Brewce Longo: The Split Tooth Interview

From Blood Sick Psychosis to Coven of the Black Cube, the Philadelphia filmmaker has quickly established himself as a prolific force in contemporary lo-fi horror

For the past three years, Brewce Longo has been an emerging voice in the Philadelphia independent horror scene. The films released under his Blood Sick Productions label have brought underground bands, underseen actors, and misunderstood cult personalities together to create a body of work that feels exceptionally alive considering the dead format (miniDV) Longo has chosen to film on. The easiest way to describe his filmography is like watching episodes of It’s Always Sunny if they depicted acts of cannibalism, necrophilia, and coven witchery.

Longo’s films are indebted to many counter-cultural film subgenres, from the shot-on-video cult classics of the Polonia brothers to the no-budget relationship dramas of Joe Swanberg. They also evoke Kevin Williamson’s work in Dawson’s Creek, somehow. He is a filmmaker who is unafraid to wear his influences on his sleeve, but each of his films is endowed with a sense of spontaneity that belies any seeming attempt to be referential. Each film is equal parts cinéma vérité and trash cinema.

His first film, Blood Sick Psychosis (2022), is a grindhouse-inspired foray into the mind of a serial killer loosely based on “the Vampire of Sacramento” Richard Chase. The film depicts the life of a psychotic loner who develops a thirst for blood and will stop at nothing to quench it. We follow him as he claims victims at the local Mahoning Drive-In Theater and eats a dead baby’s brains outside of Pat’s King of Steaks. (“They have the same consistency as egg soufflé!”) In 2023, Longo released a feature and a short — A Corpse for Christmas and Pumpkinman Lives, respectively. Corpse doubles down on the grotesque themes, this time with a flock of new collaborators and a little more holiday cheer. Pumpkinman finds Longo paying homage to one of his greatest inspirations, David “The Rock” Nelson — often lauded as the “Ed Wood of the 21st century.” It also finds him striking a more personal chord, leaving behind the gross-out gore and sexually charged horror of his previous two efforts for a more familial tale that encapsulates the feeling of a chilly autumn night.

His newest film, Coven of the Black Cube, sees Longo challenging himself narratively while staying true to the stylistic choices that made his initial work so electrifying. The film, which was shot over an impressive four days, is a queer romance in which a coven of witches aid unsatisfied wives in the murders of their husbands. All of the Longo staples are there — Coven includes what is likely the most discomforting death sequence in his entire filmography — but this film seems much more concerned with providing a female perspective on the toxic masculinity on display in Blood Sick and Corpse. It is proof positive that Longo is a filmmaker unafraid to defy the ostensible limitations of the genre in which he thrives.

All of Longo’s films have premiered at the local PhilaMOCA venue, home to many alternative film screenings, concerts, and art exhibits. The venue has even been featured as a major plot point in some of his work. Recently he has been focused on showcasing rare shot-on-video oddities, where he will introduce the films himself, followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers. The screenings are almost always followed or preceded by a musical performance, a hangout with cast/crew/fans alike, and a lot of Iron City beer. These events are a testament to the community Longo has helped to craft.

I spoke with Longo via video call about his filmography and the impact his lo-fi style of filmmaking has had on the Philadelphia arts community. The conversation took place just after he arrived home from touring the country with Coven of the Black Cube.

Brewce Longo: I just want to lead off and say that I see you got your Dawson’s Creek [boxed set] right above your shoulder in the background.

Aaron Bartuska, Split Tooth Media: I do! I’m a big Dawson’s Creek guy.

I don’t know if you know this, but there are sprinkles of Dawson’s Creek references in all of my stuff. Only a diehard Creek fan will probably notice. The easy one is in the first movie, Blood Sick Psychosis, the main character’s name is Pacey. And then pretty much all the cops in all three features are named after someone from the Creek: Officer Witter, Officer McFee, Officer Lindsey, all the last names of the major characters.

Why is that? You’re just a superfan?

Yeah! I’m a big relationship drama fan. And I grew up on Dawson’s Creek. They were the same graduating high school class as me. Also I’m a film geek but in a different way. I’m definitely not the Spielberg fan that Dawson was, but I’m that level of geek in weird underground horror.

