(static crackling) - [Speaker 1] Hey, you wanna shut that off and give us a hand, dude?

Okay, when I say go ahead, that means turn it.

Okay, ready?

- Yeah.

- [Speaker 1] And go ahead.

Okay, Jim, bring the nose dive of the creature.

Okay, that's where you wanna go through.

Had the eyes sink in a little, Jim.

Pull that mechanism without moving the eyes.

- [Speaker 2] We're all ready.

(indistinct chatter) (suspenseful music) - [Narrator] It was an ordinary summer in the beautiful community of Lost Lake, but below the surface lurks a creature so menacing, so terrifying that you may never swim in the lake again.

Snapper!

(swimmer grunting) (woman screaming) (all screaming) When the dead start popping up, an innocent outcast is blamed.

His only ally, a beautiful woman pursued by an overzealous cop.

Together, they must stop the terror before it stops them.

Snapper!

(suspenseful music) A gripping horror, guaranteed to attract audiences with phenomenal special effects by Mass FX.

"Snapper," coming soon to a theater near you.

(loud eerie music) (static crackling) - Influences.

Friday the 13th, Halloween, we were both "Evil Dead" fans when that came out.

- I was influenced young.

I went to a movie as a kid called "Mark of the Devil."

(man screaming) And this is a movie where they pulled the tongue off of somebody and they gave you a barf bag when you walked into the theater.

- The prisoner has been sentenced to have his head cut off according to the law of the land.

- Now, I was underage, but we all went.

And every kid that went to this movie had nightmares.

And I will never forget, the moms were all talking.

"What movie did they go see?"

- [Announcer] "Mark of the Devi."

- I'm Mike Savino.

I was producer and director and screenwriter of "Snapper."

- Mark Veau, co-screenwriter and producer, 1989.

- I love the project.

- I do too, I still do.

- I remember Mark and we were in a computer class.

And I was in the back, and Mark was fresh out of basic training.

- That was at Worcester State College.

- From the moment I think that Mark and I met, we've just been instant collaborators.

- Mike was running the TV department.

I was running the radio station.

So there was that instant media connection.

That's where it started, And we just developed this love of screenwriting.

We combined those two loves to a common place, which is Media House Films or Media House Productions.

We were always going around our apartment shooting moldy bread, anything that caught our eye.

- We would either meet at his house or my apartment.

- Yeah.

- At the time.

And then he moved away.

And then we would meet halfway in a hotel lobby.

- [Mark] Right, right.

- [Mike] We would show up every week and we didn't stay there.

We would just sit at the lobby.

We would sit there for three- - [Mark] Three, four hours.

- And just write and have some food.

And we did that weekly for many- - Many years.

(static crackling) How did we come up with "Snapper?"

I'm trying to place it.

It was certainly after "Attack of the Killer Refrigerator."

(woman screaming) I mean, I can tell you how we thought of "Attack of the Killer Refrigerator," because it actually flipped on one night and sounded like a tank rolling down a hill.

(screaming continues) - Chris, Chris?

Are you okay?

- We had a little bit of success with the fridge, but we never really capitalized on it.

Even to this day, people will kill the fridge.

"It's the worst movie I've ever seen.

The production value stinks."

- Yeah, but- - I'm like, for $25, you go do it.

(Mark laughing) - Here I am, trying to make a movie and I'm getting reviewed on projects that we did in college.

- [Narrator] It was an ordinary summer in the beautiful community of Lost Lake, but below the surface lurks a creature so menacing, so terrifying that you may never swim in the lake again.

Snapper!

- I don't recall running into any snapping turtles that made us say, "Hey, this would be a great movie."

- I do know we were discussing us as kids at times, swimming in lakes and feeling fish, but like, "Oh, my goodness, what is that?"

- That's right, I remember.

- You know?

And that may have been the start of the story where we were just discussing what some of the creepy things in our lives.

And one of them for us was always like swimming in a lake.

- Swimming in a lake.

- We took that idea and then added in the concept of the turtle growing to huge proportions through waste disposals and crazy experiments gone wrong in small town.

- Not exactly an original impetus on how something can grow that big, obviously.

I think it's been used in every Godzilla movie.

But hey, it works.

But with "Snapper," it was just something Jaws-ish.

But we needed to differentiate.

And the differentiation was the animal we chose, which was a snapping turtle, which can be very dangerous, very vicious.

- [Speaker] Whoa.

- The story was, what was the original?

- Well, basically, an outcast is blamed for murders in a small town that he didn't commit.

