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We talk to the co-writer and producer of new horror comedy Camp Wedding WORDS KATHERINE MCLAUGHLIN
IRL danger for
socials obssessives.WEDDING FROM HELL
“Shaun Of The Dead was always a
touchstone,” explains co-writer and executive
producer of Camp Wedding, Cara Consilvio.
The horror comedy, directed and co-written by
her close friend Greg Emetaz, is loosely based
on Consilvio’s own wedding where she gathered
her friends and family at an abandoned summer
camp she rented on Airbnb.
Emetaz, who was Man of Honour at
Consilvio’s nuptials, elaborates on Edgar
Wright’s influence: “The thing I liked about
Shaun Of The Dead was that it was hilarious
but also grounded. It felt like these were real
people and they had this weird interpersonal
stuff that was vying with the actual danger in the
movie. In this case, the big idea was that these
are people who are not really communicating
and are forced to or they’re going to perish.
I’ve described it as like a wedding comedy
that stumbles into a horror summer camp, but
because they’re only communicating via text
message the tone doesn’t get conveyed so both
genres are interweaving upon each other.”
The result is a rambunctiously funny and
surprisingly sweet satire of social media and
phone addiction told from a Xennial perspective
where IRL friendship is key to survival. It nails the
strange ever-changing meaning of friendship in
the digital age with Friday The 13th-style horror
shenanigans and takes aim at its characters in
a similar manner to Severance. The filmmakers
lovingly poke fun at themselves, taking
inspiration from their grad film, Neat Freak. “It
was about an obsessive-compulsive poltergeist,
but instead of causing disorder it imposed
order and people got vacuumed to death! The
characters were inspired by ourselves but taking
the worst aspects of our personalities and then
blowing them up. Then we carried them into
Camp Wedding,” explains Consilvio.
On the matter of social media faux pas’ and
how odd it was to experience the shift from an
analogue world, Consilvio says: “I did a second
degree in 2007-2010 right when Facebook was
really appealing to the masses. One of the things
that shocked me about going back to school was
what happened in Facebook groups seemed
to be more important than what happened in
real life. I remember I had an argument with
someone and she stopped speaking to me inreal life and I unfriended her on Facebook. She
confronted me in a parking lot saying how dare
you unfriend me! It was this new world of what it
means to be friends with someone.”
The film throws knives, masked maniacs,
possession and Teddy Ruxpin at the audience
but at its heart it’s all about the quandaries
of true friendship: “As you get older you feel
like you lose connection to friends,” Consilvio
explains, “and the only connection you have is
through social media but it’s not really a truthful
depiction of how people are really doing.”Camp Wedding is available on iTunes and
digital platforms from 20 August.