THN talk WWE and The Sand with writer Alex Greenfield

If you were following our coverage of this summer’s Frightfest you’ll know that there was one film that caught us by complete surprise, that film was The Sand. On paper the premise sounded silly – a group of teens awaken to find the beach has developed a taste for them, yet the reality was a charming and compelling horror.

There are many writers out there that, were this idea to pop into their heads, would go all out silly – how else do you think we got Piranha 3DD? – but thankfully they were all kept far away from the project. At the helm instead were writing duo Alex Greenfield and Ben Powell who steered the idea into a more tangible and real direction which really paid off. Much like Frozen that saw three friends stranded on a ski lift, The Sand offers an impossible situation to the viewer and asks what would you do?

Having been so impressed by the movie we were very pleased when we heard that it was to be one of the six films to launch a new joint digital download venture between Frightfest and Icon Distribution. The label which will be simply called Frightfest Presents will enable those who couldn’t get to the London set festival the chance to download and view some of the highlight films. In preparation for the launch on 19th October we sat down (virtually) with Alex Greenfield to find out how the idea for The Sand was birthed.

Before writing The Sand Alex had a very interesting life, he grew up with his UFOlogist and Occult-investigating father, and his CV includes time as a writer for the WWE. Needless to say we couldn’t not ask about both of these things. See what he had to say below:

So how did you get into writing?

Luke looking into the twin sunsets in Star Wars when I was four years old. I didn’t know that I wanted to be a writer specifically when I was a child, but I knew that I wanted to make movies. Wanting to make movies was one of my earliest memories, it was what I always wanted to do. Writing is the easiest I guess (laughs), I mean it’s the easiest for me. It’s just what I gravitated towards at university and I love telling stories with only sight and sound to play with.

What I’ve always wanted to do is horror, it’s sort of my favourite genre to work in. When Ben and I set The Sand I was just like ‘Yeah! I’m finally doing what I like to do!’.

Where did the idea for The Sand come from and how did it develop?

Originally Ben called me – Ben Powell‘s my writing partner – I remember it really clearly because it was one of those ideas that just grabbed hold of me immediately. Ben called me and he said ‘Alex when you were a kid did you ever play the floor is lava?’ I’d never even heard that expression before and said ‘No’. He was like ‘God this is going to be a lot harder to describe to you, it’s sort of this game where your’re moving around and you got to move from piece of furniture to piece of furniture’ and he goes on and on with the description and finally he says the magic word ‘don’t touch the floor’. I was like ‘Oh yeah we played don’t touch the floor all the time, its a great game’. Then he said okay so ‘Kids wake up on a beach and the beach eats them alive.’

Everybody in horror is looking for that limited location, single locations set-up like Exam that lock everyone in a room. We wanted to do one of them movies that didn’t feel small, that was out in the day and you could see the whole world around you. When Ben said ‘don’t touch the floor on a beach’ I knew we wanted immediately to look at the beach movies from the seventies and eighties, like Piranhna, and Humanoids from the Deep, and all of those old-school exploitation movies. This is itself a little exploitation movie.

We did want to fuck around with the tropes a little; we didn’t want our heroines to be saved, we wanted them to do the saving. We wanted to meet the audiences expectations, but also the black guy is supposed to be the first to die and we knew we wanted Cleo to be the last. We knew the ‘slut’, big quotes around that, is the one who should be punished for her sexuality so we wanted her to live. We wanted the quote unquote ‘Virginal heroine’ to say things like ‘Dude if you’d have fucked me I’d know it’ because we didn’t want her to fall into the last girl clichés.

The film manages to keep what is a fairly ‘out there’ idea, how hard was it when writing to make sure you kept it grounded?

(Laughs) Pun intended? It wasn’t tough, it was challenging in a fun way. We knew that a large portion of the movie, because we knew from the start it was going to be a low budget movie, sort of by design. We hide what the monster is for 90% of the movie probably. We literally drew an overhead map of where everything was on the beach and the line that we knew which was as far as the thing under the sand spreads.

We just kind of wanted to ask ourselves what would we do if we woke up in this really existential situation, it’s no exit. You wake up and you have to get out of the circle, how do you do it? Well what do you have at the beach? You have towels, you have surfboards you have picnic tables. The fun of it to us is it became a little bit like Cube  I think, it became a puzzle of how can we get them off of this beach. Having characters who instead of rolling up and dying instead all of them defiantly want to get off and live. It made it fun. It was an enjoyable, challenging task to figure out.

Since it’s doing so well in England now we want to set the sequel in Blackpool obviously. On the boardwalk, that sequel seems like it’d be fun.

