Terrible Twins Jen and Sylvia Soska talk Horror and the UK ahead of the UK Tour of American Mary
Jen and Sylvia Soska are the ‘terrible twins’ who are taking the film world by storm. Their second feature, AMERICAN MARY, is enjoying huge critical success ahead of its UK release in January 2013.
For their Director’s Night on Horror Channel, they have chosen ‘Hellraisers’,’Martyrs’ and ‘Pontypool’ and here they talk about their choices, why the UK is so special to them, the therapeutic nature of American Mary and why they can’t wait to get started on ‘Bob’.
Last year Horror Channel broadcast the world premiere of ‘Dead Hooker In A Trunk’. What did that mean to you?
SS: When we were in the UK for FrightFest this year, we met so many people that were introduced to our work through the Horror Channel screenings - that gives an independent an audience they could never reach otherwise on a global scale. ??JS: The UK is very special to us. It's the first place the film showed at a festival and the first place it was released. It was only was fitting to have our television premiere where we've had such a stellar response. It was at the same time very surreal. We watched along via twitter with the fans and I think we crashed our twitter account half way through and had to carry on via Facebook, ha ha! And to have an intro from our horror girl crush, Emily Booth, was a dream come true.
How did that film change your lives?
SS: That film and more specifically the support we received from the horror community has changed our lives. We have this amazing opportunity to create unique films and we have brilliant people standing by the work to make it possible. We're promoting our second film, American Mary, now; what's different is we're getting the chance to travel and meet the people who have made this possible and watch the film with them. I feel like we're the luckiest horror nerds on the planet.
JS: Dead Hooker In A Trunk was a massive success due to the outstanding support of the horror community. First and foremost, we're horror fans ourselves and there's nothing like the feeling of having our fellow horror lovers embrace what we're doing. It's never been more easy to make a film in the way that we have so much technology and that makes it on the flip side a great struggle to stand apart from all the others, particularly for first time filmmakers. DHIAT has made us known filmmakers and that is a huge honour. We are so grateful to the people who have believed in us from the very beginning. They're the reason we're able to keep making films.
Your new movie American Mary, which opens in the UK in January, has made a huge impact across the globe and has critics clambering over themselves to heap praise upon it. Where did the idea come from?
SS: Thank you; it's a very personal story. We were fascinated about the body modification culture when stumbling upon it years ago and massively researching the subject matter. We were struggling after making DHIAT, this is before its release, poor as hell, starving, meeting monsters in the industry, and having all sorts of personal troubles. The script was very therapeutic - we put everything we were going through and ourselves into that story using mainstream medicine Vs body modification as analogies for mainstream film industry Vs the horror scene. We wanted to shift people's opinions on appearances on the surface as well as one person's struggles for success.??JS: We've always been outcasts and found friendship and acceptance with our fellow underdogs. That inability to accept people who are different comes largely from ignorance. The body modification community is largely misunderstood and seems to be the subject of modern day witch hunts. It makes no sense to me that cosmetic surgery is fully accepted whereas body modification is ridiculed. We wanted to educate people on body mod. It makes a perfect vessel for telling our story as well.
FROM JANUARY 11 2013, THE SOSKA SISTERS WILL BE IN THE UK FOR A NATIONWIDE THEATRICAL TOUR FOR AMERICAN MARY, COURTESY OF FRIGHTFEST AND UNIVERSAL