At $6,000, the horror film "Soft For Digging" was the cheapest movie ever screened at the Sundance Film Festival, even cheaper then "El Mariachi" and "The Blair Witch Project."
Created by J.T. Petty while at NYU's film school, "Soft For Digging" tells the story of a lonely old man searching for his cat in the woods. While wandering around, he stumbles on the bizarre murder of a little girl and he attempts to unravel the mystery behind it.
The nearly silent film has only a few bursts of dialogue and relies much more on suspense than it does shock value or the cheap thrills associated with many of today's scary movies.
Sounds are integral to the story, filling in the emptiness that the sporadic dialogue creates and forcing the audience to listen for clues about what is going on rather than looking for them. The main character crunches through the eerily quiet Maryland woods cloaked in his bathrobe for most of the film while the camera darts back and forth through the trees.
"Soft For Digging" has received much praise for the visual power and overall quality rendered on such a small budget. Most of the cast and crew are members of Petty's family and his friends, who have been regulars in Petty's numerous student films.
The story, though basic in plot, provided Petty with a lot of freedom visually.
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In an interview with the British online magazine Jigsaw Lounge at www.jigsawlounge.co.uk, Petty spoke about the visual impact the woods had on the film.
"For one of the big scenes I found this wood where it looked like all the trees had been killed about 10 years before, so there were no trees left thicker than an inch," Petty said. "Shooting through them was like looking through a crowd, and there was this green lichen all over the trees. Stuff like that influenced how I was going to represent the story visually, rather than influencing the actual story itself. This movie was pathologically planned out."
Petty, who after making "Soft For Digging" went on to write the script for the popular video game "Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell," was amazed with the positive reaction to the film.
"When we were doing 'Soft For Digging,' I really didn't think I'd have that much of an audience for it," he said. "It was just my final student film, I guess I couldn't imagine people would react as strongly as they have."
"Soft For Digging" is part of Madstone Theaters' Film Forward series, a showcase of unreleased films. Though slow at times, the film has many great moments. Several nightmarish dream sequences provide thrills while the comic undertone makes the boring daily routine of an isolated man bearable.
"Horror movies and comedies are almost a matter of tone, they're so close," Petty said. "All the good horror movies that I see, I see the audience laughing as much as gasping and laughter's so close to a growl or a grimace, it's like a way of signaling to yourself that things are OK."
For a student film "Soft For Digging" provides just the right mixture of soft comedy, creepy visuals and mystery to create an excellent horror film. Not bad for a $6,000 budget.
Madstone Theaters is at 6311 San Mateo Blvd.