The beach isn’t as sandy but 

But you got boardwalk things for tendrils to come through. There’s all kinds of terrible things we can do to you. (Laughs)

Could we get a sequel to The Sand in the future?

I think as with all movies if people go out and see it and really dig it. If the people who finance the movie make enough money I’m sure they’d want to do a sequel. I think there are a lot of opportunities to deal with the situation and make it bigger. We do a little teaser/tag at the end of the movie it’s sort of begging for sequel money (laughs) so it’s there. It would be lovely to do.

We’ve gotten just an overwhelming positive reaction, even our negative reviews, the worst that can be said about it is this is a fun little title that you’ll have a fun time smoking a joint to. (laughs) We’re really happy with the response.

Ben and I have another idea that we’re shopping right now that won an award and people are responding to a lot, it’s the same sort of lifeboat model of ten little Indians that we play with in The Sand perfected, called Plague Ship. It’s a fun little sub-genre that we’re having a good time in. I hope we can do another Sand but if not we’ll continue to kill poor innocent people in terrible ways in other things.

Let’s play pretend, you wake up on a beach and discover there is something not right with the sand, what would your survival strategy be?

I probably have a complete psychiatric break (laughs) curl up in a ball and would weep, weep until someone comes and rescues me. I am not a hero, I write about heroes.

Somebody asked me the other day what I would do in a zombie apocalypse – I’d be one of the first people to die. To be completely honest about the whole thing I’m great at coming up with life-saving scenarios in fiction but I would be paralysed and scared out of my mind in the first five minutes. You would use me as a human shield to toss to the zombies like chum in Jaws.

Your father had a career as a UFOlogist how much has that upbringing influenced your writing?

It certainly worked its way into my work right? My dad was, is -he’s still alive and chasing things down. He is a UFO and Occult investigator. I was literally out looking in fields for evidence of UFO’s, or going through haunted houses from before I can remember, and all through my childhood.

I have a script, it’s largely a coming of age story about a kid whose dad researches ghosts and UFOs. A lot of stories ended up in there. I was in The Brookwood Hotel, this famous haunted hotel in Atlanta that by repute, that and The Stanley were the sources for The Outlook Hotel in Stephen King‘s The Shinning. I was walking through those mildewed halls when I was in 7th grade scaring the shit out of myself. It was unique.

I’m re-watching The X-Files at the moment and it seems that that was how you grew up.

When Ben and I first met in college in 1993 which was right as The X-Files was going from its first season or two into the cultural phenomena that it became, and I had not actually been watching it. I wasn’t even familiar with it at the point that I got to college. Ben’s parents would send him the videotapes, old school VHS tapes on the slow play so the video was terrible but you could fit six episodes on one tape. We would just sped half the weekend pouring over these episodes and figuring out all of the conspiracy theories. I’m so excited for X-files coming back.

What’s your favourite scary movie?

I pick one that a lot of people don’t agree with me on but every time I watch it I get something else from it, The Descent. The way Neil Marshall, the director, uses claustrophobia as a weapon in the movie is just phenomenal. I’ve read the script and I’ve seen it about a dozen times. It’s just a beautiful piece of horror. If you like horror movies go and watch it, it’s like a textbook in how to give you big jump scares but also just ratchet up the tension in your gut. It’s a marvellous film.

For me my pulse was literally racing in my chest in the scene when the lead actress is crawling from one cave before the crawlers ever show up, and there’s the little cave in around her. It’s just like the world is getting tighter and tighter. I felt the compression on my own chest. It’s just such marvellous film-making. You really are with the characters. I love it.

You used to work as a writer on WWE, how restricted were you in when it came to plots. There have been some pretty nutty ones over the years…

It’s tough, I ended up leaving because of creative differences. Vince McMahon and I got into shouting matches quite a lot (laughs). I am incredibly proud of some of the stuff we got away with. One story line that’s commonly called ‘single white female’ with two wonderful performers Trish Stratus and Mickie James, sort of a stalker/identity consumption. For the medium that we were operating in, where everything ultimately ends in a fist fight we got away with some pretty high level story telling with plot twists and turns.

I had another long run with Booker T whose character at the time was called King Booker, I just had an incredibly fun time and I think the audience did too. But sometimes I would try things that were coming out of my cinematic background, like I did a programme with The Undertaker, who’s a big supernatural character. For a horror writer it was candy land, but I went too far in the direction of the candy land doing some supernatural things in a wrestling ring that were really just beyond the veil and were silly.