We can go further into the corrupt politicians that are trying to skirt the Environmental Protection Agency, 'cause they know that this biotech lab is leaking bad stuff into the town's lifeblood, which is its lake.

Now they have a problem on their hands.

- All these murders start showing up.

Fred being the outcast in town, he starts to get blamed for these things, until there's a mutiny, at one point, where they literally come after him with, like- - The old pitchfork.

But the good thing about it is that differentiated it from Jaws is the shark couldn't come and knock on your door as much as Saturday Night Live had the land shark.

- [Shark] Telegram.

(audience laughing) - Oh, telegram, just a moment.

(actor screaming) - We knew that a snapping turtle could.

And when you have one that's 10 to 15 feet long, that it's gonna create some havoc.

So we thought, "There's an idea for a movie."

And not only do we come up with a concept.

We have a completed screenplay.

We worked on the writing of it for quite a while.

We flipped the title from "Below the Surface" to "Snapper."

We registered with the Writers Guild because it just had more meat, so to speak.

- I think the ending was the turtle obviously surfaces and everybody sees that it's the turtle.

And then it gets killed by Fred, right?

Does he run over with his truck?

- Yeah, I think he runs over it when he smashes into it in his truck.

- We sort of tied the beginning, 'cause he almost hits a turtle.

- At the beginning.

There's a little baby turtle crossing the road.

So there's some foreshadowing.

- Yeah, he kills it.

- He kills and becomes the hero, of course.

- And then the town celebrates.

- We're gonna put any air tanks and have him eat it and shoot it with a rifle.

That was already done.

- When we finished that script, we really loved it.

I mean, like any movie, you see it in your head, like any script, you see it in your head, you see the characters, you feel it.

You see the wonderful horror that it could bring out.

(light music) So getting off on a day one, it's a matter of, okay, we got these pages, what do we do?

How do we raise the money?

What are we gonna do?

Well, back then, you went to the library.

You research people that you could reach out to.

You either drove to New York or you flew to California to try to meet people.

So what our approach was, if we had something to show, we said, "Okay, let's make a trailer."

And I remember having a script that was just bits that we were gonna shoot, and then we just planned it.

And just buy film as we needed it.

"Snapper," we shot all on film.

We didn't wanna skimp going to video, like we did with all our other projects because of cost.

And we said, "Geez, we wanna be serious.

We wanna be looked at right.

That we can use film, that we can get the look."

It was 400 bucks for a roll.

I'll never forget that.

Each roll was $400.

And then we had to send it off to get transferred and developed.

And that was another $400.

So every 11 minutes of film was $800.

- [Mike] Oh, wait, (indistinct) over this light.

Okay, hold on.

- [Speaker] Over the light, huh?

- We basically pulled deep this one.

Everybody that we could ever get that worked with us on a project, we reached out to.

I grabbed Jerry Bagdasarian and he owned a 16 millimeter camera.

He was an old mentor type to us in many respects.

He was in his 70s, and we were in our 30s or late 20s, and he sort of told us all of his war stories of film back in the day.

And he shot a film called "The Vision of the Pie People," and he was really proud of that.

- The whole project kind of almost hinged on what Scott was able to do, because if we didn't have the big turtle head, we would didn't really have a whole lot to show.

- [Narrator] You could say he's the master monster maker of Massachusetts.

Scott Andrews has made quite a name for himself in New England by creating scores of horrific creatures guaranteed to put some bite into your Halloween.

- I always loved sculpting with my hands, and I got into special effects makeup, which had a lot of sculpting, learn how to do prosthetics, make Halloween masks.

And that led to Mike Savino, because I never forget going to his workshop and looking at some of the stuff that he made, the masks and the miniatures and just incredible work for a guy in Douglas.

Blew me away, and we became friends instantly.

- We did everything out of my shop.

It was in Douglas, Mass out of my house, which I'm still at the same house where I did a lot of commercials with Mike.

- We made a bunch of money flying out of a chimney once for Comgas.

- [Announcer] Your furnace works hard, day after day, year after year.

But after time, it takes more and more of your hard earned money to produce the energy that it once produced.

- He turned a lady into a fish, which was great.

She had gills and everything, and it was a thing for the business expo that they had coming on in town.

- [Announcer] Don't flounder in a sea of missed business opportunities.

Tackle your own catch at the Business Expo this October 17th, 18th and 19th.

- There was nothing around here for makeup.

They weren't even really filming on this coast back then.

Yu didn't have like the productions they do nowadays, which they started to at the end of the '90s.

