Without Your Head: Scooter McCrae talks Black Eyed Susan - Billy Pedlow & Maurane Me and My Victim

Without Your Head Horror Podcast we have the filmmakers of 2 films that force the audience to ask difficult questions on controversial subjects.

Billy Pedlow and Maurane creators and subject of the experimental documentary "Me and My Victim" and Scooter McCrae of the sci-fi horror "Black Eyed Susan"

Me and my Victim: In an era of digital meditation, where our communication is relegated to the sleek impersonality of screens, the carnal becomes uncomfortable. The devices we rely on to “stay connected” often have the opposite effect, seeding discord, confusion, and misunderstandings. As Gen Z heartthrob Nicholas Galitzine said in a recent interview with British magazine GQ, “due to the digital age, something so human as having sex feels like an affront.” With their feature debut ME AND MY VICTIM, filmmakers Maurane and Billy Pedlow confront this idea head on. A messy, whirlwind, imperfect, orgasmic, meme-inflected jump into the rabbit hole of their on-again, off-again situationship, their ultra-micro-budget (the film was made for less than $1000 USD) confession playfully captures the humanity of love and lust in the 21st Century.

ME AND MY VICTIM recounts the “kind of fucked up” meeting between Maurane and Billy Pedlow. She lives in Montreal, he lives in New York. She’s a multimedia artist specializing in video art and he’s a poet. Not quite friends and not quite lovers, their meeting feels palpably contemporary in its defiance of labels and firm boundaries. The project started as a poetry book that Billy Pedlow was going to call “My Friend Maurane”, but when he realized “no one is ever going to read it,” it evolved to become this film. Structured around an off-the-cuff audio recording and built as a kind of Tumblr-esque collage, the film explores, with brutal and paradoxical honesty, the complexity of sex and desire. An auto-fictional parable for the digital age, the transgressive ME AND MY VICTIM is the polar opposite of the imperfect perfection of artificial intelligence. The final effect is reminiscent of turning over a rock and witnessing a full ecosystem of creepy-crawlies scattering in the light. It’ll make you cringe, but it’ll be hard to look away. – Justine Smith

Black Eyed Susan: It’s been 21 years since Scooter McCrae (SHATTER DEAD) released a new feature film, and he’s lost none of his transgressive bite. Diving straight into a brutal, strange, and upsetting scene between a man and a woman, BLACK EYED SUSAN challenges the audience within the first few moments. It’s not long, though, that the curtain is pulled back like some twisted Wizard of the Oz story, and we find out things aren’t quite as they seem. First, Susan (Yvonne Emilie Thälker) isn’t a person but rather a BDSM sex doll programmed to receive and “enjoy” the punishment of her sadistic partners. She’s the hardware of a cutting-edge tech startup aiming to push her artificial intelligence to new heights. The company that manufactures her hires the desperate Derek (Damian Maffei) to test the limits of her technology and his desires in a low-fi sci-fi horror that delves into the dark pool of love and perversion in our new tech age.

Shot on Super 16, BLACK EYED SUSAN smashes together a raw organic image with the sleek impersonality of our increasingly impersonal future relationships. Counterbalancing a dark, violent core with a surprisingly tender vulnerability, BLACK EYED SUSAN imagines a science-fiction landscape infused with a surprising fragility. As Derek, actor Damian Maffei guides us through this strange future world with unbridled anger and restrained curiosity, while the striking Yvonne Emilie Thälker never loses touch with their humanity as they lend an unsettling plasticity to Susan. Their chemistry is palpable and grounds the movie’s themes, while Italian composer Fabio Frizzi (THE BEYOND) lends the film an atmospheric backdrop and strengthening the film’s luscious and distressing eroticism. While not for the faint of heart, BLACK EYED SUSAN delves into themes and questions that will only become more pertinent with the evolution of artificial intelligence. – Justine Smith

Both recently premiered at Fantasia International Film Festival see Black Eyed Susan at the upcoming Amazing Fantasy Fest

#BlackEyedSusan #MeAndMyVictim #WithoutYourHead #AmazingFantasy #Fantasia #IndependentMovies