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Filmmaker Scooter McCrae discusses his latest sci fi thriller BLACK EYED SUSAN.

Scooter McCrae, a Brooklyn native, is a passionate filmmaker with a diverse skill set encompassing directing, editing, composing, and more. His love for science fiction, cultivated during his youth and making Super 8 films, led him to study at SUNY Purchase. McCrae's professional journey began as a production assistant to Frank Henenlotter, working on the cult classic "Basket Case 2." He subsequently launched his directorial career in 1994 with the zombie film "Shatter Dead," followed by the 1999 science fiction offering "Sixteen Tongues." In 2015 he released a short film, “Saint Frankenstein,” which won several awards at quite a few genre film festivals.

Filmmaker Scooter McCrae

BLACK EYED SUSAN, the latest film from director Scooter McCrae, explores the complexities of artificial intelligence and the human connection. After a nine-year hiatus, the director returns with a thought-provoking story about Derek (Damian Maffei), a struggling Uber driver who agrees to beta test a new product for his scientist friend Gilbert (Marc Romeo). The product is Susan (Yvonne Emilie Thälker), a strikingly realistic A.I. sex doll designed to cater to men with violent sexual tendencies.

Marc Romeo as Gilbert in Scooter McCrae's BLACK EYED SUSAN.

Susan can't walk, but she possesses lifelike skin and hair, and can be programmed with various personality types, ranging from sensual to aggressive. Disturbingly, she is designed to show bruising and lasting damage when struck. As Derek begins to question the morality of the project, he uncovers difficult truths about himself and is forced to make a life-altering decision about his own future and Susan's.

Vinegar Syndrome's original production, BLACK EYED SUSAN, has been making waves at genre film festivals. Filmmaker Alex Kuciw recently discussed the film with Scooter in anticipation of its upcoming screening at Cinematic Void in Los Angeles on Monday, December 9, 2024, at 7 PM. Also, in advance of the film's special edition Blu-ray release from Vinegar Syndrome. Their conversation offers a unique insight into this thought-provoking project.

(L-R) Yvonne Emilie Thälker as Susan and Damian Maffei as Derek in Scooter McCrae's BLACK EYED SUSAN.

FEARS: For those who haven't heard about your new film, what is the premise of BLACK EYED SUSAN?

SCOOTER: BLACK EYED SUSAN is about a guy named Derek who's down on his luck and is hired by an entrepreneur friend from the past. And that job entails him basically beating up on a sex doll to help develop it’s A.I. And what makes this sex doll different is that when you hit it, it bruises, and the bruises then heal. So, it's basically this poor guy having this moral dilemma, needing the money and wanting and ending up having to do something that kind of goes against his beliefs. And then from there in, drama happens. I'm quoting "Barbarella" now — ‘a great many dramatic situation begins with a scream’.

FEARS: What were the origins of the new film and why did you want to make it your next project?

SCOOTER: BLACK EYED SUSAN is unusual for me because, it actually began life in as part of another script. It was the B story in a script called “Narrowcaster,” about a woman who wakes up one day and discovers that there's a website that is, broadcasting her point of view. And she discovers she's part of a growing network of people, whose points of view are being broadcast and that other people can watch and choose whose points of view they want to watch. So, that was the A story and then the BLACK EYED SUSAN story was the B story in there. These two stories were happening simultaneously and then halfway through the script, they meet, and they become a third story. It was meant to be my science fiction “Nashville,” and when I say Nashville, I'm referring to the Robert Altman film, where it's all these disparate story threads that suddenly come together, all these various characters. So that was my lofty goal. And I discovered that in the process of writing this script, that I'm just not as talented a writer as I thought. I couldn't get it to work in one, two, maybe even three drafts. As I was left looking at it, I thought maybe I can salvage this for parts or something, so I reached in and I grabbed out the B story, which now is BLACK EYED SUSAN, which is the guy training the AI of the sex doll. And it's a pity, because there were some really interesting things that developed, you know, that are different than where we are now.

