Director Scooter Corkle Talks Cosmic Horror THE GAME OF FRIENDSHIP

Hello, my friends. Barbara here. Written by Damien Ober and directed by Scooter Corkle, THE FRIENDSHIP GAME examines the notion of how acquiring your deepest, deepest desire impacts your friendships and the people around you. It's an interesting idea to consider, and seen through a horror lens, it gets a little dark. Starring Peyton List, Brendan Meyer, Kelcey Mawema, Kaitlyn Santa Juana, and Dylan Schombing, it will hit theaters, digital, and on-demand November 11, 2022. I had the opportunity to speak with Scooter about the project. Check it out!

If your deepest, deepest desire came true, what kind of impact would it have on your friendships?

“Ah. That’s a dark question, Barbara. Honestly, I don’t know. free time. I don't know if that's my deepest desire. The darkest, deepest desire, I'm not going to repeat it on camera."

I racked my brains trying to figure out what mine would be like. If mine came true, I don't think it would have a negative impact on anyone.

“Yeah. Well, you never know. This is the problem with the deepest desire; because it's so selfish, you never really know how it's going to affect other people.

It's true. How did you become involved in this project and what appealed to you about the story?

"I think I originally did my first feature film, and I was looking for the next one. I contacted Dan Bekerman, our producer. He was a friend of mine from Toronto, and I was looking for something weird. My first was a thriller. It was a dark thriller in a small town, which was really fun, but I wanted to get a little weird. I asked him if he had something there , and The Friendship Game landed, and I read it. It was weird. It was mind-blowing, and it was cosmic horror, and the coolest part about it, I think, was that it was character-driven. It was a cerebral read.

“Potentially the first thing that really stuck with me was this idea of ​​your friendships. If your friendships don’t survive the game, neither will you. left me behind?" As an adult, that's not really a question you get asked a lot. of things, I mean, the stakes are life or death to them, or it feels like life or death to them, so the game itself pushes it to the limit and makes it life or death. that was pretty cool for a horror movie, a pretty good approach to starting one."

Yes. You had kind of a Lost Highway character morphing moments, and you also had some video glitches, for lack of a better description. Could you talk about these choices and why they matter?

“Yeah. Because it's cosmic horror, because it's a cerebral genre, I think what makes this pantheon cool is that it's an exploration of madness, the intangible madness of the self . Anything that stems from this question of what is your deepest desire and how does it affect the people around you is a very personal starting point. So when we get into all the wild sci-fi stuff, you don't really know where you are. You are not necessarily in a new reality, or maybe you are. It could be an “altiver”, as I called it, an alternate universe. The choice to get there, I think, is to get inside the character's head, whether you're physically in their head or in another space, and [ask] that question and give that space and then see a yes or a no and see the repercussions based on a yes or a no, with disastrous effects for some, not for all, but for some."

Was the writer on set at all or once he...