They started to come in, but it was all independent films.

There was three or four different groups that were producing content at that time.

- [Jerry] Hey, Mike, you want me to pan down?

- [Mike] No, just leave them sort of straight up like that.

- Like that?

- Fore sure.

- [Jerry] We're gonna pull back, just swing by.

- The community itself was very small.

We all knew each other.

We all helped on each other's projects.

I mean, half of my early career was helping other people make their films, but the community itself in a whole was active, exciting.

And it wasn't Hollywood.

It was Central Mass.

- We thought back then we could build anything.

We would have built the Empire State Building if we wanted it.

- It was a time of filmmaking when you just did it for love, whatever the cost was, we just tried to make it.

- Mike asked if we could do movie props, and I had a friend of mine and we said, of course we can.

So we started fabricating turtle pieces.

And we did research on snapping turtles.

I mean, we really wanted to hear that it would take your hand off if it needed to.

- [Mike] They are the most unique little turtles you can ever see.

They look so menacing.

- [Scott] We started with drawings, start down looking at snapping turtles, and we wanted to stay pretty much to the true look of a turtle.

We didn't wanna mutate them other than size.

- It was a matter of we're not gonna be able to build a full size one.

- Okay, with the shell.

So we narrowed it down to the big head and the little guy, the cable controlled.

It was five feet long, six feet long, and it had a total jointed head, all cable controlled.

It was foam latex, fiberglass, and resin eyes.

- [Mike] Had the eyes sink and a little, Jim.

Pull that mechanism without moving the eyes.

- All right.

- Let's think about the head.

A little motion to it.

Give it a pull right now, Jim.

I wanna see what it does.

Yeah, that looks good.

Go in and out, kind of.

- [Jim] Yeah, wait a second.

I gotta put these back on.

- Yep.

- That was the first piece we got together.

- [Mike] Oh, good, ready?

And action.

Mouth.

- The big head could do anything.

Bite, look back and forth, up and down.

Come in and out.

Just didn't have a shell, so I figured that any of the shots I would do would be the head going in, grabbing and biting.

POV from behind the head.

Would been nice to have the shell, but we just couldn't afford it.

- For the whole turtle, we figured we'd go the miniature to save money and get better shots.

- And ready, Jim?

- Yep.

- [Mike] Action.

Okay, go one more time with the feet.

Hold on a second.

- [Mike] Small turtle, which was all cable controlled also to get the head to turn legs pumping.

- So there was two actual hero.

Props made for it the two turtles, a little turtle and a big turtle.

This was the actual.

This one was a cable control one, and that this is just one of the first pulls out of the mold.

Surprised it's still here.

(laughs) But this had cable controls, had a big rod coming out of its butt and all the little little legs move and a little head turned and twisted quite a bit for a little guy.

Me and another fella, Jim Auger, painted the models, and it's an airbrush, latex airbrush.

Pretty much like a Halloween mask.

Same type of stuff with the latex.

And it didn't involve process.

Back then, was all, you know, hit or miss.

"Is it right now?"

"We'll do it again."

(laughs) - And then where do we shoot this, right?

Where do we, you know, we can't put them in water.

- No.

- 'Cause they'll soak it up and turn into a sponge.

- The minute you hit the water, everything changes.

The parts are just fall apart, you know?

So now you have to repair everything that touches the water.

The rubber, everything you've built, the foam, everything wants to sink.

So there's your first problem.

- How do we create this water effect?

We didn't have a studio.

We didn't have much.

We had my apartment.

That was about it.

So we pulled the furniture out, put up all this black duvet.

Its cousin ate in the smog.

Figured out a way to smoke it and add a little bit of this texture in the air.

- [Speaker] I got in front of that one.

That's all over, Jim.

- The part we did the underwater was fun because it was just a crazy little.

We're in a room that was very small.

A bunch of guys trying to make it look like underwater.

- We sealed off the room so that the smoke would stay in it.

We did our best to shoot underwater scenes using smoke, slow motion, and miniatures and full size.

- It was tinfoil on a piece of plywood and that just rocked.

There's all crinkled and the lights hitting the tinfoil.

So now you got all these different rays reflecting.

- [Mike] Here we go, standby.

I'll give you the action cue.

Okay, we're going slow.

Crank it up.

And ready, Jim?

- Yep.

- [Mike] Action!

Okay, going one more time with the pick.

- So it looks like suspended water.

And then you have the light shining up from the bottom, hitting underneath the turtle as it was swimming by.

All of the animatronics worked that day.

