Some things are best left in the fridge…
A slice of something sinister…
There are few things more unsettling than a piece of processed meat with a face on it. Particularly when that face starts looking back at you.
So when Pablo came to me and my Directing partner, Amy Fasey, with a script for PETA's Halloween campaign about a murderous slice of supermarket sandwich meat, naturally, we said yes. The challenge wasn't making it funny. - that bit was already taken care of. The challenge was making it genuinely frightening.
We wanted to create a proper horror film. Not a spoof, not a wink to camera, not an advert wearing a horror costume. Something that could sit comfortably alongside the films that inspired us, with the small exception that our antagonist was a piece of ham.
We borrowed from the visual language of contemporary horror: oppressive framing, uncomfortable silences, darkness that feels like it's hiding something and performances that never once acknowledge the absurdity of what's happening.
Because the moment anyone lets the audience in on the joke, the whole thing falls apart.
And then there was Hamface himself.
Part Mr Blobby, part Leatherface, part something you'd find between the cheese strings and the cocktail sausages. We wanted him to feel simultaneously ridiculous and deeply wrong. A grotesque, sweaty, strangely vacant thing that could be funny in a photograph and horrifying in a doorway.
Getting there involved an extraordinary amount of prosthetics, a bodysuit slathered in horse lube to recreate the sheen of processed meat, and conversations about ham texture that no adult should ever have to participate in.
Our obsession extended to everything. A HAM SWEET HAM cross-stitch. Music built from pig noises. Typography inspired by the pigpen cipher. Tiny, deeply unnecessary details that became completely necessary once we'd started.
We shot on film, leaning into its texture and imperfection, while keeping the grade rooted in contemporary horror rather than nostalgic pastiche. We wanted the house to feel ordinary, the family believable and the threat completely sincere.
The more seriously we treated it, the more ridiculous it became. And somehow, the more frightening.
That's the thing we love about directing. Taking something that has absolutely no business working and finding the craft, conviction and collaborators to make it work.
Massive credit to Pablo for writing something so wonderfully unhinged, ArtClass Content for producing the hell out of this, PETA for trusting us to make a horror film about lunch. brought to literal life by Millennium FX, edited by Shift Post, music by THE HOGAN, post by RASCAL and sound by 750mph.
Oh, and we directed the whole thing four and nine weeks postpartum, with two newborns attending every edit, grade, sound and post-production meeting. My son even appears in the film.
And nobody batted an eyelid. Which is exactly how it should be.