One of the reasons that I chose this B story, was that it was workable and was affordable to shoot. You know, the original “Narrowcaster” script was far, far more expensive, and would have been crazy. I just didn't think I could afford to shoot that on my own. Whereas BLACK EYED SUSAN was far more restricted in terms of locations, characters. All the things that you look for when you're putting together a low budget project. So, it was ideal in that sense. I thought, yeah, you know what? I can actually do this on my own if I needed to. I could probably just squirrel together, like, you know, 25 to 50K and hang up curtains and just shoot, like, in a black box with no sets and I'd still have something. And it would make sense because it was so, it's so performer driven, story driven, character driven, without, any worries about, like, crowd scenes or, the great outdoors or odd settings or anything expensive.

FEARS: For anybody whose reading this interview, I provided feedback on those early drafts of “Narrowcaster” and I thought you did pull it off really well. I wouldn't discredit yourself. It was just an expensive movie.

SCOOTER: Thank you, sir. Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't mind going back to that idea. I think “Narrowcaster” still has a lot of interesting ideas. Perhaps to see if I can retool it without the BLACK EYED SUSAN part, you know?

FEARS: As you said in your description of BLACK EYED SUSAN, it has some very difficult subject matter and, without spoilers, it does contain scenes of sexual assault and rape. It can be triggering, especially for newer audiences. But the themes in the film are much larger. I wonder if one of these themes for you is the concept of ‘man as violent animal’ and what was it about these themes that you were looking to explore in the movie?

SCOOTER: I think of myself as a respectable, for the most part, individual who is well educated and, has always grown up around and had more female friends, and I mean friends, just like, you know, friends. Not anything romantic. And even women as authority figures have never been a problem for me. I love the idea of having, let's say, a female president. I've never minded working and having female bosses or anything like that.

It's interesting because to your point there's this ingrained, primitivism maybe just hardwired into the male psyche, you know? You’ll get these flashes of terrible thoughts in your heads, things you think of saying, or ones that you would never actually say. I mean, everyone has had these thoughts. I know it's not just me. So, with that in mind, I guess I was able to write what I thought was something universal. And no matter how smart and reasonable you think you are, there are just some things that are just primitive thoughts that you'll never be able to stomp out of your brain and clean out entirely. It'll be in the back, in the dark areas. Even when I'm at my happiest and everything's going great, I always like to just kind of take out a mental flashlight and put a little light on the darkest corners and just see what's there still. I feel like there's always something nasty or awful just off to the side, just out of peripheral vision that if you turn fast enough, you'll catch the tail end of it and be like, well, what was that?!!?

(L-R) Damian Maffei as Derek & Yvonne Emilie Thälker as Susan in Scooter McCrae's BLACK EYED SUSAN

FEARS: Knowing you as I do, as a dear friend, I don't see that element in you or have ever seen it in you, but I've known other people, other males, in my life that have that aggressive, violent nature. It's sort of built into our DNA no matter what. I think that's one of the things that was fascinating about your new movie. One of the other themes is technology being used to solve for this in this particular case, solve that?

SCOOTER: I just want to jump back to something you just said because it's interesting as we've been friends a long time and, you know, just sitting around having a beer, we say dreadful things and then we laugh. And just because you say something terrible, doesn't mean that you mean it. In fact, it's so goddamn funny sometimes to say the most horrible things. Sexist, racist, whatever. You know—garbage. It comes at you because you just kind of like, you got it out of the way.

FEARS: There’re people who really do think that way unfortunately. But yeah, I would say we're laughing at it because we know how ridiculous and absurd it is. Almost making fun of it and having a laugh at it.

SCOOTER: Yeah, exactly. But, to your point, there are people who actually believe that, and we're laughing at the fact that someone would believe that or think that you'd be like, oh, you got to be kidding me. How could that be a real thing in someone's head? So, I guess that's part of where this all stems from too, I mean, the movie and on a certain level is its absurdism.

It's absurd. And so, I'm able to justify it in my mind in that way. Technology here providing a bandage over man's worst nature. It's a great way of putting because it is like a Band-Aid.

