[This article is part of an ongoing series profiling New York films and filmmakers at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. Click here for other features in the series.]
Full disclosure: I was in an awful horror-film rut when I interviewed Jeffrey Crook, one-half of the Crook Brothers team that made what sounds like it could be 2006’s most terrifying Sundance entry, Salvage. The story of a woman (Lauren Currie Lewis, right) who suffers a brutal murder only to relive the incident again and again (and, naturally, to try solving the mystery of why it happens), Salvage is the horror film I am counting on to wash Hostel‘s and Wolf Creek‘s bad tastes out of my mouth.
Like the Crooks need that tiny, added pressure with their movie a week away from its world premiere in Sundance’s Midnight program. But so far, so good, to hear Jeffrey Crook tell it.
“What I see missing in things is that there’s no mystery,” Crook said, patiently reacting to my anti-Hostel broadside. “There’s none of that supernatural side in a lot of the slasher type stuff. Ours is sort of a mystery wrapped in a horror shell, and there are a lot of kind of supernatural hints at things that are going on. I think the overall feel of it is a little more mysterious than just thing where somebody’s getting chased around for the entire movie with a chainsaw. And our approach to it was that we wanted to have scary stuff–we wanted to have her going down dark staircases and into basements and creeping around and things like that, because that stuff just wotks as scary scenes. But we also wanted to drop all these creepy hints. The Ring was so successful because it’s just mysterious. You don’t know what the hell’s going on through it, you know?”
Sure, I know, and it actually pisses me off even more that I have to wait another days before I can check it out. But that is not the Crooks’ problem. In fact, it does not sound like the Brooklyn natives and current Sunnyside residents have many problems at all when it comes to Salvage. Shot in the small town of Marietta, Ohio, where Joshua Crook attended college and met his future wife, the film is the brothers’ fourth film in as many years. It follows the the buzz-packing tradition of their previous indies, which landed distribution with Artisan, Lionsgate and most recently, in the case of their dark comendy The Fittest, won best picture at the 2004 Valley Film Festival.
Of course, this is Sundance, and while Crook tells me he is thrilled to be making his first trip, he adds that he and Joshua have no idea what to expect. “It’s kind of overwhelming for us in that it gets you so much attention you didn’t otherwise have,” he told The Reeler. “We’ve been in guerilla filmmaker land out here for years. It really gets you connected to a lot of people in the industry and bumps you up another level. We’re sort of taking other people’s advice on what we should do.”
But with a film this promising–and producer’s rep like Washington Square’s Christopher Pizzo and (as of last week) the Gersh Agency on their sides–it is likely some solid advice. Well, a lot better than Hostel, anyway.

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