No one, least of all Florida filmmakers Christian Stella and Jeremy Gardner, expected it to take so long for their third collaboration, “After Midnight,” to finally get released.
But now, just over seven years since their first film, “The Battery,” one of the best zombie movies ever made (in BVB’s humble opinion), and thanks in large part to an assist from acclaimed filmmakers Justin Benson and Aaron Morehead, genre fans finally can experience what is likely to be near the top of a lot of critic’s Best of 2020 lists come December.
It’s not that Stella, 35, of Clermont, and Gardner, 38, of Winter Haven, have simply sat idle since 2012. Gardner, in particular, has starred in a slew of well-received indie horror films, including “Spring,” which Benson and Moorhead directed; “The Mind’s Eye” and “Bliss” by writer-director Joe Begos; and “Psychopaths” for writer-director Mickey Keating.
To say they keep incredible company would be an understatement.
“We all know each other behind the scenes,” Stella told Blood, Violence and Babes by phone recently. “We’re on this weird indie horror tier where I guess we’re the up-and-comers, but for a time, I don’t think we, Jeremy and I, didn’t really feel we were part of that group because we had spent seven years trying to get “After Midnight” made.”
The pair, who Stella said have been best friends since he was 11 years old, refused to give up, despite “After Midnight” becoming trapped in a hellish revolving door of producers, requested story revisions and a nonstop search for funding.
“Those guys, if anything I could say about any of those guys, Justin and Aaron, Joe Begos, Mickey Keating, all those guys, they’re prolific. And we could not figure out how to get it done. We just could not get another movie off the ground, and the main reason was because “After Midnight” was such a baby to us,” Stella said. “Everyone kept saying that the script was amazing, and we loved the script, and we kind of didn’t want to settle on making anything other than this. So, it put us kind of into a holding pattern. We probably should have moved on, but no, this is the right movie to make. This is the movie we want to make. We just had to wait until someone was willing to make it.”
Ironically, when Gardner first finished the script for “After Midnight,” shortly after “The Battery” was completed, he sent it to Benson and Moorhead for advice.
“And Justin and Aaron were like, ‘Hey, can you give us notes on our monster movie, this movie called “Spring”?” Stella said, laughing. “And they sent their script back to Jeremy, and Jeremy was like, ‘Are you kidding me? We both wrote monster movie romances!’
“And, at that point, that felt like kind of a hurdle for us. They got “Spring” off the ground. I mean, they really fought to get “Spring” off the ground, and it was like, oh man, is there room for another monster romance in this small indie horror world that we’re in? So, it’s very weird that it came back around and they’re the ones who made the movie.”
To be fair, “Spring” and “After Midnight” couldn’t be more different. “Spring,” released in 2014, is about a young man who travels abroad, meets a girl and discovers that she is secretly a monster, which puts a serious damper on their budding love story. But, thankfully, it turns out that there is room for two similarly themed genre films, especially when both are shining examples of how to make a near-perfect movie.
And, so it was, after years of struggle, and facing the reality that “After Midnight” might not get made, Stella said Benson and Moorhead suddenly reappeared with an offer.
“They came back and said they had the opportunity to produce a movie. They had funding. They thought in their head, what movie do we want to make, and they said the best script we’ve read in seven years is Jeremy’s script for “After Midnight.” And that’s the one they went with,” Stella said.
“I have to give them credit because even though it does touch on a lot of the same themes as “Spring,” they still went with it. It also really, really made me appreciate film festivals because we wouldn’t have known these guys if it weren’t for film festivals and networking in that kind of way.”
“After Midnight,” which was filmed not far from The Villages in central Florida, is now playing in select theaters and is available to rent or buy on most streaming, Video-on-Demand platforms.
John W. Allman has spent more than 25 years as a professional journalist and writer, but he’s loved movies his entire life. Good movies, awful movies, movies that are so gloriously bad you can’t help but champion them. Since 2009, he has cultivated a review column and now a website dedicated to the genre films that often get overlooked and interviews with cult cinema favorites like George A. Romero, Bruce Campbell and Dee Wallace. Contact him at Blood Violence and Babes.com, on Facebook @BloodViolenceBabes or on Twitter @BVB_reviews.
This article appears in Feb 20-27, 2020.