FEARS: I think for people who are seeing this movie, the shock of maybe the initial scene and some of the scenes afterwards sort of gives way to this idea that technology is being used, to make money to solve this issue. Why is either the horror or the sci fi genre such a good method of exploring the story in this way?

Yvonne Emilie Thälker as Susan in Scooter McCrae's BLACK EYED SUSAN

SCOOTER: On a certain level, there's just really no other genre to actually explore it in because, like in this movie in particular, people are openly talking about these subjects, about capitalism, about abuse, about male toxicity, things like that. Like it's addressable when you're doing it in a genre, like if you did it in a real-life situation without the science fiction trappings, you couldn't talk about it as openly just because it would just sound like a diatribe, like if it was a Cassavetes film or something, people started talking like that, it would just make no sense.

Horror, for the most part, good horror really isn't about analyzing and taking things apart. It's about being scary. And a lot of times not knowing what's going on or feeling like you're off balance is what makes horror, horror. So that's why I don't think that that genre is not as well suited for this as this story. Even though BLACK EYED SUSAN is being lumped as a science fiction slash horror piece, I don't think it's really horror at all. It's science fiction.

FEARS: In terms of the movie coming together, did the subject matter and/or themes cause any issues with its casting or in the actual making of the movie?

SCOOTER: There were definitely some issues, with getting people to work on the movie based on the subject matter. I know from talking to the producers that they had a slightly harder time than usual finding some crew people because some outright said no. I'm not even sure if they'd read the script. They might have only just heard what it was about. I know that when I was initially talking to a lead actor some time back, they read the script and said, no, this is not something that I want to be associated with. It's a good script, but I don't want to be associated with it. And, once we gathered our cast that's in the movie now together, what's nice is none of them had any issues.

During the audition process, and or on set, there was never any on set questioning or doubting what we were doing or backtracking and saying, wait, that wasn't in the script because everything was in the script and very explicitly written out. You know, it read like pornography sometimes, but it was necessary to make sure that everyone was on the same page. In fact, there was even a note in the script that said just that, like, “Hi, I'm writing everything out, so you know what's going on. But no, it doesn't mean we're shooting it as explicitly as it's written.”

But I do know from talking to producers after the fact that, some crew members were like, “What the fuck are we shooting here? What is this?” Our lead performer, Yvonne Emilie Thälker, who plays Susan, was basically naked for eight days of our nine-day shoot, or semi-naked, depending on what we were shooting. And I think sometimes it made some crew people just a little bit uncomfortable. But what was interesting is that I think they gained comfort when they saw how comfortable they were on set, because Yvonne was never trying to quickly cover up or scurry about. They had done quite a bit of nude modeling. So, for them, this was just another gig. And that was kind of great because you don't want to have any of your actors be uncomfortable, around other people in that way, because then things just start to freeze up.

What’s great is that when I found the other actors, the three male roles, major male roles, the Susan role had already been cast. And I think that helped with the other performers in there because they were like, “Who's going to play this? Do you have someone yet for this role?” I'm like, oh yeah, the first person cast. I think that made them think, “Oh, okay. Well, if that role's been taken, then, everything's all right.”

The cast & crew of BLACK EYED SUSAN at the film's premier at the 2024 Fantasia Film Festival.

FEARS: Let me ask how you did cast your BLACK EYED SUSAN then, Yvonne Emilie Thälker?

SCOOTER: Yvonne is someone who I found randomly because one day going through my Instagram feed, I saw a photo of them and I was like, “Oh, wow. That's an incredible look.” And I noted that, they lived in Brooklyn, which is where I live. I was like, oh, that's cool. Then I see that they have modeling rates. I’m like, wait a minute, I can actually get in touch with this person. I could set up a modeling session and talk to them. And they're just, you know, a 15-minute Uber ride away from me here in Brooklyn. It's just such an amazing series of coincidences.

