Split Tooth is proud to present the online premiere of actor and director Frank Mosley’s teenage space invasion epic!

Acclaimed independent filmmaker and actor Frank Mosley discovered the magic of film at an early age. His dad was a devoted cinephile who showed him it was possible to make movies at home, which he continued to do with friends and family throughout his childhood. But around eighth grade, it came time to test the waters with a longer and more complex production — a backyard epic of interplanetary dimensions: Invaders from Venus!

What began as the next ambitious step in a young filmmaker’s journey morphed into a five year project that saw Mosley through high school, an illness that brought him near-to death, and, of course, an alien invasion unleashed upon the towns of Arlington and Grand Prairie, Texas. The film exudes a youthful energy — the sheriff guzzling from an empty bottle of booze, an out-of-control silly string autopsy, a vaporized cow — that can only come from passionate amateurs. The film utilizes a large cast and an impressive amount of locations, and was made possible with the help of friends and family members who were willing to take time off work to help a kid finish a passion project.

The film first came to our attention when Mosley was interviewed by Jim Hickcox for Split Tooth earlier this year. He spoke of the film’s role in his development as a filmmaker and how, after a decades-long career of acting and directing independent films, his dad still calls Invaders from Venus! the best film he has ever made. Mosley mentioned that he had recently digitized the film and was planning to screen it for guests during the weekend of his wedding to screenwriter and actor Joslyn Jensen. We had to see this film and learn more.

Now, Split Tooth is thrilled to present the online premiere of Invaders From Venus! As an added bonus, Mosley spoke with Split Tooth editors Brett and Craig Wright about the film’s production, what it means to him today, and why a high school horror project still stands tall among his body of work.

Watch Invaders From Venus! here and read the interview with Mosley below:

Split Tooth Media: First off, congratulations because you recently got married! We bring this up because, on such a landmark occasion, you can celebrate in many ways, and you chose to screen a film you made in high school called Invaders from Venus! What led to this pre-ceremony screening?

Frank Mosley: First of all, it was my wife Joslyn’s idea. We wanted to make it kind of like a wedding weekend with activities. A lot of people were coming in early, so we wanted to give them something to do. One of the ideas she did was clogging with her mom, who teaches clogging classes. Anyone could do it, didn’t matter if you had done it before or if you were a beginner, it would be fun. But she was trying to think of some other fun things to do with our friends. I was looking up drive-in movie theaters where we had the wedding. There were some really cool ones, but then I found this old movie theater that had been around since the late-’30s or early-’40s and we started thinking we should rent it out and put on a movie we like. I was running it by her and she goes, ‘What about Invaders from Venus?’ I was like, ‘What!? No, no.’ My big concern was that this was our wedding weekend, it was about us. I didn’t want it to become, ‘Hey everybody, let’s watch Frank’s 30-minute movie that he made as a kid!’ I didn’t want to make people have to stomach that. But she really wanted to do it. She made zines, little programs to go with the screening, and buttons that have my mug on them and it says, ‘I survived Invaders from Venus!’ on the button. It was incredible and it was all her doing that because she wanted to do that. It says a lot about her love for me. I was very appreciative of that.

The best part was he had our friend, Alex Megaro, there to do a mock Lincoln Film Center-esque Q&A after the screening. He took it very seriously, using Pauline Kael quotes as quotes about Invaders from Venus and people from the audience played into it, playing characters like film critics or intense fans. A friend of mine was like, ‘Hey, I’m a struggling filmmaker. Maybe we could work together sometime.’ Everybody had fun with it. The vibe was very fun. It felt like hanging out with all your friends in a living room, except it was in a really cool old movie theater. 

When you spoke with Jim Hickcox earlier this year, you mentioned that your earliest days of filmmaking were spent with your father, Rick. Tell us a bit about what those early films were like and what you were watching at the time that inspired your first ambitious filmmaking project to be an alien invasion epic.

