In a weird twist of fate, you might say, Donald Trump is the man behind Allan Piper’s newest film “eVil Sublet.”
“In 2016, I was a filmmaker on Hillary Clinton’s campaign. I was in charge of all the online videos about her opponent. This made me an expert in Donald Trump,” he explained. “Covering the real-life horrors of the Trump era, I needed to throw myself into a fictional horror story for my own piece of mind, and I concocted ‘eVil Sublet.’”
“eVil Sublet” is a horror comedy about a New York couple who knowingly move into a haunted apartment because the rent is cheap. (They thought “eVil” stood for “East Village.”) The legendary Sally Struthers makes her horror debut as the mysterious landlord.
The New England premiere of “eVil Sublet” is part of the Independent Film Festival Boston. The film will be shown Saturday, May 4, at 9 p.m. at the Somerville Theatre. Piper and his wife, Jennifer Leigh Houston, who is the star of the movie, will have a Q&A session. WBUR’s Darryl C. Murphy will moderate.
Allan Piper
Photo by Stephen Mosher
Politics of filmmaking
Piper credits a high school teacher and Harvard University with his interest in filmmaking.
“I had great mentors at Harvard,” said the 1996 graduate. “Spike Lee gave me the courage to take the risk of making my own indie feature.
“Days after graduating from college, I made my first feature film in Boston, a comedy called ‘Starving Artists.’ The Boston Globe called it one of ‘the best films you’ve probably never seen.’”
Despite this early recognition, Piper didn’t make a beeline for Hollywood, describing his career path as “circuitous.”
“I eventually moved to New York and spent years editing TV shows like ‘What Not to Wear’ and ‘Chopped.’ In 2010-2011 I made my second feature film, the documentary ‘Married and Counting,’ about two men [Pat Dwyer and Stephen Mosher] who traveled the country to get married in every state that would let them — which was not many in 2010 and 2011,” he said.
In 2012, Piper joined President Obama’s re-election team as a filmmaker and in 2016 he worked on Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Piper was later recruited to be the supervising politics producer for NowThis, a role he served in for the whole Trump presidency. Today he is head of content for Inequality Media, a nonprofit co-founded by former Labor Secretary Robert Reich. It’s mission: to educate the public about how growing wealth inequality and the corrupting influence of money in politics threaten our economy, society, and democracy.
Horrors of yesterday and today
“We live in scary times, and when the real world is scary, people seem to turn to fictional scares for catharsis. The first real horror movie boom (with Dracula and Frankenstein) came in the 1930s amid the Great Depression and the rise of fascism in Europe,” he said.
“The Cold War and the fear of mutually assured nuclear destruction brought us the movie monsters of the 1950s. The Vietnam-era cultural revolution ushered in the age of ‘The Exorcist’ and the ‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre.’
“Now that we’ve lived through years of Trump chaos, a deadly pandemic, and are teetering on the brink of losing our democracy, there seems to be a bigger appetite for horror than ever,” said Piper.
“Also, at a time when there are fewer and fewer opportunities for truly indie projects, horror is a field where small budget, indie filmmakers can push boundaries. The most creatively innovative movies out there these days are horror or horror adjacent.”
Home movie
Piper explains that the political/economic subtext of “eVil Sublet” is America’s affordable housing crisis. “This is a movie about the extremes city-dwellers will endure for an apartment they can afford. It’s a theme that’s about as relevant for Bostonians as it is for New Yorkers.”
“We shot the movie in the apartment where Jen and I lived, where strange things really did occur. Some of the unexplained phenomena we captured on video and edited into the movie,” Piper said.
Another “phenomena” you’ll see will be ghostly faces — some you might even recognize, particularly if you were one of his 200 financial supporters.
“For $20, people could be turned into ghosts in the haunted apartment,” he said. “The faces appear in shadows, reflections, peering over people’s shoulders. Most are pretty subtle. Some are designed to jump out. We wanted our supporters to literally be part of the movie. And having hundreds of hidden ghost faces makes the movie scarier. Viewers will jump in the middle of a scene when they suddenly realize there’s been a face peering out of the shadows the whole time.”
So how did Piper attract Struthers into the picture?
Sally Struthers As Reena
“Jen and I met her at a party at the home of Pat Dwyer and Stephen Mosher and became good friends with her. As it turns out, she’d never been in a horror movie, and it was on her bucket list,” he said.
“While not a studio film, I’d like to think ‘eVil Sublet’ has a lot of commercial appeal. It should be coming to streaming platforms this year, brought to you by Lion Heart Distribution,” added Piper.
To learn more about “eVil Sublet,” visit the website.
