From Uruguayan filmmaker Maximiliano Contenti comes The Last Matinee, a blood-soaked love letter to the cinematic experience. Starring Luciana Grasso, Ricardo Islas, Julieta Spinelli, Franco Duran and Pedro Duarte, The Last Matinee follows a mysterious eye-nibbling killer who stalks a group of unsuspecting moviegoers and theater workers one rainy afternoon. The Last Matinee debuted in theaters earlier this month and is headed to VOD tomorrow, courtesy of Dark Star Pictures and Bloody Disgusting.
Daily Dead recently had the opportunity to speak with Contenti about his approach to The Last Matinee and during the interview, he discussed wanting to transport viewers back to a simpler time at the movies, the inspirations behind the film’s story and showcasing the directors and the movies that turned him into a film fan throughout his childhood as well.
Congratulations on the film, Maxi. It was so much fun. I would love to hear a little bit about what inspired you to want to create this one-location horror movie set within the confines of a movie theater. Honestly, though, I can't think of a better place to do it (laughs).
Maximiliano Contenti: Oh, definitely (laughs). Well, first of all, I always say the same thing, but what inspired the film was the location. It was the movie theater itself. First of all, that's a movie theater that I went to as a kid. Years ago, I did a commercial there too. I just started looking around, and it just felt like this movie theater was calling out for a horror movie to be shot there. So I knew I had to do something. Years later, I was struggling with other projects, not horror projects, but they were more like drama stories, and I wasn't getting funding. It wasn't working out. So I just went back to that idea because I needed to get something going and make something that was producible.
I knew I could contain a horror movie within this movie theater that inspired me and it just felt right. It felt like the hotel in The Shining. This movie theater, it's very old and it has a lot of history. So I went back and I scouted the theater, looked at the depth around the theater, and that's how it happened. So we wrote the script from that idea and we wanted to make it budget-friendly, too, so that would help us during production.
I think that's incredibly smart, and I think that theater location is wonderful because it reminded me of a lot of the theaters that I grew up going to. It feels like you go into these places now and you are transported to a totally different time.
Maximiliano Contenti: I agree. That was the other inspiration for this story because this theater was almost closed. And now, it is closed. The other thing was this feeling of going back. That was the other big inspiration. I liked the idea of going back to the time when I was a kid. And I wanted to set this story in this last era of big movie theater houses, before the multiplexes, and the time that I fell in love with movies in those theaters. So I just wanted to travel back in time to my childhood in the '90s, which was a more innocent time, I guess.
Also, I wanted to celebrate the communal experience of theaters back then, which is very different from today. I remember going to matinees, to go see movies like the [Teenage Mutant] Ninja Turtles when I was a kid, and being scared of it, too, because I was little. So there’s a lot of nostalgia in this movie where I wanted to just appreciate the past and the roots of my love of cinema.
I loved all of the references that you peppered throughout this movie. Obviously, Argento's Opera poster plays prominently throughout this, which was perfect. But I also noticed a lot of other movies like Army of Darkness, E.T., and so many other films too. It's clear from watching this that you, beyond being a talented filmmaker, you're also a movie fan. I was wondering if you could talk about adding in all those references here.
Maximiliano Contenti: Thank you. I'm a big film buff and I guess that's obvious with the movie. And I tried to hold myself back with the production designer and everything, but this was a project that was meant to show my love and all these connections. Maybe it has too many of them, but I thought they were fun (laughs). But the ones that you mentioned, actually, I had the idea to merge my inspirations in The Last Matinee. It's easy to call this a neo-Giallo, or like a love letter to Giallos and all that, but that's just the surface of it to me.
Once I came up with the story, I knew that it was going to be a slasher, and it's going to be inside a movie theater, so it's going to be about movies, and the Giallo aspect of it came naturally. And so we brought in the Mario Bava, the Fulci, and the Argento references, and all that. But my heart is in American cinema, too, because I grew up with Spielberg, plus the movies he produced, and directors like Raimi, Carpenter, and De Palma. So I think that there’s a merge of those loves in The Last Matinee. Plus, all the slashers and B horror films I grew up watching, too.
Heather A. Wixson was born and raised in the Chicago suburbs, until she followed her dreams and moved to Los Angeles in 2009. A 14-year veteran in the world of horror entertainment journalism, Wixson fell in love with genre films at a very early age, and has spent more than a decade as a writer and supporter of preserving the history of horror and science fiction cinema. Throughout her career, Wixson has contributed to several notable websites, including Fangoria, Dread Central, Terror Tube, and FEARnet, and she currently serves as the Managing Editor for Daily Dead, which has been her home since 2013. She's also written for both Fangoria Magazine & ReMind Magazine, and her latest book project, Monsters, Makeup & Effects: Volume One will be released on October 20, 2021.
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