So, I contact them and did a photo shoot over at their place and didn't tell them that the reason I wanted to do the photo shoot was because I was thinking about them for a role in a movie. I didn't want to put that kind of pressure on the session. I just wanted to, you know, just get some shots and see them in person talking and see what they were like. And it turned out, of course, that they were just very easy to deal with a very cool, great, effusive personality. I also noted on their bookshelf that they had a bunch of Philip K. Dick books, which I thought was a great sign. So, when we did finish up the photo shoot I said, “Hey, listen, I'm thinking of making a movie, and it's about this, can I send you the script to take a look at?” And then we went back and forth a little bit, and they were like, wow, this is really intriguing. It's a pretty crazy script in part, but, you know, it has something to say about male-female relationships and its science fiction, that was very interesting to them. I was like, well, if you like Philip K Dick, you'll like this—this is Philip K Dickless.

Yvonne is one of the most beautiful looking people I think I've ever seen in my life. You know, and I keep comparing them to David Bowie. This kind of magnetism, you just instantly drawn in and just want to look at them.

FEARS: Your other main character in BLACK EYED SUSAN is a down-on-his-luck guy named Derek whose job it becomes to test this advanced sex doll, but more importantly develop its artificial intelligence. So, I wanted to ask, what are your thoughts on AI, in terms of the future of filmmaking?

SCOOTER: I know I’m going to get a lot of flak from people for this, but I'm fine with the A.I. that's out there. You know, basically AI does what every artist does, which is, it aggregates from everything that it has seen and has been put in its head and comes up with something based on all of that, which basically describes all of us. We do it more soulfully, and we add a pinch of creativity and a dash of idiosyncrasy and I think it’s that pinching, that dashing which is something A.I. is incapable of doing. It will frankly never be capable of that, because that is something that differentiates us from computers.

I think instead of worrying about how A.I. is going to put writers out of jobs, we need to make ourselves better. We need to be better writers. We need to be better filmmakers. Because, yeah, they can do that stuff now. Maybe it’s because we've just gotten lazy, you know, we're still telling the same fucking stories in the same fucking way. And it's easy for an A.I. to come in and match that now. And we've got to find new stories to tell and new ways of telling them in order to stay ahead of the A.I.

You know, we had 100 years of cinema. We've got a couple of thousand years of Aristotelian story structure. And I don't know what the next step is myself, but I do know that I'm not worried about an A.I. coming in and writing what I write. Maybe if I was writing sitcoms, I'd be terrified. Because if you're a writer or a person who's working strictly to formula and not inserting your own personality into the work then, yeah, be afraid. Be very afraid.

FEARS: I'm curious to know, though, would you use A.I. to make a feature film or a short?

SCOOTER: I just have no desire and I'm drawn to it in no way whatsoever. But I've seen people do some pretty great stuff with it. Like anything else, there are positives too. I mean, if you're someone who is not artistically inclined and you can find a way to express yourself through A.I. that enriches your life in some way, I think that's a great thing.

Here I am with all my electronic music gear beside me. I'm not a musician, but the fact that I can make music, in quotes, with this stuff is enriching and, allows me to be expressive. I don't know how I would live without it. Like, I'll never be a guitarist or a pianist. And those, I mean, those are musicians. Those are valuable roles. Those are people with incredible talent. But that doesn't mean that I should be disqualified from finding a way to make noises that relax or otherwise express something that I feel needs to be expressed. So, in some ways, it's like a prestige piece, you know, a prosthetic device for people who need it.

FEARS: How soon before Elon Musk watches BLACK EYED SUSAN and owes you the residuals for making it a reality?

SCOOTER: The great thing about, BLACK EYED SUSAN is that although I profess endlessly about how science fiction needs to have a basis in scientific fact at its core, otherwise, it's not science fiction. But the idea of a doll that bruises and then the bruises heal is ridiculous. It's not going to happen. It's just never going to happen. In the same way that I don't think you're going to get androids that can walk in any way that looks even remotely convincing to another human being.

That's also the thing with science fiction. You got to pepper in a lie with something that sounds plausible. So, of course, the A.I. we all know could be a part of an intelligent sex doll. I mean, we're pretty much almost there at this point with them. It’s just a matter of the realism. They can get them looking pretty damn real, and they can put some machinery in it to make it move a little bit more. You might be able to get it to react, so if you do punch a doll they might be able to scream at you. I agree with that. Yeah. Absolutely.