I think the proof is in the pudding Edge is on The Flash now and was on Haven for years. Batista – who is one of my old champions while I was at WWE is as blown up as you can be. I always say about Dave, I’m over the moon for him and completely unsurprised. We all saw the charisma this guy has whilst we were at WWE and you see obviously The Rock. I think there’s a generation of guys right now coming down the pipe who are going to be crossover stars as well.

In the UK right now is the hottest wrestling in the world. You have an organisation called Progress Wrestling in London that has some of the most interesting, great characters I’ve seen in wrestling since the heyday of the attitude era of the nineties with Stone Cold Steve Austin. There’s a guy over there called Jimmy Havoc who is one of those fair wrestling characters whose a bad guy whose legitimately scary. It’s not easy to pull that off, I know from trying to make it work. You’ve got a hero character at that organisation, their champion is a guy called Will Ospreay whose like 23 years old and is just going to be one of those stars like Stone Cold or The Rock who you’re talking about ten years from now.

If you want to see good wrestling UK readers look in your own back garden. Revolution Pro and Progress Wrestling, you’ve got some amazing local product that I’m jealous of.

Where did the ideas come from?

Wrestling is a wonderfully almost classic, simply Shakespearean way of telling stories to the common man. I don’t mean that in a derogatory way. The language is tough to learn sometimes but the stories are just these classic, I mean they’re kind of the definition of Western tradition. But you can apply them anywhere and there’s such a direct correlation with the world of professional world that you can just apply these plots and they work every time.

What led to Booker T becoming King Booker and our champion and a big dastardly villain. Before he was just a little flat, they call it middle of the card show good guy. He wasn’t meaningless but he wasn’t quite there. He had this female companion, his cheerleader and we decided to do a Lady Macbeth story, that’s what we called it. So we had her just whispering in his ear that he’s not quite meeting his full potential. We just drove that needle in for probably about six months before we invested into it and turned him into a bad guy. It worked like a dream.

You recently placed quite high in a screenwriting competition, what can you share about Plague Ship?

There’s a contest that’s pretty well regarded in the United States it’s the Screencraft Horror screenwriting competition. We got second place which we’re over the moon with because the reaction has just been great. We’ve had conversations with a couple of production companies so fingers crossed that that comes together. It looks like we’re going to sign with, I wish I could announce it officially, with a pretty big manager because we’ve been on our own for the last five years.

Plague Ship is (laughs) Lord of the Flies on a boat. This young couple go on their honeymoon on this cruise ship. You’ve probably seen on the news these stomach bugs that break out on cruise ships. We have a very fatal virus pretty close to Captain Trips’ from Stephen King‘s The Stand sweep through the boat and our couple are in quarantine. We get our first death moments into the movie by the third page they’ve been stuck in a room in quarantine together for six days; if you have ever been in a room with your significant other stuck for six days, the best relationships can get a little bit fraught. They slowly discover what’s happening on the ship and they realise if they’re going to get out of this alive they have to break quarantine. In a lot of ways it’s the journey through Hell story. This couple who get separated have to get away from other people who don’t want this boat to land at any dock and away from a virus that can cause your death pretty quickly after the slightest contact. It’s like a zombie apocalypse only there aren’t any zombies this disease is real. It’s a really dark thriller about how people cope with the inevitable and often people go selfish but sometimes people aren’t selfish and that’s sort of the fun of figuring out who rises to an occasion or who curls up in a little ball and dies like me.

Once again we get to play with, there’s a conventionality in horror movies particularly that is fun to play with. You go into a movie, even a trick ending movie and look for the trick that’s part of the fun.

Halloween is coming up why should people pick The Sand?

Well first off you wanna support Frightfest’s label. It’s super awesome that Icon are launching, not just with my movie but there’s a whole load of really good movies there. That’s super exciting. The Sand specifically has scares for your sweetie to leap into your arms or for you to leap into theirs. I think its a smart movie where all the way through you’ll be thinking ‘don’t drop the knife’ but rather ‘would I do the other thing?’, I think there’s a choose your own adventure element to this movie that you’ll really engage with.

Demographically its mostly men who watch horror movies, this is one that the women in your lives will absolutely engage with and have a good time with because Chanda and Kaylee are badasses. They’re definitely more from Sigourney Weaver‘s mould than your typical scream queen and we’re pretty proud of that. You’re also getting in on the ground floor of these three women who I think are going to have really impressive careers one day.

[Since the interview we have heard from Alex that he and Ben have been signed by Zero Gravity management who represent some big horror heavyweights including Clive Barker and The Soska Sisters. We couldn’t be happier for them and wish them both the best of luck.]

Catch The Sand on digital download when it arrives at Frightfest Presents on 19th October.