And that was like the best day we had, with all the props working in this little bedroom.

- [Speaker 1] It was a little beyond her.

- [Speaker 2] Put your mouth next to the (indistinct).

- [Mike] And it came out really well for a low budget effect.

- Film gods were smiling on us for the brief moment they did with this project.

(light music) - [Mike] I wanna say we started at the end of August and ended October.

- I was gonna say I went from like August to October.

- It was early.

It was like early October.

And here we got people in the water, okay?

And I'm like, wow.

These were mainly weekends, because we all worked full time jobs.

So we did most of our shooting weekends or at night too.

- [Mark] Or at night.

- We were filming all Webster, Mass, Worcester, all the small towns around a small lake, There was a couple of lakes, actually.

Wherever we could sneak out and people wouldn't yell at us.

- Luckily, in Central Massachusetts, we have a lot of lakes, so we use Coes Pond.

- Coes Pond.

The reason we shot at Coes Pond is because the incline of the beach was very shallow, didn't drop off.

Most of the beaches, they sort of dropped off a little it.

We shot at Webster Lake.

- Webster Lake.

- Lake- - Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchau.

Some people think it means, you fish on your side of the lake, I'll fish on my side, and nobody fishes in the middle.

But that's kind of an old wives tale.

- I easily got permission from the Parks Department in Worcester, and it's right along the highway.

You drive by, you see a film crew there shooting a horror movie.

It was kind of funny guy, blood coming out of his- - Chest.

- Open chest, and we had a bunch of spectators.

- We also built a couple of decapitated heads, one that was used to pull up out of the water that looked like it was eaten by fish and chewed up and another head that a fellow gets pushed by the turtle into a dock and it knocks his head off.

The boat we were using to push along the guy was a pontoon boat, and that had a lot of people on it, so it was like a barge.

- The filming was crazy.

The pontoon boat was used to propel one of our actors backwards through the water, as if the turtle hit him in the chest, took a bite, and then propelled him where he got his head whacked on the dock.

- This is guerrilla filmmaking at its finest, because, I mean, just it's one of our friends.

"Sit on the seat, we're gonna push you through the water."

- And then we devised this little wood thing that came off the pontoon boat, which I think we held down with sandbags.

It wasn't really mounted.

- No.

- And then it went down into the water, across about 10 feet to a seat, where our actor could sit on.

That was one of the things that we had to plan in advance and build and bring down and hope it worked on the set.

And it did work, which was funny.

And we probably almost killed the actor one time, going towards the dock with his head in the frame and then trying to stop the boat in time.

- Easily could have gone wrong.

We don't do water anymore.

We all think we're invincible, and that at that time, we were, because nobody got hurt.

But you don't think of people getting hurt.

"Oh, I'm gonna jump off a building on fire."

"Okay, Ed, you just tell us when you're ready."

(both laughing) "We'll wait for you down here with extinguishers."

- We had the stuntman who eventually made his way out to L.A., but he wanted to do all these great stunts, laid himself on fire, jump off a building, smashed cars, flip cars.

The car scene was shot at a junkyard.

- It was a junkyard.

- The car was not registered, so we couldn't put it on the street legally.

So we had to do it on private property.

So we found a junkyard that would let us do this stunt.

(car engine revving) (car crashing) I think we left the car there.

- We did.

I don't think we had the fire scene, but he said he could do it.

We said, "Oh, that'd be great for a trailer."

A guy falling from a building engulfed in flames?

Yeah, right there.

I was very nervous.

We had no insurance.

We were just doing.

- We didn't even have permission to film where we were filming.

We just show up.

- We had thousands of boxes.

Remember the big shipping boxes?

'Cause the stuntman said he needed the exact same box so we could build a big square.

It was like six foot tall or something huge.

And so I went over to this candy store who happened to be a friend of mine, and she's in "Snapper," and she owned this Heber Candies at the time.

And they would get thousands and thousands of boxes, and I'm like, "Okay, I want these."

And I filled up my front porch with boxes, and the landlord came over and screamed at me to get rid of them because it was a fire hazard, 'cause here I have thousands of boxes in my fort.

- We're using it for somebody to set himself on fire after.

(suspenseful music) (indistinct yelling) (stuntman yelling) - We put together the trailer.

I'll be honest, the more I watched it, the more I was a little disappointed in what I was seeing.

(suspenseful music) It didn't have any turtle.

And I looked at it, I'm like, "This is not gonna do it."

We didn't have the big crunch head moment.

We got the blood shooting around it, but we don't have that money shot.