I got the filmmaking bug from my dad. He had a Sony Handycam Hi8 tape camera on loan from his brother-in-law. My mom was gone once and he was bored and was like, ‘Hey, let’s make a movie.’ So we made The Wizard of Oz. I was 4 years old. We edited in camera and I played all the parts, except for the witch’s guard. He had that one line (“The witch is dead!”) and turns the camera around on himself to say it and then flips it back. I remember thinking it was just like playing with my friends but we could bottle it. My dad and I made a few other movies, like Franco the Great, where I was in a tuxedo and did magic tricks. He did fun jump cuts so things would disappear. My dad is a real cinephile and he helped me to understand the broader spectrum of movies that are available. It wasn’t just a matter of what was around us; he would actively seek out movies on his own. He would go to see arthouse films in Dallas. When I was a toddler, he would go off and check out the new David Lynch movie. He instilled that in me. 

There’s a lot of films you can pull from and draw from. So I got so into making movies and becoming a cinephile myself, that by the time I was 8 or 9, I was operating the camera more myself and making movies with my friends. I would pull in my cousins to make horror films. Invaders from Venus was kind of the culmination, the mountain that these earlier films were leading to. I had my troupe of actors that I jokingly referred to as my Mercury Theater. Nick Blanton, who plays the president, was my best friend and was in everything I made. Dustin Do, who plays the mechanic, was in a lot of the things I made. My cousin Megan was the sheriff, and we did everything together. So there were a lot of people that, for them, making Invaders was just the next step because we were getting older. The difference was the cast was bigger and we had all those locations. Some of my older friends were a little daunted, and maybe a little possessive or protective when I was suddenly inviting other new friends to be in the movie. They were kind of like, ‘Who are these people? We haven’t worked with these people. This is getting kind of big.’ Even Nick was a little nervous because making movies had ceased to be a private endeavor that he and I did on weekends. We had like 15 people from school. It was the next level, whether he felt good or bad about it. But it felt like we were building to something with that film and I definitely wanted to raise the bar as much as I could. 

It’s interesting how you developed in your filmmaking from such a young age. I’ve had friends who are into films or filmmaking discuss how they planned to raise their kids chronologically with the development of cinema; starting them off as babies with Méliès, moving to Chaplin, and so on through history as they grew up. Your dad sort of did that, but from a production perspective. You started making films from, for a 4-year-old kid, a very history-based perspective with Wizard of Oz remakes and Méliès magician movies and developed from there until you were making epic genre films with all of your friends.

What’s funny, too, is that the genre thing, it’s not that my dad wasn’t into genre films, he was — he took me to my first R-rated movie, Terminator 2, at age 8 because he thought it was just too good for me to not see it. But when I think about my dad and what he instilled in me, it wasn’t genre movies, it was comedies and more artistic films and dramas. He was into actual film. He had a 16mm projector and, for my birthday parties in elementary school, he would go to the library, where, back then, you could rent old silent movies, like Laurel & Hardy, Harold Lloyd, and Chaplin and we would make popcorn in the living room. For my friends it was like a whole new world. At first they would all be groaning over the black and white, but 10 minutes in they were in stitches. My dad was opening up all kinds of doors to these films that none of these kids knew about.

You mention that a lot of your early films were horror movies. At that age, how much had you actually seen?

Something happened… I guess I was just a crazy little dark kid who loved spooky stuff. I think it started with Ghostbusters. It was a way in for a kid because it was spooky but it’s funny and wasn’t too scary. But that led me down the rabbit hole. Then I was just a horror fiend. A lot of them I couldn’t watch though because my dad said they were too violent. But I was watching Universal Horror movies and some of the Hammer films here and there. But all of the movies that were coming out at that time in the ’80s I couldn’t see because they were so violent. My dad, funny enough, had no problem with me seeing sexuality in film. He had more of a European sensibility because it’s just the human body. But he didn’t want me to see violence. My mom, though, was the total opposite. So I knew who to try to sneak what movie depending on who I was around. I’d try for Body Heat when dad was home, and then Die Hard 3 when mom was around. (Laughs) It was kind of a weird time of understanding cinema and experimenting at an earlier age with how to become a director. But as I became more comfortable and learned how to use the camera myself, I was just always like, ‘Let’s make another movie this weekend.’