And Elon should send the residual checks to Scooter McCrae, care of the lowest level of hell. Don't worry if it gets lost, Satan forwards all my mail.

FEARS: Going back to BLACK EYED SUSAN, you worked once again with Italian composer Fabio Frizzi, who not only scored some of the greatest Italian horror films of the 1980s (Zombie, The Beyond, City of the Living Dead) but also scored your horror short film that I produced called “Saint Frankenstein.” Was the collaboration different since it was a feature film this time?

Composer Fabio Frizzi

SCOOTER: That's really interesting. I mean, with “Saint Frankenstein,” it was a short film and he had a small window in his schedule that he could help us out. The music got delivered. I remember we suddenly got an attachment with the music and it was pretty obvious where the music needed to be placed in “Saint Frankenstein.” It was done. So, we didn't get any mockups or anything like that. What he did do, though, is give us everything separated out of the tracks after we asked for it and that way if we needed to, we could remix, remove or do things to it in the sound mix, which he didn’t normally like to do. But, since we're friends, he trusted us and respected the short. And we did make some changes at one point. And his theme during the monologue I still firmly believe is one of the most beautiful things I had ever heard come from the Maestro.

It was a totally different process on BLACK EYED SUSAN, and not just because it was a feature. In this case, the first thing that the maestro wanted from me was a temp track. He wanted to hear what I was thinking. So, the music in the movie should be where it would go and what it would sound like. I didn't want to do that because I didn't want to prejudice him. And he said, “No, no, I want to know.” So, I sent him that version and he responded very well to it. And I think one of the things that he got from that temp track was that, even when the vilest stuff was on screen, I still wanted beautiful music for those scenes. I had all of this, French softcore, 70s porno-esque music laced during all of the scenes where Susan is being beaten up and abused and I think he was pleasantly surprised.

FEARS: Do you remember who the artists you used were for the temp track? I’m really curious.

SCOOTER: It was a real wide range. “The Story of O” was featured in it. I think I used like two pieces from that. Christian Gaubert’s “The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane” score. I used 1 or 2 pieces from there. And then there was 1 or 2 gentle pieces from Klaus Schultze. And then for the more avant-garde stuff, I had Morton Feldman, and then there was some (Krzysztof) Penderecki and some (György) Ligeti I had mixed in for some atonal moments. I only threw in a single piece from the Maestro's long and storied career, because I didn't want to, again, prejudice him by using his own music, because I thought that would be a trap.

When I met Luigi Cozzi for the first time at a convention, I asked him how he got John Barry to do the music for his film, “Starcrash,” and he said, “Oh, John Barry, he was my second choice.” And you know, my eyes just nearly fell out of my head. I was like, “I'm sorry, he's your second choice?!? Who was your first choice?” And he said, “Ennio Morricone.” What had happened was he had “Starcrash” edited, and all of the temp music was Morricone’s music from his other films. So, when Luigi showed it to Morricone, the lights came up and Morricone was like, “Well, there's nothing for me to do here” and he left. He was probably a bit of a dick, but what a talented dick he was. The John Holmes of talented dick composers. But, so, yes, I didn't want to do the same thing to the Maestro. A good lesson learned from director Luigi Cozzi.

I even threw on one of my own pieces, at one point, and that piece stood out to the Maestro. It was a very ambient electronic bit. He said, “Let's keep that there and I'll write music over that piece.” So technically we have that one musical collaboration on there to which I will, you know, I'll have that on my headstone — ‘Collaborated with Fabio Frizzi on a piece of music.’ That's my smile for the rest of my life right there. But yeah, the Maestro just did such a great job.

FEARS: Vinegar Syndrome, the distributor that's releasing Blu-rays and 4Ks, are now getting into original productions, and BLACK EYED SUSAN is one of their first ones. Can you talk about them coming on board, which also meant you having to shoot on film for the first time in a long time?