We were waiting on the turtle to be done.

And when we got the second version of the trailer with the turtle, I started to feel a little better.

We said, "Okay, I think it's good enough."

We packaged just a little bit of a letter, and then we just started sending it out to different studios, independent people.

- These are just full foam props that we made for promotion.

Mike wanted to have a bunch of little turtles he could send out to people.

We were more than confident that once people saw the trailer that we would get the financing.

- And he put the money in.

You can see it on all the shots that it's very professionally made.

We're passionate about.

This is gonna do it.

Boom, sent it in, sent it in, sent it in.

Nothing.

- It ended up that Mike couldn't get the financing.

So everything stalled.

- We don't even know if they got the stuff.

There was no communications.

It was a small club.

If you really are an agent and getting through or you were an independent like us and getting tossed- - No one was in it for a big payday.

So everybody was behind 100%.

We all wanted to see it go somewhere, but we know it's a lot of work to get a movie made.

But we did the best we could.

- I would probably say in the order of probably $8,000 to do what we did.

Between food and other things that we put in, I'll put on a credit card.

After "Snapper," we realized that in order to get a movie made, you have to reduce the locations, reduce the characters, right?

"Snapper" was big, and that's when we learned that in order to make a movie, you really have to watch what you can accomplish for the money that you can raise.

(bright music) - Excuse me.

Sorry, I, uh.

Can you spare some change?

- [Mike] I think we moved on to "Days Before."

- Yeah, we did, "Days Before Christmas."

- Mark saw something that there was a contest going on for HBO.

(person screaming) - Hey.

Look at this.

The Freak had a Christmas present for him.

- I think we had a month to get it done, to raise the money, write the script, shoot it, and get it out to them.

And we did it.

You had to be under 10 minutes.

- The "Days Before Christmas" won the Houston International Film Festival in its category.

The 25th annual, yeah.

So we went down to Houston with that.

So every project will get you to the next level in some way, shape, or form.

- I went into the Halloween end of it.

I started setting up Spooky World.

- We are here at Spooky World in Berlin, Mass, one of the premiere horror theme parks in the country.

- [Reporter] People are getting the yells scared out of them at Spooky World in Massachusetts.

- He really made it spooky.

Just look up here, Jay.

Is that spooky or what?

Oh, boy, come on inside.

I'm at the American Horror Museum.

- The last few months, everybody calls wanting for their haunted houses and all this stuff across the country.

I even send out, I got letters from Germany and Japan now.

I'm starting to get people know about me that are calling, and it's real hectic.

Halloween back in the early '90s was huge.

It was a big moneymaker.

So I ended up making props for haunted houses and stores.

It started off as just a haunted hayride.

It wasn't called Spooky World at the beginning.

- [Interviewer] What was your favorite part?

- The "Texas Chainsaw Massacre."

- I was approached to do a mile hayride through the woods, and so I ended up setting up the first hayride with the props, all the different things you'd stop and see on the ride.

- [Interviewer] Can you talk a little bit about other film projects and other things that you've worked on?

- The only movie that ever made it was "Next Stop: Wonderland" that I built a puffer fish that had to swim down in the Boston Aquarium.

It was a hectic shoot, and that started me in the big budget film, and that actually was one of the reasons I wanted to get out of it, because it was so chaotic.

I didn't like how you were treated on a movie set.

You would just hurry up and do it, and if it didn't work, you were in trouble.

It was just a lot of pressure.

That eventually turned into toys, sculpting all different size toys.

And I used to sculpt the 12-inch line of Hasbro Star Wars figures, and I still sculpt today, but (chuckles) I don't think that will go away.

(light music) - Now, here's the thing, ideas can always be revisited.

- I definitely think "Snapper" can come back, Mark.

What do you think?

- I think so.

It's a timeless story, perhaps.

Everybody likes the horror scenes down by the lake or the water.

- So much has been learned.

So much has been paved in our own growth that I think we can bring this project and make it really exciting.

- We still have that kid in us when it comes to coming up with story ideas or working on certain scenes, and every time we do something, it becomes better than it was the last time that we looked at it.

But we still get excited when we call each other, and it's every day we talk.

Very grateful for the friendship that we've had.

"Snapper" can come back.

It can come back.

- Yeah, no, definitely.

I think today stronger better than ever.

Anybody wants it.

There it is.

It's all done.

You don't even have to write it.

- (laughs) It's already written.

- And it's good, I think.

- Yes, I think so.

(light music) (light music continues) (electronic music) (light music)