Interview: Director Graham Skipper On ‘Sequence Break’

The online streaming service, Shudder, has recently added Sequence Break, one of the most mind-melting movies from 2017’s Frightfest, to its catalogue. The film stars Chase Williamson as Oz, a reclusive video arcade technician who starts to experience bizarre biomechanical mutations and hallucinations when a mysterious new arcade machine appears in his shop. When we caught the film we described it as being like if ‘David Lynch and David Cronenberg birthed a cinematic child‘, and it ventures into some very unexpected areas.

During Frightfest, last summer, we sat down and spoke with the director of Sequence Break, Graham Skipper. Skipper will be most familiar to some as starring in the 2016 movie Beyond the Gates, but in addition to acting he’s also a hard-working aspiring writer and director. We caught up with him just before his film screened during the festival (on the IMAX screen no less) to see how he was feeling, and to find out more about his head-spinning science-fiction thriller.

In 2016 you attended Frightfest with Beyond the Gates as one of the stars of the film, this year you’re here as a director, how does the experience differ – are there more or less nerves?

Gosh, I don’t know about more nerves or less nerves. There’s definitely more of a sense of ownership over what I’m bringing this year. As an actor you get to play in someone else’s sandbox for a few weeks and then you give it to them and they create something from it. So with Beyond the Gates it was super-fun and very relaxing to come here and represent the film, and this year… this is something that I’ve been working on for the last year and a half. On this and only this. To be able to bring it here and present it in front of this crowd especially on this type of a screen in this kind of environment. There’s something indescribable about that feeling.

And it’s showing on the IMAX screen, did you know in advance that that’s where you were screening?

They told me that it might be playing on that screen, and then I heard – ‘oh yeah we’re going to play you on the main screen’. But until you see that thing, you don’t have any actual conception of how huge it is. I walked in there last night with my wife just to check it out and see it, and it was just ‘oh my God!’ It’s hilarious. When you make a film you always picture it on a big screen with big sound in a big theatre, and then all of a sudden you’re going ‘oh wow, these places exist, here is a theatre to see a movie in.’ It was funny before I came out here – I was watching randomly the director’s commentary for Event Horizon. I was watching it and he goes ‘we had our world premiere at the Empire Leicester Square’ and I was just laughing – like how am I here right now? How is this my life?

You poached your co-star from Beyond the Gates – Chase Williamson, I’m guessing you guys must have gotten along well?

Chase was a pleasure to work with as an actor. We become fast friends and we worked well together. I was able to see that he was able to take direction and craft a character masterfully. So then when it came time to cast my movie I thought ‘well Chase would be brilliant in this’. I know that as friends we already have a shorthand and a lot of common interests, not just in terms of horror films, but cinema in general, and plays and theatres. So it was really easy to talk to him. I knew how to quickly be able to communicate what we needed to do and he’s such a good actor he was able to shift on a dime and do whatever was needed to be done. And he does some weird stuff in my movie.

The film doesn’t follow your typical narrative – how on Earth did you dream up that idea?

It’s a funny story; so many, many years ago I read about this urban legend about basically a killer video game. It was about an arcade game that supposedly was in some arcades in America that when people would play it they would have hallucinations and seizures and die. That was kind of the extent of it. There was some stuff about shady government operatives and all this other stuff, and I just thought there was something in there that would make a cool movie. This was many years ago, I think I was in college when I first read about it. Over the years I’ve periodically re-visited the ideas, written different treatments, even written drafts of scripts and nothing really seemed to click.

Then a couple of years ago I was revisiting all of Cronenberg’s work. I revisited Videodrome, and it all just sort of hit me that I was looking at it all wrong. It doesn’t need to be a story about some killer video arcade game that is hunting people down or something. It needs to be a story about a person. About his relationship with the world. That needs to be told through a lens of body horror. From there it all flooded out and I wrote the script pretty quick. It was one of those situations where all of the circumstances of things going on in my life, and the art that I was consuming at the time just came together perfectly. I remember that I had a dream pretty soon after I started working on this version of the story, and in it I saw this technicolor melting skull. I went [whispers] ‘Oh my God, this has got to be in the movie.’ It just came out of me.

There are a lot of practical effects in Sequence Break, in the days of CG and everything, what made you punt for practical?

I feel like especially with a film like this, when you’re talking about body horror part of the horror of it, is the tactile nature of it. When you watch a movie like Videodrome, when he’s sitting there fingering this weird stomach vagina that he’s got, it’s effective because you see his fingers actually touching that stuff.

So with this film there was no doubt in my mind it had to be practical. It had to be something that Chase could manipulate, and that could manipulate him, in order for it to be effective. We went to Josh and Sierra Russell who I had worked with on Beyond the Gates and on a few other films. I went to them right away and they just got it. They knew exactly what I was looking for. They drew up some sketches and I was like ‘yeah, this is exactly it, go for it’, and they went for it.

