How FleshEater (1988) and Halloween 5 (1989) Inspired Me to Make My Own Slasher Franchise

Folks! Jeremy here. Today is a very special edition of Dust On The VCR. Not only is it a guest piece, it’s a guest piece from one of Alabama’s finest filmmakers—who just made not one but two slasher films! They’re called The Third Saturday in October and The Third Saturday in October Part V, and yes, they involve college football. I mean, this man said to hell with studios and just created his own damn franchise. Jay is a good buddy of mine, and while we mostly talk about basketball, we are both horror movie junkies, so I invited him to talk about one of his biggest influences on his new double-feature, and naturally, he had to choose two of them. I guess that makes this the newsletter’s first double-feature as well! If you like what you read here, please come see the films at the Sidewalk Film Festival (Saturday, August 27th at the Alabama School of Fine Arts) or check them out at a virtual film festival soon!

With our two period-specific slasher films—The Third Saturday in October and The Third Saturday in October Part V—the intent is mostly on the surface.*

Part I is designed to capture the aesthetic of 70s horror films and hopefully transport you back to the drive-in era of filmmaking. We wanted to create a film that doesn't just feel like it’s set in 1979, but that it was actually released in 1979—or perhaps some alternate reality 1979. Part V is intended to do the same thing for the "lesser" sequels to franchises like Halloween and Friday the 13th by creating a more absurd, low-budget 90s sequel. And of course, both films are heavy on influences, to the point where both of our films are a sort of tribute.

One of my biggest influences for these films is FleshEater. If you've ever seen Night of the Living Dead, you may be familiar with actor Bill Hinzman. More likely, you’ve seen him but you don’t know his name. He portrays the iconic ghoul from the cemetery in Night of the Living Dead, and two decades later he starred in FleshEater, where he portrays...the same character? I'm not entirely sure if his zombie in FleshEater is intended to be the same cemetery ghoul, but there is virtually no difference between the two, and I love that.

But Hinzman doesn’t just star as the lead zombie in FleshEater. He also wrote and directed it! And since this was a rather low budget, many of his family members are also involved, including cameos from his wife and daughter. In fact, the entire production is a shining example of low-budget/DIY filmmaking. It's clearly a shoestring production with plenty of wooden acting, nonsensical characters, ludicrous plot points, and cheap gore. These are all things I happen to love, though.

The influence FleshEater played on me comes from the zanier choices Hinzman makes with his zombie picture. There aren't really any lead characters. Instead, there’s a group of partying, hay-riding, dancing, drinking youths. You meet them all in the first few minutes of the film, and within about 30 minutes, they’re all dead. That’s when the movie starts following Hinzman's ghoul on the prowl as he and other zombies rampage through the community. There's also a strong autumnal vibe and some awkward dancing—two things that you get in spades in The Third Saturday in October Part V.

I even based our slasher killer, Jakkariah Harding, around the idea of Hinzman's zombie. You're pretty much following him around through the entire picture as he stalks and murders at random along a lone stretch of one country road. But unlike in FleshEater, I decided it'd be best to anchor the film around a few characters that will still be there by the end.

Both of our movies are slasher films and not zombie films, so they also draw inspiration from some more familiar slasher fare. Everything from the Halloween and Friday the 13th films to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Black Christmas.** But the most specific influence among that crop might be an unexpected one: Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers, the greatest “Part V” of them all.

I used to be ashamed to admit that this was my favorite Halloween movie as a kid, but that's the truth. I had a real love affair with Halloween 5 in my youth, and that love contributed to what is perhaps the most obvious yet important aspect of our double feature. The Third Saturday in October Part V could've been any random sequel, but I chose the fifth because of The Revenge of Michael Myers.*** I’m only now realizing how weird I was as a kid, but it checks out that I'd have such a love for Halloween 5, because Jamie and Billy are really weird kids!

Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers is a bit of an influence as well. The lead characters in The Third Saturday in October—Maggie the babysitter (Kansas Bowling) and her kid counterpart PJ (Poppy Cunningham—are pretty obviously influenced by Halloween 4's Rachel and Jamie dynamic. If I didn't love both of those Halloween sequels as much as I do, I doubt I would've had any interest in starting a slasher franchise with a middle sequel.

That's the other thing to keep in mind for our slasher double feature. We made Part V first and then retroactively created Part I. So there's a real fun meta element in watching them in that order, which is what I always recommend.**** A lot of weird decisions we made on Part V we reverse engineered into Part I so that they make the Part V choices look like nods to Part I. (Crazy stuff, right?)

It's still fun to watch them in numerical order, but I believe there's more magic in seeing our killer sport his slasher necessity (a skull mask) in Part V—and then seeing it introduced to the character by watching Part I later. The masks themselves are a nod to the ongoing fan debates over which Halloween mask is better, so there's a big difference in the vibe of our masks in Part I and Part V.*****

Things always get pretty crazy in slasher sequels. You'd think it would be fairly easy to keep the train on the tracks of a major horror franchise, but those later Halloweens are a good window into how far off the rails things got during the 80s and 90s. And that’s exactly what we wanted to pay tribute to with The Third Saturday in October Part V.

I hope you’re able to check out our films at the Sidewalk Film Festival tomorrow night, even though the timing is a couple months early. And if you can’t make it, you’ll be able to stream the films through the Skyline Indie Film Festival in two weeks (and more festivals after that)!

*I say “our” because I made these films with producers Frank Crafts, Ian J. Cunningham, and Lauren Musgrove. I couldn’t have done it without them!

**Though it’s not really a slasher film, one of the more important (but less noticeable) influences on The Third Saturday in October is Carrie, which was a saving grace during post-production because I leaned heavily on Pino Donaggio's score while assembling our edit.  It helped us capture the vibe of our film and define the time period we were trying to recreate. It was a joy to work with our composer, Kelvin Wooten, as he took those Carrie pieces and ran them through our own strange concoction of sounds to create what ultimately became our score.

***I also decided to give one of our characters a stutter. Some reviews of The Third Saturday in October Part V have attributed this as a nod to Bill from It, but it's actually a reference to Billy, the child character in Halloween 5.

****If you see our double feature at a film festival, don’t be confused when Part V screens first. We promise it’s on purpose!

*****I think anyone that believes the Halloween 4 mask is better than the Halloween 5 mask is wrong. The mask from Halloween 4 looks too cheap, and there's just something haunting about the Halloween 5 mask, even if it is a step too far from what the mask was originally intended to be. Case in point: The FX artist on Halloween 5 decided it would be a good idea to mold the Halloween 5 mask after his own face, but that isn't as odd as the FX team rolling out a Myers mask with blonde hair to begin filming on Halloween 4.

FleshEater is available on Tubi. Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers is available on Shudder, AMC+, and DirecTV, and it is available to rent elsewhere.