Joe Begos, writer/director of Christmas Bloody Christmas – which is now playing in theatres, and is also available to watch on the Shudder streaming service (you can read an 8/10 review from our own JimmyO HERE) – is hoping to make two sequels to his holiday horror film. But before he gets to work on those sequels, if they do happen to get made, he’s going to wrap up a horror project he has been working on since the early days of the Covid pandemic lockdowns. An alien invasion horror movie that he stars in, because the alternative would have been to cast someone who was in the Screen Actors Guild, which would have added thousands to the budget.
Speaking with The Boo Crew podcast, Begos said (with thanks to Bloody Disgusting for the transcription), “I play a coked out filmmaker who is at the edge of his wits. Everybody around him has cut him off, and the opening scene is him just melting down. His manager hangs up the phone, it’s all shot in POV for the opening scene, and then he gets abducted by aliens, in this really f*cking crazy scene. And then he wakes up and he can’t really remember, but it starts to come back to him. So he convinces a friend to come over. His friend comes over and starts telling him, ‘Dude, you have a drug problem.’ And then while his friend’s there, they come back. And then his friend gets abducted. And he’s locked in the apartment because they start to control his mind and everything’s bricked off and it becomes this hallucinatory battle where he’s constantly doing a bunch of cocaine and painkillers because they put an implant in him, but he also needs to stay awake. So he’s doing coke and painkillers while blowing away these aliens. The lights are getting all f*cked up and the place gets covered in neon blood and the camera’s just spinning. And then his friend comes back but he’s infected with an alien and then I get abducted again.“
Begos originally thought he could knock out this alien invasion movie on a 35 day shooting schedule, but so far there has been 57 days of filming, broken up over three different time periods. He’s not sure how many more days will be required, because they still have to film everything involving the astronauts that enter the picture toward the end. The filmmaker also told The Boo Crew that the aliens in the film are animatronic.
In addition to Christmas Bloody Christmas, Begos previously directed Almost Human, The Mind’s Eye, Bliss, and VFW. And personally, I can’t wait to see the alien invasion movie he described during that podcast interview.
How does Joe Begos’s alien invasion project sound to you? Share your thoughts on this one by leaving a comment below.