But there were a lot of horror movies I would watch on the sides. Like, I would go over to my friend Nick’s house to watch Jason movies. One time, it was me as a 10- or 12-year-old watching From Dusk Till Dawn in 10 minute increments in my room at night and trying not to wake anyone up.

The credits for Invaders feature a lot of names. This was no one-man show. What was your sales pitch for getting collaborators on board with this project who weren’t in your initial circle?

It was a lot of begging, trying to make them understand that it was legit. And because my parents — who were producing the damn thing and driving us all around because we were only 13 years old — had to convince some of the parents while doing the pickups and drop-offs, like, ‘We’ll have them home by 11!’ and reassure them that it would be fun and safe. A lot of it was my parents convincing other kids’ parents who didn’t know me well that it was a legit thing and that it wasn’t going to be dangerous.

To talk some of my family members into it, it was tough, not to convince them, because they knew I made movies, but a lot of them had never been in a movie. I have so many relatives in this movie and it took a lot of begging and telling them how much it would mean to me. And looking back now, I don’t know how they said yes. It’s incredible! My Uncle Jim, in particular, who plays the main soldier, he really goes through the gamut of what happens to him in the film. He learned the lines and went through the whole thing and it’s really special. And I think most of them said yes out of love. They knew I was doing this all the time and knew that my dad was part of it as well. There was a lot of trust and love in that. 

As noted in the credits, it took from 1998-2003 to finish the film. What was the writing and shooting process and timeline for this like? 

I wrote the script, which was only like 10 pages, and then we shot the movie in three waves. When I was 13, we shot all the stuff that we used at the wax museum in Grand Prairie where my dad worked. That’s where we shot all the office scenes and then all the stuff in the space ship was filmed on their horror movie set of the museum. Because he worked there, we had access to the set that was there for when the army goes in to the ship. The offices and hallways in the film are all from the back of the museum. We were really lucky to have that.

We were lucky to be in Texas in the ’90s. There was no red tape. People were very open to us filming. The restaurant was just a restaurant we went to. The museum, obviously, provided a lot of the locations. We shot some in my parents’ house. One of my uncles had a garage and that’s where we shot the garage stuff. A lot of it was kind of written for spaces, but other times we had to think outside the box and make it work based on what was around. 

We had planned on shooting the last half of the film immediately after that, but I got really sick. My body went septic and I had gallbladder issues that they didn’t diagnose until way late. I was in the hospital and they weren’t sure if I was going to make it because they didn’t know what it was. It took them forever to figure out that a 13-year-old boy needed to have his gallbladder removed. It caused my kidneys to shut down and a cyst started growing on my pancreas. They had to do an emergency surgery, so I have a big scar on my stomach from when they had to rip me open to save my life. 

Because of this, I missed the first semester of eighth grade. I was homeschooled for a whole semester in recovery as I was trying to get back on my feet. I lost a lot of weight, and it was a scary thing, but it also put a full stop on the movie. So when I came back to the movie it was eighth grade, and everybody, myself included, had gone through puberty. Voices started changing; people looked different. But we shot more scenes. We shot stuff with the writer and the mechanic; more stuff with the FBI agents and other side scenes. So that was that. I thought with those two chunks of the movie I had the whole thing planned out. But I was looking at the footage and I was getting into new things. In high school, I had new theater buddies and all my old friends from grade school and I were still making movies, but focusing on things I could churn out and complete in a weekend. So Invaders sat on a back shelf. I was almost daunted by it, but also I felt like it was old and that I needed to focus on the new movies. We were doing action movies and rolling off of cars — and we were older now so everything was a little darker and crazier. But then I kept coming back to Invaders and I knew I had to finish it. So during my senior year of high school, I returned to it but it needed one more scene; a centerpiece. And that scene was my Uncle Jim getting tortured. So that was the last addition. We constructed that space in our dining room with tarps — you can still see the ceiling — and we shot that over a day. Then the summer after my senior year, I edited the movie. I was now 18 and about to start college, and so that whole summer, I spent editing every movie I hadn’t finished, Invaders included. 