You’ve had a prolific past three years as an underground horror filmmaker yourself, releasing three features and one short as well as championing a handful of other films by like-minded filmmakers. How did your passion for filmmaking come about? Were you a backyard movie kid growing up?

I never really shot stuff as a kid. I thought I wanted to be in a band growing up, but I’ve never been good musically. When I was in my early 20s, I did try to make a feature film. I wrote probably a dozen scripts growing up, from high school, through college, through my 20s. I actually did attempt adapting one of them at one point, but it was never finished. This was probably about 15 years ago, but we shot maybe half of the movie and I just had issues. Some actors didn’t show up one day, I had a roommate that got upset about something we were shooting, some of the footage came out too dark in one scene. And so after like a weekend of filming we called it quits and I was like, let’s regroup later. I’ll take a look at the footage and see what happens. And then, for whatever reason, the director of photography never sent me any footage at all. I never saw a single frame of it. He claimed he was going through a move and lost it or something. I have no idea what happened to that footage.

What got you back into it? That’s the sort of experience that if it had happened to me, I don’t know if I’d be able to make anything else.

Yeah, it kind of killed me. I didn’t do anything for a long time because I saw that movie as a failure. But then I ended up getting into stop motion. I did all that shit myself. Occasionally I would have someone help me, but I didn’t have to rely on anyone. By the time COVID hit, my friend circle had changed. When I attempted to make that movie 15 years ago, I was just like, ‘Let’s make a movie with buds,’ which sounds fun. But unless your buds are really dedicated to the cause, it just doesn’t work out. I realized the hard way. Now, I’ve got a friend circle that’s a ton of people who are into movies. Josh Christensen is one of my close friends; he’s a professional actor. Michael DiFrancesco has been doing camerawork for a long time. And then my other buddy Francis [Kano] is in several bands and was able to give us a bunch of really cool music. So I just decided to make a small feature, Blood Sick Psychosis. I wrote it in 2020, we shot in 2021, and it was kind of an underground hit. So I just kept doing it.

Your films so far have been operating in this no-budget space inspired by SOV. How much of this is by design — you are shooting this way because you enjoy it — or how much of it is born out of necessity?

We made Blood Sick Psychosis for something around $4,000. The other movies are all right around $5,000 a piece. That’s just kind of the bare minimum, I think, to make movies like these. Some people can make a movie cheaper, but I like to include a lot of music. And there’s nudity in my movies. I think that no one should ever show flesh without getting paid for it. But other than that, most of my people work for free, which is very cool of them. I try to repay them in other ways, like giving free copies of the films or, you know, I keep a case of beer around to keep people happy. For the most part we’re just having fun. I don’t make a lot of money off these movies. Most indie directors don’t make much money.

If someone came up to you and said, ‘Brewce, I love your films, here’s $1 million dollars to make a film on a bigger budget,” do you jump on that? Or do you take that $1 million and make one thousand different $1,000 movies?

I would love to have a real budget sometime. I don’t want to shoot my next movie on video. I want to try something different. I really want to shoot on 16mm, if I can raise that. We’re not talking an astronomical amount of cash, but to shoot on 16mm, you need $10,000-15,000 just for film and processing, which is more than double the budget of my last few films. So we’ll see what happens.

So many of your films feel like they were born out of wanting to make a movie with friends. When on set, what kind of atmosphere do you try to create?

My movies mostly stay fun. We work for 15 hours a day sometimes, so everyone gets tired eventually. The problem is when you shoot low-budget films and you’re bringing in people from out of town, you get a very limited, finite amount of time to work. That means you have to work long hours in a condensed amount of days. Certain people don’t eat and sleep when they work and they get cranky, but other than that, most people have a great time. We’re there to make art. We’re not a business. Everyone is there because they believe in the project.

You’ve made a habit of including your influences in your films — whether it be Hugh Gallagher, David “The Rock” Nelson, or Joe Swanberg — in addition to friends and musicians you like. What does it mean to have all of these influences on your work come together and help support your vision?

With Hugh, he was one of my biggest influences ever, and the fact that we’re working together now is so sick to me. He’s a SOV guy from the ’90s who hasn’t directed in 30 years. He spent the last couple days at my house. We fucking hung out. We did a convention together a couple weeks ago in Indianapolis. It’s really cool to be able to say that some of these filmmakers that I’ve been a fan of for years are now friends and peers.

