Writer-Director Tom Costabile Talks ‘VooDoo’ In An Interview

February 11, 2017

Written by Kelli Marchman McNeely

Kelli Marchman McNeely is the owner of HorrorFuel.com. She is an Executive Producer of "13 Slays Till Christmas" which is out on Digital and DVD and now streaming on Tubi. She has several other films in the works. Kelli is an animal lover and a true horror addict since the age of 9 when she saw Friday the 13th. Email: horrorfuelinfo@gmail.com

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Writer-director Tom Costabile sat down to give us insight into upcoming film ‘VooDoo‘, which debuts on Video On Demand this February.
 
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‘VooDoo’ follows a young woman on vacation in LA, trying to recover from her break up with a married man. Her lover’s wife, a practitioner of Voodoo, has followed her on her getaway and seeks revenge. What began as a vacation quickly turns into a fight for survival.
Samantha Stewart, Dominic Matteucci, Ruth Reynolds, Daniel Kozul, Ron Jeremy, and Lavelle Roby star.
 
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Horror Fuel: “If you will, please tell us about VooDoo.”
TC: “It started off as a little project and grew and grew, bigger and bigger, through production and post-production and distribution, to where we are at right now which is approaching release. I think that movies take on a life of their own. It kind of did that.”
 
Horror Fuel: “What inspired you to write it?”
TC: “I’ve been a horror fan my whole life and at the time, around 2012, I had already written a few scripts that I had put through competitions that I never kept budgets in mind. At the time Paranormal Activity was big and the whole thing about being scared of the dark, all the found footage movies like Blair Witch were still going strong. We wanted to make a movie where you see what you are supposed to be scared of, like the films I grew up with, where it’s right there in front of you. Not to say that the dark isn’t effective. It’s great when done correctly. But I think it’s become over saturated. That seemed like what was happening at the time. We just wanted to make a movie where you see what you’re supposed to be scared of.”
 
Horror Fuel: “Did you have to do a lot of research for the Voodoo aspect of the film?”
TC: “Yes, reading books, watching documentaries, getting into voodoo from New Orleans. A friend of mine is actually from Nigeria and I used him for most of it. Voodoo is still very big in Africa and part of Nollywood, which is their Hollywood. We went for the African roots.”
 
Horror Fuel: “What was your favorite part of production?”
TC: “I liked that the girls were very open to retakes. I have a very relentless side of me when it comes to film. At the end of the day it’s work. Everyone is rushing, screaming, and doing what they’re got to do to do their jobs. Every single day of production I was able to look back and say ‘I’m tired, I’m exhausted. But we got it’. There were some parts like in Hell that were very hard to do. Construction alone took at least 45 days or something like that. We were working around the clock, morning, noon, and night. We were sleeping in the parking lot at the warehouse. We went over schedule with the build, so we had very limited time on set for the actors. You sort of look back and cringe, but for the most part we got it.”
 
Horror Fuel: “What’s your favorite horror movie?”
TC: “Silence of the Lambs was really good. I don’t know if you consider that horror, some people do, some people don’t.  It was so intelligent. It was a psychological thriller, so was The Exorcist.  But when you talk about horror, a lot of people talk about Evil Dead, seeing someone’s head getting chopped off. Those films did’t really have any of that. In my opinion, they are way more effective because they went the psychological route. A lot of what I do is more in the psychological realm, too. Even in VooDoo, you don’t see a lot of that. It’s a psychological thing. When Silence of the Lambs came out I was like ‘wow’. I had never seen anything like that before. It was like we got a glimpse of a world we only heard about when pur parents talked about ‘Stranger Danger’. It’s a classic.
I grew up in Chicago which isn’t that far from Wisconsin where Ed Gein and Dahmer was from. Even in Chicago we had Gacy. There was a real fear in parents in the 70’s and 80’s to make sure kids didn’t talk to strangers. We still don’t know how many kids Gacy killed. So when I was a kid it was subconsciously drilled in me. It is still with me. When I saw Silence of the Lambs, I felt like I got what my mother was talking about.”
 
Horror Fuel: “What’s next for you?”
TC: “We have a picture called S.E.R.E : Shadow Uprising. It’s kind of like Indiana Jones meets Close Encounters. We are still working on the pre-production side. I have couple independent horror I’m working on called Little Ditty, and another one called The Uninvited, and a gay mafia picture called Cabone. My friends and I made that short a long time ago and loved it. We did it in ’09. So, we are trying to make it a feature. Working on a few different things. Trying to make the magic happen.
 
Be sure to check out ‘VooDoo’ when it arrives on VOD on February 24th. The trailer below has been deemed so “offensive” it is banned on Facebook.
 

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