That’s quite a saga.

Yeah! (Laughs) And some of those people I didn’t talk to by senior year. You know, friends split apart and then others were the same that I retained. Even in the casting of the movie, we would go to someone’s house at 7 p.m. to pick them up to shoot and their mom would tell them they couldn’t shoot that night. So I’d be like, ‘What are we gonna do?’ and my dad would be like, ‘Well, throw a jacket on uncle so-and-so and he can be the general walking into the office.’ 

Is he the one who’s wearing the polo under the military jacket?

Yeah! A friend didn’t show up and he was literally just walking by and my dad goes, ‘Hey Chuck, come here!’ and threw him the jacket. He was working at the museum so he just read his lines off a cue card and did the scene in like an hour. 

We can see how much fun everyone is having in front of the camera, but what was going on behind it? What was an average day of shooting like? Did you have people helping out with technical stuff, location details, etc?

It was just my dad and mom. That was it. Peter Carsillo, a good friend of the family, helped a lot, too. He was the wax sculptor at the museum. He plays the autopsy doctor in the movie. He works for Disney now, but he was kind of like an uncle to me and he made movies himself when he was growing up. He made American Werewolf in London remakes that he would show me, so when he saw me making my own movies, he was like, ‘I want to be in it.’ 

So we had Pete, but it was really my parents and my friend Nick Blanton, who was kind of always around. You’ll notice, in the credits, that a lot of the people who played the aliens were also playing roles in the movie. But they were all so helpful that they became like assistants. Even though their character was maybe no longer in the movie, I would ask them to be an alien or to help out and they would do it. That’s why you’ve got all these different heights and sizes of aliens. You can feel all the different performers in the suit, which I love. Some took it very seriously and others were kind of clumsy.

My dad shot the first wave, he and I both shot the second wave, and then I manned the camera for the Uncle Jim stuff where he gets his brains sucked out. Everything was all on the camera mic. My dad did the VFX of the cow being zapped. He went in and did that frame by frame for me. That was his contribution to post-production. Funny thing: that transition from the cow to the hamburger, that was page one of the script. That was always in there.

But if you want some dirt, my dad and I, you know, father and son making a movie… He became just as possessive and protective over it, making a film for his son, as I was. There were times where I was a little nervous, especially during that first wave, and I wasn’t very communicative. You know, I was a 13-year-old kid trying to direct a movie. I would tell him where I want the camera to go, but, being the camera operator, he would kind of take over at times out of sheer necessity. He was trying to help his son make the movie he was dying to make. And as my voice started getting stronger, as a filmmaker, we would sometimes bicker over scenes and how to shoot or edit them, which is really funny to me, because he wanted me to finish it just as much as I did. He realized it at the time, and I didn’t, that it was a movie we were making together. Looking back now that I am much older, I see it was our movie. When I finally finished the movie, he loved it. He was amazed that I was able to cut it down to 30 minutes. I tried to keep it as tight as possible. 

We need to talk about the silly string autopsy. This feels like a scene that was supposed to be serious, but as it got out of hand, the cameras wisely kept rolling and preserved the smirks and all.