I liked doing Pumpkinman Lives with David “The Rock” Nelson a lot. I wanted to try doing a personal story and I wanted to help get his work out because his movies are unconventionally accessible. It was sort of a love letter to David. I feel like a lot of people really liked it and responded to it in different ways than Blood Sick and A Corpse for Christmas. I was just in a different headspace that year and I like writing the stuff that’s in my head.

Joe [Swanberg] loves indie trash film. When I went to his venue Analog Video in Chicago to screen A Corpse for Christmas, it was so cool. The front half of it is a video store and the back room is a screening room. Dude loves indie, underground film. I mean, he started off making movies with no budget. But he also gave Greta Gerwig her start. You can in one step connect Coven of the Black Cube to Barbie, you know what I mean?

How much of the relationship drama in Coven was inspired by Joe Swanberg? I think it’s so apt that your most relationship-centered film featured him as an actor.

I wrote and shot most of Coven before I knew Joe would be in the movie. Originally his character was going to be one of the cops that’s in the beginning of the movie, but then when Joe offered to be in it, I was like, alright, just gotta add a third cop into the mix here. There isn’t an exact thing from Swanberg that I pull, I just like watching those types of movies. He’s got a movie called Silver Bullets that is a relationship drama set around a horror movie. That movie really spoke to me. I do have a scene in Coven that is kind of a tribute to Silver Bullets. There’s a girl who wears a Halloween mask that does a strip dance, kind of similar to the strip dance in Silver Bullets. I told Joe that I was gonna do that and he loved it. I like the way he does things and it feels like he writes from his experience. I was going through a pretty hard breakup while making Coven and I put all of that stuff in the movie. It feels more real if you do that, and I think that’s what Joe does with a lot of stuff.

In addition to your own films, you also release those of fellow filmmakers. What has Blood Sick Productions taught you about the distribution side of film, and do you feel smaller, collective-style distribution may be a viable path forward for independent filmmakers?

I thought Blood Sick Productions would be cool if it wasn’t just all about me and my movies. The genesis of that was working with Kasper Meltedhair. Kasper starred in A Corpse for Christmas and we got along really well shooting that movie. Then she had a really cool idea for this movie called Busted Babies, so I worked as producer on that and we used my film crew: Michael shot it, and then Charles Smith, who runs sound and lighting on all of my stuff, along with X Menzak. Kasper’s from Kentucky, but she came to Philly and we shot it here. She cast a handful of people, and then I cast the rest out of Philly. That was really cool. I was like, alright, we have another director under the Blood Sick Productions thing.

Film is collaborative. You go back to Joe Swanberg, and Adam Wingard, and Ti West, they all help each other on their own films. I like that sense of community. I like helping my friends. I don’t need to be the one with the microphone at all times, you know? I don’t want just my voice. I want to work on other people’s stuff because that’s just more interesting to have more voices.

What do you look for in the work that you want to promote? Are your collaborations born out of wanting to just make something with the person? Do you need to see eye-to-eye with their vision, or is that something that just comes naturally because you surround yourself with like-minded artists?

With Kasper, I got glimpses into her brain, which is an insane thing. She operates on a different level than anyone I’ve ever met. She’s a true, true artist. Nobody thinks like her, nobody comes up with the things that she comes up with. So I just knew when she told me that she wanted to write a film, it would be different. And when she sent me that script, I knew I’d made the right choice.

The next movie I’m producing is by Hugh Gallagher. Hugh is [the director of] Gorotica, my all-time favorite shot-on-video movie ever, ever, ever. Before we shot Blood Sick Psychosis, I actually had my cast and crew all watch Gorotica because none of these guys had really seen a shot-on-video movie before. I was like, ‘Listen, watch this. I’m not saying we’re going to make this movie, but aesthetically keep this in your mind.’ I tried to get Hugh to be in one of my movies before but it didn’t work out. I’ve always wanted to work with him. He came to me and pitched this idea and I was just excited about it. We’re gonna try crowdfunding and see how that goes and hope we can get enough money to pay for this because it’s gonna be fairly special effects heavy, so we want to hire somebody.

Other people have reached out to me to work together and I would like to work with almost anyone if I’m available. But Hugh, Kasper, and David “The Rock” Nelson particularly, I love them so, so much. To be able to work with them is literally a dream.

