Claysville filmmaker returns with ‘The Barn, Part II’
Courtesy of Scream Team Releasing
Actor Ryan James, left, and Justin Seaman at a screening of “The Barn, Part II” at the Popcorn Fright Film Festival in Miami
Courtesy of Screen Team Releasing
Lexi Dripps in “The Barn, Part II”
Courtesy of Screen Team Releasing
Mitchell Musolino (left) and Lexi Dripps in “The Barn, Part II”
What do Francis Ford Coppola and Claysville filmmaker Justin Seaman have in common?
They had to be arm-twisted into making sequels to their biggest successes.
Coppola was reluctant to embark on the two sequels to “The Godfather,” and Seaman needed some heavy persuasion to launch a follow-up to “The Barn,” his 2016 movie about high school buddies who unleash a whole lot of fright when they stop at an abandoned barn on Halloween. “The Barn” became a hit among fans of low-budget horror, but the process of making it was so fraught that Seaman was disinclined to build another “Barn.”
“We had a really rough time making the first movie,” Seaman explained. “It was a passion project, but it was so hard to finish. … The movie just broke me.”
More specifically, Seaman had to scrap and redo parts of the movie due to technical snafus, and had to call actors back into service to get it done. But once “The Barn” took off on the thriving circuit of horror film festivals, Seaman decided that if a sufficient number of fans chipped in to cover the cost, he would proceed with a sequel.
“I finally got to the point where I said, look, I will do crowdfunding, and if enough people come forward and put the money up that I need to make it, then I’ll do it,” Seaman said.
In August “The Barn, Part II” was finally unveiled with a world-premiere screening at the Hollywood Theater in Dormont. It’s expected to land on DVD in October, and Seaman is looking for a streaming outlet. Both “Barn” movies look back lovingly on the 1980s horror movies that Seaman discovered in video stores when he was a kid, like the “Halloween” and “Nightmare on Elm Street” cycles. A 2004 graduate of McGuffey High School, both movies were largely shot around Claysville, but have cast members with national profiles, among them Joe Bob Briggs, the comic performer and film critic, and Lexi Dripps, the Pittsburgh-born actor who appeared in the Nickelodeon series “Super Ninjas.”
Seaman briefly ventured out to Los Angeles to work in the television and film industry, but quickly came to realize he could make the movies he wanted and still be close to home. He, and other independent filmmakers like him, have been assisted by the flexibility and relatively low cost of modern-day equipment.
“Being out there, I realized really quick that I was not going to get the opportunity to do my own stuff,” Seaman said. “I was working with assistant directors who had been assistant directors for 25 years. … And I was like, no, I want to direct.”
He added, “For a small period of time when I came back, I thought I had made the wrong decision, but it was a good decision, because if I had stayed out there, I always would have been working for someone else rather than working for myself.”
Along with continuing to live and work in the Claysville area, Seaman admits to feeling some nostalgia for the days when he worked at Claysville Family Video and the days when people had to actually leave their houses, go to a store and pick a movie to rent, rather than having a gusher of movie history be available by pushing a few remote buttons or with a few mouse clicks.
“There’s obviously that instant gratification,” he explained. “But there’s just something about being able to go to the physical location of a video store and pick something up. There was something really nice about that, because you knew that if it was a good movie, you could go back and talk to someone and tell them how much you enjoyed it, or, man, that one really stunk.”
And though Seaman has ambitions to make other types of movies – “I don’t always want to be the ‘Barn’ guy,” he said – he noted that “The Barn, Part III” is not out of the question.
“I would do a “Barn III” if there’s a demand for it, just like the last one,” he said. “It’s been a long few years. But unlike the last time, I’m much more willing to jump into it again.”