Underground Film Journal

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Mark Savage: Underground Film Tips And Early Films

By Mike Everleth ⋅ March 30, 2009

If you’re not reading filmmaker Mark Savage’s blog Phantom of Pulp, then you should be, especially if you’re into really freaky stuff. (Most of the content is NSFW, though.) Savage is a genre film maniac and his blog posts are stuffed to the gills with images and memories of his favorite horror and exploitation films. His taste is absolutely exquisite.

Lately, Savage has added to his repertoire of twistedness to include practical tips for aspiring filmmakers. This one on distribution, both traditional and online DIY, is an absolute must read. Prior to that, though, in this post Savage showed off his earliest filmmaking attempts, including his first ever film Methusarla, Guardian of Hell made when he was just 14. That’s it embedded above. Shot on one Super 8 cartridge with only in-camera edits, it’s a pretty accomplished first effort.

Another “one-reeler” is The Annihilator, which I’m embeddeding beneath this paragraph. It’s fascinating to see how much Savage grew as a filmmaker in a very short time. As he writes on his blog, he really paid attention to the process and applied techniques he learned on one film to use on the next. As a one-reeler, The Annihilator is amazingly epic with several different set-ups and scenarios featuring a uniquely original horror movie slasher.

You can watch all of Savage’s one-reelers in that blog post, plus watch them and his later Super 8 films that had actual post-production done on them on one of his YouTube channels.

If you want to check out Mark Savage’s more modern films, then visit his main YouTube channel here. I haven’t seen one of his features yet — a situation I need to correct — but just to get a taste of just how far Savage has come since his teenage years, below is a compilation of over-the-top violent scenes from his feature films, including Defenceless, Trail of Passion and Sensitive New Age Killer . This one is totally NSFW, kids and I totally mean it this time:


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