When I think of the movie, I think of two scenes: Uncle Jim’s interrogation and the autopsy scene — maybe the garage fight, too. But the funny thing about the autopsy scene was, Neil and I, who played the two FBI agents, were also the ones who shot the silly string up at the doctor. But somehow Neil didn’t get the memo that he was supposed to shoot it from below, so he shot it from the side. Maybe it’s a ricochet effect? I don’t know. (Laughs) There was so much silly string and I just couldn’t keep a straight face. And then because I had so much fun editing it, I made the scene longer just so it keeps going. We have some great blooper material from that scene. 

The sheriff guzzling booze from an empty bottle might be my favorite character.

She’s kind of an anchor character for me. [Megan Wesley] is the best and one of the oldies who I made movies with. She’s my first cousin and I didn’t have any siblings so we did everything together. We would recreate SNL skits together. For the sheriff, I told her, ‘Remember that movie Fargo that we watched? Take some inspiration from Frances McDormand.’ I think it’s funny that I give that character a car she can’t drive and alcohol she can’t drink. (Laughs) The car doesn’t even drive when she’s in it and we didn’t even bother to put anything in the bottle! There isn’t even apple juice or something colored in there! It’s just an empty bottle! 

Did you have clear-cut ideas for each character going in, or did you let each actor help shape what their character is? 

They were all so archetypal. It was like, ‘You’re the president. Have some of that pomp and swagger.’ What do you see in other movies? And for Uncle Jim, I was telling him, ‘Go De Niro! What would De Niro do if he were tied up to a chair?’ He got into it. But everyone really had a clear cut character. 

Dustin Do, who plays the mechanic, I knew he was going to be a standout character. But I didn’t expect the amount of charisma he brought to the role. He made it so much more interesting with little moments of humor. He was a favorite when we screened it at the wedding. Everyone thought he was a star.

You finished this after your senior year of high school. When you were applying to colleges, was Invaders from Venus something that you were using on your resumes? If so, once you were in school, was it something you were showing to friends and cohorts?

I was proud of it and we had a screening right before I left for college, in 2002. But I showed it along with four or five other shorts. One was a zombie film, another was a gangster drama. It was like a retrospective of Frank’s younger years. I was going into University of Texas at Arlington that fall as an English major and as a film minor and my dad was like, ‘You should just be able to skip the first semester of film at UT because they don’t know about the movies you made.’ He actually tried to get the university to skip me ahead, and I totally get where he was coming from; I edited them all and I understood how story and angles worked and it was very sweet of him to do that. But at the same time, I was 18 or 19 and I was embarrassed. I was thinking all that was kid’s stuff, and I wanted to make real movies. Sure enough, when I got into college, that was when I discovered Antonioni and Bergman and I was into the arthouse world. And those are the types of movies that I continued to make from college up until 2018 or so. 

Over the years, you’ve acted in horror projects that maybe touch on horror or have spooky elements, like Tyler Rubenfeld’s Innards (2017), but do you have any plans to return to horror as a writer or director?

It’s funny that I’ve never really gone back to horror, but my intent is for one of my next short films to be my return now as an adult. My wife, Joslyn Jensen, is writing it and we are talking through the story together. It’s got a witchy kind of quality to it, an ethereal or curse-like feeling to it. It’s kind of like all the themes of transference that I have in all my dramas being put into a horror sphere. And she and I love a lot of the same shit, so we have a nice back and forth. I don’t want to give much of the story away, but I will say that it involves a high school coach and his kids that he coaches.

I have another script that is a passion project that I wrote in 2018. I first had the idea for it in 2011 or 2012. It’s a horror film wrapped inside of a drama that takes place in Pittsburgh 1975 from the summer to the winter of the same year. Each season changes perspectives. It’s a big sprawling epic about a serial killer that I made up, but I want to set it up like Fargo or Texas Chain Saw so that some kid will watch it and have to Google it to see if it is real. It’s American Graffiti, but then it turns into Halloween. I’ve been trying to get it made for years. It’s the only script I have that is huge and I just can’t make it on an indie scale but I’m really excited about the potential of it.