I am always drawn to filmmakers who make all of their work in and around Philly, and you represent the vibe of the city so well in your films. What do you find cinematic about Philadelphia?

I love Philadelphia. I love living here. But it’s not like I go out of my way to set a movie in Philly. I live here and I’m filming here, so that’s what’s on screen. I shoot whatever makes sense. If it made sense to shoot an entire movie in Chicago or something, I would do it. But for the most part, my collaborators live here.

With Blood Sick, you made a film featuring a male protagonist committing violent acts against women. In Corpse, you’ve got a morally ambiguous female lead. Now with Coven, you’ve got lesbian witches commiting violent acts against men. I hate to come off this binary, but you’ve done this switch of perspectives that I find interesting over the course of your last three films. So often filmmakers try to stick to writing what they know, but you seem to be purposefully challenging aspects of that.

I still put myself into all my protagonists. With Corpse, I thought about writing Dylan, Nicholas DeGideo’s character, as the lead, but it just didn’t make sense. I liked seeing Izzy’s (Kasper Meltedhair) perspective and I wanted to tell that story —a broken character during Christmas time and all these horrible male influences; it felt bleaker — as opposed to Blood Sick, which is just the perspective of a guy whose brain is fully damaged, where you don’t really get a sense of what he’s thinking. I wanted to make a character that’s a little bit more sympathetic in Corpse, even though she does end up being a killer. I like the idea of showing that progression.

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With Coven, it wasn’t my idea originally to do a lesbian story like that. Zoe Angeli — who co-wrote the movie with me and plays the main witch, Clover — it was her idea. She plays one of the victims in Corpse and afterward she was like, “I had a lot of fun shooting with you. How would you feel about making a lesbian serial killer drama one day?” And I was like “I’m in, but I’d feel much more comfortable if you helped write it with me.” So we went back and forth for a while to find our story. I liked it because it’s a huge 180 from Corpse. I mean, Corpse is like the epitome of horrible masculinity. It’s not anti-woman or anything like that but the main dudes in the movie are horrible to women. Even people that aren’t killers are horrible to them. So I wanted to do something much more female-powered.

I want to talk a little bit about your Blu-ray releases. You make them with so much care from the artwork to the special features. What does physical media mean to you and why is it important to release your films this way?

First of all, physical media for life. From a filmmaker’s perspective, it is very hard to make money off of streaming — It is incredibly difficult. Most people will only watch movies streaming if it’s completely free. Maybe they’ll bite the bullet and rent a movie on Amazon for 99 cents or something, but for the most part everyone just wants their movies for free. I just can’t afford to do that because I’m putting all the money I have into these movies. So if I’m making a Blu-ray and asking $25 for it, I like to give people their money’s worth. So we do commentaries, behind-the-scenes, outtakes from the VHS camera, trailers for all our other stuff. The Blood Sick Psychosis Blu-ray is crazy packed. I have footage from our premiere on there, I think I’ve got some music videos on there. David “The Rock” Nelson’s Pumpkinman Saga, has got a lot too. David packs his DVDs with extras, so we’ve got like over an hour of just like David talking on there.

I’ve luckily connected with two really amazing people who help me put these Blu-rays out. Torin Langen is an artist from Canada. He reached out when I was making Blood Sick and was like, ‘Hey, do you need help with graphic design?’ I was like, yeah, dude, because [my Blu-ray] looks like garbage right now. So he did that [artwork] for free. It kind of reminds me of an AGFA/Bleeding Skull design or something. I think it’s really cool. Zach Olivares does all my authoring for discs. He does a really great job making the menus and little animations and making sure everything plays well. Couldn’t do those discs without either of them.

What’s next for you and Blood Sick Productions?

The Diabolical Dr. Fetus will be directed by Hugh Gallagher and produced by myself. We are in the process of locking in the cast. We got a fucking sick lineup of actors that are going to be in this that I’m super excited for. We shoot that in January in Philly. I also just acted in a movie called The Evil 1% made by this absolute insane biker dude in Detroit named Tony Moran. So that’ll be coming soon. We’ve got a handful of other things in the works, but Dr. Fetus will be the big one. And then hopefully I’ll direct something else sometime next year.

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