeman hopes that his second produced screenplay (his first, The Peak, was made in India) will strike a chord in its finished form, and he’s thrilled to death with the way that the film is taking shape. "Adrienne Barbeau has far surpassed any notion or foresight I had for her character," he enthuses. "She’s been amazing, and so has Nick. And Daryl has truly impressed me. Every script change, he’s come to me first, so this is pretty much the script I wrote. There weren’t any major changes. Since this is our own production and we’re not with a studio, there aren’t any higher-ups telling us that we have to change things. The only restrictions we’ve had were in terms of time and money." (Freeman does not divulge the film’s budget.)

It’s those very restrictions that made first-time director Goldberg take on the challenge. Finally able to talk during a quick car ride from the set to the nearby hotel where the crew is staying, the 24-year-old Goldberg confesses that he got interested in directing through a teacher who took "troubled kids" and taught them the basics of video and film. The Florida-born Goldberg went to NYU, where he met Freeman, and shot several music videos before jumping into feature-making with Unholy. "It’s totally a rising-to-the-occasion type of thing for me, not to mention a trial by fire," he admits. "I’ve never shot anything in 18 days before. You know, on a music video, you get two or three days to shoot three minutes. To make a feature in 18 days, we’re shooting six or seven pages a day; it’s a totally different pace. Every aspect of it, to be honest, is fairly new to me. I’ve never worked with name talent, and Adrienne and Nick have been absolutely amazing to work with. Adrienne is just a consummate professional and I think everyone’s learned a lot from her, so that’s been an absolute joy. Nick’s been amazing too. He’s an incredibly fun guy and very, very popular amongst the crew."

Although Goldberg and Freeman didn’t set out to make a horror feature (or "thriller," to use Goldberg’s preferred term), they realized - like many filmmakers before them - that it was in many ways the easiest genre to tackle for an independent venture. "There was another movie, a kids’ adventure movie that me and Sam were trying to raise funds for," he recalls. "We wrote and loved the script, tried raising money for it, then realized we didn’t raise anywhere near the amount we needed. So we stepped back and said, ‘Okay, this is how much money we can really raise - what can we make for this?’ Me and Sam are both very big fans of the thriller genre, so we wrote a movie based on our restrictions. It was actually a wonderful way to work, because once you’re very restricted, it forces you to be very creative."

To work within the limits that they set for themselves, Goldberg looked back to one of his favorite directors to determine how to make the movie. "The way I put it to Sam was, ‘To me, a scary movie isn’t about the throat being cut, it’s about the moment when the knife’s being pressed to the throat.’ That’s where the tension comes from. The throat being cut is just exposition; what keeps you on the edge of your seat is the tension leading up to that. So we just talked about how we could stylize a movie to have it constantly tense, and I always thought that was a very Hitchcockian approach."

Visually, Goldberg wanted to differentiate his film from typical indie thrillers as well. "As far as cinematography, it’s very moody, very contrasty, very surreal — not trying to make things look natural," he explains. "There’s a constant feeling of oddity, a constant feeling of unusualness, so even in a scene that seems very tame, visually there’s something odd, even if it’s working on a subconscious level. The colors aren’t right. There’s props jagging into the frame. We’re just trying to keep up that constant (off-kilter) mood...I always see these movies that are made for not a lot of money, and they’re struggling to look like a big-budget film, and they fail every time. Why struggle and fail when instead, you can try and make your movie look totally distinct and unique? We can make it look like something people haven’t seen before, and that’s been our approach all along."

Goldberg’s approach (with the aid of his cinematographer and crew, whom he constantly praises) is on display as the production moves to the basement of the Fort Totten house. There, shadows and ripples of filtered light create a truly unsettling mood, not to mention a startling, almost painterly image on the director’s monitor. A light mist hangs in the air, and the back part of the basement is so dark that Adrienne Barbeau nearly trips down the stairs as she is led down (Sam Freeman is there to save her, adding ‘hero’ to his credits on the film).

This is the same scene that was being shot earlier, only this time from the viewpoint of Hope, the doomed daughter of Barbeau’s character. Barbeau stands on the sidelines to deliver her lines, while the waif-like Baruc stares plaintively up at the cellar door, terror and sadness fighting on her face (she’ll later be the subject of one of the film’s few elaborate makeup effects, a shotgun blast to the head). A portrait of an evil-looking, almost demonic old man - a Nazi witch, perhaps? - stares menacingly out from one corner of the set, not in use but adding more atmosphere by its presence.

It’s clear that the filmmakers have high ambitions for this film, as evidenced by the cast, the care that Goldberg takes and the dedication of the crew. When a rough cut is ready (which should be about the time you are reading this), the plan is to begin shopping for a distributor or entering Unholy in festivals. Either way, Sam Freeman feels positive about the prospects for the film: "We have an advantage with actors like Adrienne Barbeau and Nicholas Brendan, who have huge cult followings," he theorizes. "Hopefully distributors will see that this is not your standard straight-to-video fare and it would do well with a broader audience. We think the questions that this movie poses would seriously freak out every single person who sees it, so we are one hundred percent optimistic for a theatrical release."