Four years ago, Frank Crafts and Jay Burleson were raising money for an ambitious art house slasher film.
“We couldn’t get it off the ground,” Crafts says. “We needed $750,000 and we only had $180,000.”
With the funding raised, they pulled together a team and created “The Third Saturday in October.”
The film will have its New Mexico premiere at 10:30 p.m. Friday, May 26, at the Guild Cinema, 3405 Central Ave. NE, in Nob Hill.
There will be an in person Q&A with Crafts and Art Director Ellar Coltrane.
Crafts says tickets to New Mexico’s first horror festival, Morgue and Krypt, will be given away at the screening.
There will also be another screening at 10:30 p.m. Friday, June 2, at the Guild. Crafts will also be participating in the Q&A session after the film.
The film tells the story of when a psycho goes on a murderous rampage after surviving a botched execution, only two survivors of his initial attack can stop him.
“I’ve been a lifelong fan of the slasher subgenre so it has been a dream come true to create the world of ‘Third Saturday,’ ” says Jay Burleson, director. “These are unpretentious callbacks to a different era of horror and B-movies which are best seen with a group of like-minded genre fans who can appreciate the work for the labors of love that they are.”
Crafts says Burleson was developing a slasher concept and wanted to pay homage to the style of the 1980s and 1990s.
About this time, the duo brought in Coltrane as artistic director as it was set to film in Alabama.
“Ellar was instrumental in making our biggest gags work,” Crafts says. “He figured out how they work and it was amazing.”
Coltrane says leading up to the film, he had done set dressing for commercials.
“This was the first time I got to art direct and have more authority,” Coltrane says. “It was super fun and it was such a unique way to approach the art department.”
Crafts was busy doing producer things, like raising money and managing day-to-day operations.
“I was one half of the production design on the film,” Crafts says. “I have a gigantic antique store and we got about 80% of our stuff from my store.”
The film has been screened at numerous festivals across the United States and the United Kingdom and are currently on a countrywide road tour of indie cinemas. Distributed by Dark Sky Films, the films will be available for streaming on Apple TV, Prime Video, Google Play. Vudu, Xbox and Vimeo.
“Crafting the world of ‘Third Saturday’ was a unique challenge for us. Not only were we recreating a specific time period, but we wanted them to feel like they came from those time periods,” Burleson says. “I think of them both as unearthed relics from an alternate reality.”