Innards is one that I love because it taps into stuff that I like. The idea of child actors is interesting, but also local movies and the kind of mythology of a film that was shot in your hometown. How it persists through time. I love Tyler’s idea. It was really special. It’s like you said, it’s not a horror film, but it’s about people who worked on a horror film.

You’ve mentioned watching Invaders! with your wife and her response being that she could see your roots in the film. Were there specific aspects she was drawn to, and are there things within the film that you see as early signs of your style developing?

Totally. I’m a big fan of roots. I love it when people show me their baby pictures or show me where they’re from. There’s that saying that people don’t want to hear about your dreams, but I’m the opposite. I want to hear all of that. It says something about you, your subconscious, and where you’re coming from. I find that all really fascinating. So I can watch all my movies and see that it’s all Frank. I can see the growth and the change. Sometimes I watch my old movies and I see things and I’m like, ‘That’s kind of cool… I’m glad I did it. Wouldn’t have done that now!’ Then other times I’m cringing. (Laughs) There’s a give and take of looking back at your work, because you can learn from it. You’re evolving so you’re always going to look back at your work differently. The spirit of those old films, like Invaders, is something I can always look back to as a sort of North Star with anything I make. There was a sense of fun, and play, and it was just making movies with friends. That’s why I continue to make movies now in the indie world, because, if you’re lucky, that’s the spirit you get most of the time. Even if it’s a $100,000 or $200,000 movie. I was so lucky and privileged to be able to even do what I did. Not every kid gets to make movies with their dad. That’s something I don’t take for granted. I’m very grateful to have had that and to have become the filmmaker I am now. 

Your dad claims this is the best film you’ve ever made. How does that make you feel these days, especially after screening it for family and friends at your wedding, many of whom, I imagine, were in the film?

It warms my heart, because I understand what it means. It’s his favorite movie because it took years to make and it’s because of the people who were involved in making it. Even now, I would argue that my favorite movie that I’ve directed is an improv-y movie I made in 2007 called Leave. It’s not my best movie, but it’s my favorite movie. It was made in one day and my mom and grandma are in it, and Nick, the president from Invaders, is in it all grown up and it’s a drama. It was just this moment in time where we shot this random movie in one day and somehow there was some magic in the air. So I get what my dad means about Invaders. There’s something to a favorite memory and something coming together against a lot of odds. It does make me laugh because I’ve put all this time and effort into big projects and roles and he’s like, ‘That was good, you know, but Invaders… can’t beat that!’ 

An interesting parallel to Invaders, on an adult level, was my second feature, Her Wilderness. That movie also took five years to make. The difference was it was a giant arthouse movie but it’s very similar. I shot it in chunks. I changed as a person in the middle of the production; there was a lot of upheaval and things that happened. I finally edited the movie and people were like, ‘Wow, it’s finally done!’ I think it was finishing Invaders that gave me the courage to finish Her Wilderness and not become daunted by how sprawling it had become. And I’m glad I did. 

If someone came along with an offer to fund a feature length version of Invaders From Venus, would you have any interest in pursuing that, or would you rather preserve the film in this form as is?

I would be hard pressed to know why they would want to remake this movie! (Laughs) But what I would do is make a separate alien invasion movie, a new idea, to see what I could do. But if they were really keen on Invaders from Venus for some reason, I would argue that I want to make a sequel to it. An entire production and have some of the same people who survived in the first movie come back, but have it be this slick, polished sequel — call it Invaders from Venus 2! or whatever. That way, people have to go back to watch the first one, which is this grimy, Hi8 movie made in a garage. (Laughs) If that movie could ever happen, it would truly be like summer camp; just a bunch of friends who want to get together to make Invaders from Venus 2!. It would just be people who have that kind of spirit to make something crazy. And yes, I would absolutely use silly string again!

Below are some behind-the-scenes production photos from the set of Invaders from Venus! by Page Mosley, Frank’s mother:

Find the complete October Horror 2023 series here:

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