There seems to be, a least in Los Angeles, this little horror community, you all seem to help each other out. Was it a similar case with this, did some of the other horror guys help give you advice?

Oh definitely. You’re right, in LA it’s a really tight community, and it’s also not a competitive community. I feel like everybody that is dedicated to horror as a profession, we just love it, and so we want to help our friends make great work. Jackson Stewart, Joe Begos, Josh Ethier, Mickey Keating, all those guys, they came over and watched versions of it to help us craft the movie into something even better. There was a lot of support on all sides. I think with indie film-making it really takes an army, and it takes a lot of friends backing you. Fortunately I’m surrounded by a lot of extremely talented friends, so that helped.

Aside from the body horror, the story also has a strong current of a romantic relationship as well. How did you get Fabianne Therese as your leading lady?

Fabi came along because her and Chase have worked together on John Dies at the End and they’re really great friends in real life. I remember my producers and I were looking at a few different actresses because Tess is obviously a really important character in this. Chase recommended Fabi and I knew her work from John Dies at the End and Starry Eyes, and a few other films, so we brought her in and she read. I think the thing for me about the two of them is that they have such great chemistry. It’s instant and effortless. The two of them working together made it easy to get to those places so that you believe these are two people that really love each other. We care about them. You got to care about somebody so that you don’t like it when terrible things are happening to them.

She’s really natural. I feel like she was able to take a character that I think could have easily become your manic pixie dream girl, more of a stereotype. But she was able to take her and make her somebody genuine and real and honest. I think that honesty is what carries over into her relationship with Oz, and why they make a good pair.

You’ve been touring the festival circuit with Sequence Break, what’s the reaction been?

People really get it. Every question I’ve received has been very smart, people are paying attention. I think horror fans are really intelligent people that really get what you’re trying to do. The reception has been great. This is a movie that is made to challenge audiences and to make you think about stuff, and to be this visceral experience in a theatre. I think people have been responding to that, it’s been a real pleasure every step of the way.

I’m not sure I understood 100% of what happened in it but I had a really good time watching it. I felt maybe it was too clever for me and that’s why I didn’t 100% grasp it.

When we were developing the film, obviously there are a lot of big ideas in it. My whole thing was I’m a big fan of David Lynch. One of the things I love about David Lynch is that when you watch a movie of his you may not ever get exactly what he’s trying to do, but you know that he knows what he’s doing. So as weird as it might get, and as unexplainable as some of the stuff may end up being, at least as an audience member I always trust that it’s not just weird for weird’s sake. It’s weird because I’m not quite getting it, but I want to get it. That was what I wanted here. I wanted people to want to watch it again and again to try and unravel it. Everything is in there for you to fully get what’s going on.

I also love it when people interpret it in different ways. I’ve heard a lot of different interpretations that I love. This is great. Ultimately art is about the audience, so if somebody takes something away from it that I didn’t intend, then that’s awesome.

It has been picked up for Shudder, the Netflix of horror. When people are scrolling through for their film to watch, what are they going to get from Sequence Break that they’re not going to get from something else?

I think one of the beauties of Shudder, and what they’ve been really smart in doing, is they have a really wide variety of horror that you can choose from. One of the things I love about horror is that there’s like a million sub-genres to it. A million different nuances that I think a lot of people don’t necessarily get. There have been all these articles recently about how we’re living in a post-horror world – no it’s always been that way.

I think when people are scrolling through Shudder I think that if you’re looking for something that’s cerebral, if you’re looking for something that’s surreal and visceral and something that’s definitely not your typical slasher film or home invasion movie… if you’re looking for something different, Sequence Break will give you that. Sequence Break will give you the same sort of weirdly titillating sensations that you get from watching something like early Cronenberg or a Lynchian sex scene. I think that’s what you’ll get. If you want something that breaks the mould, something that will make you think and really make you sit down and unravel some big ideas.

Between you and Jackson [Stewart] you seem to be cornering the market of turning a childhood pastime into the thing that nightmares are made of, where are you guys going to go next?

[Chuckles] I don’t know. I don’t really know what Jackson’s working on right now, and for me I just like video games. I think that this particular story lent itself to a man interacting in a dangerous way with something that he loves. For me it’s less about a game and more about this is a passion, and what can your passion do to you. I’m working on a bunch of projects right now that I’m trying to get off the ground. That’s always the big challenge of what’s the next project going to be. I’m excited to direct again. I’m excited to build new worlds. I think that’s the thing about writing and directing that I love the most, is that you really get to create something from the ground up and the sky’s totally the limit. I have a bunch of wild, big ideas, that I’m excited to explore and start building again soon.

Sequence Break is available to watch now on Shudder.