Gal Pal Camp Massacre VII

Director Statement

In late 2025, my producing partner and I decided we wanted to enter the 2026 Run ‘n’ Gun competition, where we’d be tasked with completing a film within 48 hours. I had the idea to make a slasher parody pretty early on, so I wrangled together a team of collaborators I knew would be up for the challenge. But, of course, one of the rules of Run ‘n’ Gun is that you can’t write your script ahead of time, so there was only so much we could actually prepare.

As the 48 hours began, four surprise elements were announced, which every team had to include in their films.

An object: A Mirror

A theme: Nature

A line of dialogue: “You can’t ____ in here, this is ____.”

And a final mystery element: Characters cannot interact with any kind of screen (TV, Phone, Computer, Tablet, etc).

All we had in our pocket when the competition kicked off was a location, our cast, and a general vibe. Slashers are a pretty formulaic genre, after all, so the structure was there too. For whatever reason, quite a few people seemed to think we’d pre-written the script — which I suppose I can only take as a compliment. But in reality, if we HAD actually pre-written it, I promise the film would have turned out even better.

Instead, we wrote the entire script in about six hours, from 7pm Friday to 1am Saturday morning, while simultaneously sending friends out to scour thrift stores and Party City for props and set dressing. We were on location by 8am and shot until 3am Sunday morning, without a shotlist, and including a complete rewrite of the third act mid-shoot just to make up time.

Then things got really stupid.

In a state of early-morning delirium, our DoP accidentally swapped backpacks with my co-editor and took the hard drives containing all our footage home instead of his camera bag. This delayed our already-late start to the edit even further, as our DoP was completely out cold and not answering his phone. In the morning, we had to drive to his apartment and start ringing his neighbours on the intercom, inventing a story about him having our producer’s house keys because it was considerably easier to explain. Luckily, they knew him, and a few minutes of pounding on his door later, we had our drives back.

Then Adobe decided to join in.

A software glitch prevented us from installing a three-day-old Premiere update — the same version our DIT had used to log the footage — meaning we couldn’t even open the project file. After another hour of debugging, we finally started editing at noon, leaving us just seven hours to edit and deliver the film.

We quickly realized in the editing suite we’d shot waaaay too much footage. Entire sequences were cut, and many shots were severely trimmed in order to fit within the time limit for the competition. The film still worked, but it was a far cry from what it had the potential to become. I knew from that moment a director’s cut would be in order.

And now, it’s finally complete.

Gal Pal Camp Massacre VII was designed to be ridiculous from the start, and the chaos of making it ended up becoming a pretty perfect match for the film itself. It’s a scrappy, excessive, deeply unserious love letter to the kind of 80s slasher movies, late-night comedies, and saturday-morning cartoons my team and I grew up watching — and apparently, we’re not quite done with it yet.

A sequel (or prequel) is already in the works, and next time the production cycle will be a lot longer than 48 hours.