One of the beautiful things that happens at the Housecore Festival is that in between feature length movies, short films are shown which gives exposure to up and coming directors and some of the best flicks we have seen in our two years of attending Housecore Horror, are shorts. This year, a lot of buzz followed the short film the Wife, directed by Richard Marra and produced by Gordon Hanovice. The film clocks in at a little over six minutes and its one heck of a mind fuck. Our staff photographer Marsha and I were drunk one night, possibly making fun of Danzig and we got to talking with a dude and it turns out he was the director of the Wife and immediately we knew we had to talk to him. Rick and his partner Gordon are super legit dudes who are nice as hell and made a fucking killer short. Join us while we chat with them:

Robin Goodfellow: Okay, tell us who you are and what you have done. Don’t confess to anything illegal though.

Richard Marra: But that’s where I was gonna start.. I’m Richard Marra and I directed The Wife.

Gordon Hanovice: I’m Gordon Hanovice, producer, art director and when I’m not making good movies with him, I’m doing cheesy commercials. Car commercials. But his stuff is better.

RG: Okay, so how long is your movie and tell us about it.

RM: It’s about six and a half minutes long and it’s your classic love triangle.

GH: It has this feminine power to it, whereas male fronted horror movies are bursting with this.. kind of like bursting through a wall, whereas this is more of a containment piece and the hook is in that.

RG: So what led you to make The Wife? Please don’t say you want to kill your wife.

RM: No no, I don’t actually have a wife. It started off I was watching a lot of thoe cooking shows on the Food Network like Chopped or whatever, and I was thinking about ideas around that, like if how they were playing with something else and then just sort of threw it in. So I came up with that idea and then put the back story behind it or whatever.

GH: He was also coming off of an intense sexploitation horror film that he got no credit for..

RM: I give myself credit..

GH:… Anyways, I edited The Wife and it came out super cerebral and it matched the script. It was really weird but it worked.

RG: How did you guys get involved with Housecore?

RM: He went to it last year and he was like, “Oh I love it, I love it” and this year we decided to enter the Wife and we were waiting for the schedule to come out and shit, and last minute they said, yep come on by.

RG: So you aren’t a heavy metal fan Rick but you are, Gordon?

RM: I wouldn’t say I’m not a heavy metal fan, I just don’t listen to a lot of it.

GH: He played metal in a band.

RG: Okay so did you see any remarkable acts this weekend you wanted to talk about?

GH: Oh man, seeing Superjoint after ten years, seeing Phil changing, getting older but still good, the positivity. Ken Mode, King Parrot, Portal from Australia.. There’s so much. Napalm Death, I mean my mother used to steal that CD and put it away in a place where I couldn’t find it when I was bad. The whole event, it’s just all these like minded people, like you and I, fans, and bands and directors. That really sums it up I think.

RG: Do you think you did okay here? Were you treated well?

GH: We were treated amazingly well and I think The Wife was well received.

RG: Do you think you’d come back?

RM: Absolutely.

GH: We are gonna come back every year. I have family here. My dad is Texan so it’s easy to come here.

RG: Okay, what about any other films, did you see any worth noting?

GH: I should have seen more films, but I didn’t see as many as I would have liked. I was dealing with a few family things and would have liked to have seen more, and then I ended up seeing a lot more metal acts. I always like to watch our competition, you know? I’m gonna watch them all. I wanna know what we are up against.

RG: Hey you never know, you could win a Rotscar (Housecore’s version of the Oscars, except better).

GH: Do you think?

RG: We have heard a lot of people talking about your flick, because it’s so different and I think people like that..

GH: See, that’s fantastic. All the fests I’ve been to on the East Coast, it’s all this paraphilic, dick in the mouth, but it’s not really my thing or interesting, and I’m just really over orgasmy, porny horror and I don’t really consider that horror, you know?

RG: Are you referring to torture porn?

GH: Yeah that’s not our thing, we like Hitchcock and Bava and Lynch. I like Nicolas Winding Refn, Push the series was a huge influence. We are huge lynch fans. We don’t like to call ourselves horror you know, more like thriller?

RG: Okay, so we have one last question, our blog is Drunk in a Graveyard and we center on getting wasted and listening to heavy metal and reviewing horror movies, and this is the question we ask to every one we interview – favourite horror movie and alcoholic drink to go with it?

GH: That’s really hard. The Shining is one because it makes me want to drink scotch. House by the Cemetery is another because it makes me want to drink red wine. Black Sabbath makes me drink anything. That’s too many answers, but whatever.

RG: No that’s all good, thank you very much for speaking to us.

Again, Drunk in a Graveyard would like to extend a huge thank you to Rick and Gordon for being awesome enough to have a chat with us about horror and metal. Gordon also gave us an exclusive link to The Wife on youtube so our readers can go watch the movie, so stop picking your asses and go give it a watch, and keep your eyes on the skies for these guys, because we here at the Graveyard are looking forward to seeing more from them in the future.