SCOOTER: Working with Vinegar Syndrome was great, actually, because they were very hands off. You know, they read the script and were okay with it. In fact, no notes. They didn't come after me and say, “You sure about this? Are you going to shoot that?” They really didn’t come into play until the movie was edited. That's when they started giving comments and there was back and forth there. Some comments I didn't agree with. Some were excellent suggestions. You always go back and forth with these things. And overall, I think their comments made the movie better, in some ways.

Their involvement also meant that I had to shoot on film because that's their M.O., which was not what I was expecting. I had planned on shooting it digitally to save money and shoot multi-camera. I wanted to have at least two cameras going at once, for every shot. And that way we could shoot much faster. And, for the actors, especially for some of the more unsavory activities on-screen so that they would only have to do them fewer times. But, yeah, Vinegar Syndrome came along and said, we'll pay for the film, we'll pay for the processing, and we'll pay for the 4K transfers for you to edit with. So, that was a good chunk of change right there. But it also meant, you know, being down to just shooting with a single camera with a 10-minute magazine on it that, would more often than not run out in the middle of your best take, and then you have to start again. It just brought back all of the fine memories of shooting on film from film school.

I just went to the Vinegar Syndrome vault, and I encountered the 23 cans of film we shot for BLACK EYED SUSAN. It reminded me that we had a budget for only 30 cans, so we actually came in under budget on the film stock, which is pretty incredible.

FEARS: But now we have to call you a “filmmaker”.

SCOOTER: Yeah. It’s disturbing, isn't it? I don't like it either. I’ll still keep referring to myself as a movie maker.

FEARS: You just mentioned you were at the Vinegar Syndrome vault recently, to shoot a video to promote the upcoming Blu-ray of BLACK EYED SUSAN. Can you talk about the upcoming Blu-ray?

Filmmaker Scooter McCrae at the Vinegar Syndrome vault.

SCOOTER: There are five audio commentary tracks by Scooter McCrae. One's drunk. One is, dead sober. One is in Esperanto. That was a tough one [laughs]. No, in fact, we only have two audio commentaries. There's me and Michael Gingold on one track, and then there's another track with all of the performers with producer, and also moviemaker herself, Aimee Kuge (director of Cannibal Mukbang).

The movie's only 85 minutes, and I think the special features run nearly two hours. There's an interview with me, an interview with the actors, interviews with the producers. A wonderful talk with the Maestro himself, Fabio Frizzi. Then there's some deleted scenes, there's trailers. There's even the screen tests that I did with Evonne to demonstrate to our producers that they would be just fine in the role. And they did a great job. And our ”Saint Frankenstein” short film is on there. So you get a Fabio Frizzi double feature this time.

FEARS: What’s next for filmmaker Scooter McCrae?

SCOOTER: There’s a possible anthology project, which would be fun. And, you know, I'm sitting here on top of, like, three or five possible screenplays that could be put into production at any moment. I could probably do some rewriting on all of them, but they're in good enough shape to be picked up and made on a low budget.

FEARS: Without spoiling the ending of this movie, I was thinking of a sequel to BLACK EYED SUSAN the other day. I could see Derek and Susan getting together again.

SCOOTER: I was asked about a sequel at a Q & A recently and I sat there for a moment, and it came to me in a flash, instantly, which is bizarre because I had never even thought about a sequel. The opening scene is Derek going home, he rings the doorbell, the door opens and his wife answers and it's Susan. And then it just goes from there. And what's great about that is the first movie was all from his perspective, the first movie, what the doll looked like. Where does that lead us now in the sequel?

FEARS: Would it just be called “Black Eyed Susan 2.0”?

SCOOTER: Well, I would go the James Cameron route, and I'd write BLACK EYED SUSANS up on the executives’ blackboard and say, “Now hand me a check.”

Interviewer Alex Kuciw: Instagram: www.instagram.com/koochew Threads: @koochew Facebook: www.facebook.com/alex.kuciw X: x.com/DjangoShoots1st BlueSky: @koochew.bsky.social

Read BLACK EYED SUSAN Film Review Here: https://www.tumblr.com/fearsmagazine/768874426153549824

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