SLASHERS – The Forest

Published on: 2nd October, 2009

SLASHERS - The Forest  | read this item

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Ever since the release of Deliverance in the early 1970s, filmmakers had become obsessed with the concept of ordinary city folk lost in the wilderness and hunted down by whatever strange beast or man roams the area. Both The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes followed this structure, showing what happens when civilised man trespasses in unfamiliar territory. And when the slasher boom began in 1980 with the success of Friday the 13th, a film which itself showed a group of friends isolated from society and stalked by a killer, filmmakers soon decided to continue exploring the same themes within the new formula. Perhaps the most acclaimed of these was Just Before Dawn, a beautifully shot and competently acted thriller, whilst possibly the most despised was Don’t Go in the Woods (also known under the slight variant of Don’t Go in the Woods…Alone!), a cheap splatter flick that would surprisingly find itself banned in Great Britain. Somewhere lost amongst these as The Forest.

The project was first conceived by Donald Jones, an independent filmmaker who was eager to break into the industry. Jones was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1938 and spent much of his childhood raised on a farm. As a result, he saw very few films as he was growing up and initially harboured dreams of becoming a professional boxer, even scoring minor success under the moniker Irish Frankie Conway. When his parents decided to relocate to Florida in the late 1950s, Jones instead opted for Los Angeles and, upon arriving in the city, found himself desperate for work. With a friend at a studio, Jones was able land small jobs on such productions as My Fair Lady, in which he worked as an electrician. When that fell through, he was forced to park cars for a living at a restaurant called The Fog Cutter, where he made friends with one of the doormen, Gary Kent.

He found menial work within the industry and was employed as a gaffer on a variety of television shows during the late 1960s. He also worked as a stuntman on various low budget movies such as A Man Called Dagger and 2000 Years Later, before finding himself drifting into the adult industry. During the early 1960s a few type of film had emerged called the ‘nudie cutie;’ T&A comedies and exploitation pictures that would be popularised by Russ Meyer and Herschell Gordon Lewis. Jones gained experience as a filmmaker during this time and found also direct several cheap flicks of his own, including two for smut pioneers Canyon Distribution (Excited and Kiss-Off). Having followed them with a detective feature, Who Did Cock Robin?, Jones would also work as a director of photography on Six Women and One Million AC-DC (which had been written by an uncredited Edward D. Wood Jr.).

Soon the nude cuties led to more graphic material and so Jones decided to try his hand at horror instead, shooting a feature called The Black Widow, which would later be renamed by distributor Mirror Releasing as the sleazier sounding Schoolgirls in Chains. He followed this with two more efforts during the mid 1970s – The Love Butcher and Sweater Girls – before deciding to produce a straight horror. The concept for what would eventually become The Forest originated with the story of two ghost children, which would be refashioned into Deliverance-style’ stalk and slash’ thriller. The script was completed in thirty days and, conscious that his own name would appear too many times on the credits, opted to bill the writer as Evan Jones.

He immediately began shopping the project around, eventually having to place a second mortgage on his home in order to raise the necessary $40,000. He knew he was taking a major risk but if the film managed to make even a fraction of what Halloween had a few years earlier he would have the hit he had been working so hard for. He began scouting for suitable locations and soon found Sequoia National Park, located off Generals Highway in Sierra Nevada and covering around 404,051 acres of wilderness. The park had once been a popular site for feature films, with several silent westerns having been shot there in the 1920’s, as well as John Wayne’s The Big Trail and the Academy Award winner A Free Soul. Incidentally, even an x-rated flick, Getting Into Heaven, had been made there a decade earlier, featuring adult star and Meyer regular Uschi Digard.

In an effort to avoid issues with the Screen Actors Guild for working on a non-union film, Kent (who had previously appeared in Schoolgirls in Chains) opted for a pseudonym on the credits, instead working under the name Michael Brody. His wife, Shirley Willeford, would also perform under an assumed name, Tomi Barrett, and would take the role of one of the hikers who is picked off by a deranged cave dweller (portrayed by Kent). Sadly, Barrett would pass away from lung cancer in 2004 at just fifty-four, having spent almost thirty years with Kent. Co-star Dean Russell had no prior experience before landing his part in the movie, but soon after finishing work on The Forest he became a relatively successful Broadway actor. The remaining principal roles would be taken by John Batis (whose only other significant work would be in an episode of Freddy’s Nightmares) and Ann Wilkinson, who would appear in Ulli Lommel’s Boogeyman 2 soon afterwards.

Filming took place in October 1980 in Sequoia National Park near Three Rivers, California and east of Visalia. Having secured the land with a bond of $5,000, Jones was instructed that if the grounds remained undamaged throughout the shoot then his money would be returned when they left. Unable to offer his cast and crew a salary upfront, they instead opted for a deferment payment, which would later cost Jones around $30,000. Choosing to draft in the talents of his former collaborators, the score would be composed by Richard Hieronymus (The Love Butcher and Sweater Girls), whilst the sound was handled by J.L. Clark, whose prior responsibilities had been as a boom operator. Stuart Asbjornsen, meanwhile, would make his feature debut as a cinematographer and would later find acclaim for his work on the Sidney Poitier thriller Lethal Pursuit and the hit show Baywatch.

Aside from the national park, other locations used around Los Angeles included the Bronson Caves in the Hollywood Hills and a home owned by close friend Stafford Morgan, who would also make an appearance in the movie. Both Kent and Barrett would perform much of their own stunts, with the latter jumping into a river to escape the clutches of the killer. With the movie being shot in the fall, the weather was extremely cold and the water was almost unbearable. Her only request had been that after the sequence had been shot and she had been rescued from the river that a crewmember would be ready with a cup of hot chocolate. For some reason, the man in question chose instead to wait with a chilled beer. Jones had planned to shoot various location footage of the magnificent trees and waterfalls but unfortunately the strict schedule was against them.

As Jones began to cut the movie he realised that there would not be enough footage and that the film would fall short of its predicted running time. An additional sequence, used as the prologue, would be shot in Mount Pinos and featuring Morgan as a hiker (although his involvement would cause issues with the SAG). With Jones preoccupied with shooting second unit for Roger Corman’s Smokey Bites the Dust, the editing chores were passed onto Robert Berk, who took it upon himself to re-cut the movie as he felt it would flow better if structured as a flashback. Infuriated, Jones was forced to edit it himself after a disastrous screening and quickly reassembled the movie before selling the finished product to Commedia for $200,000, although he would eventually only be paid $75,000 of the amount. The Forest was released at a time when the drive-ins and cinemas were flooded with low budget horror flicks and the film would sink without a trace, only later finding a small cult following on home video.

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