Fango heard from Benjamin Howdeshell, writer/director of PROJECT: S.E.R.A., who sent along some exclusive photos from the horror short that debuts today on YouTube. It stars Julia Voth (BITCH SLAP, “Jill Valentine” from the RESIDENT EVIL video games), MUTANT X’s Victor Webster and Dennis Keiffer, a stuntman on films like G.I. JOE: THE RISE OF COBRA, SUPERMAN RETURNS and GREEN HORNET.

Here’s a brief synopsis of PROJECT S.E.R.A., which you can view at the bottom of this page: “A young woman watches helplessly as her father, a decorated general, is tortured and killed with an experimental biological weapon. When he suddenly reanimates in a ferocious bloodthirsty state, she must use the combat skills he taught her to escape both her captors and the creature he has become.”

The short had its genesis while Howdeshell was working on a film in Moscow. “Our cutting rooms were in the basement of an abandoned bank building,” he tells Fango. “Winter had just started, and it felt like I hadn’t seen the sun in a week. When the lights were off, it was truly pitch black. One night I was ending my day around 4 a.m., and the idea for PROJECT: S.E.R.A. came to me. I scribbled down some ideas that sat on a piece of paper for a month. Once I got back to the U.S., I wrote a rough script during a lunch break and sent it to Julia Voth [and producers] Shawn Wallace and Ivy Agregan to read. We went to camera a couple of months later.”

The concept of a daughter battling her undead father especially intrigued Howdeshell, who explains, “I wanted to explore what it would be like for a daughter to see her beloved father brutally killed and then be faced with the prospect of fighting him when he became an enemy. I couldn’t imagine anything more difficult than to look into a face you love and have to destroy it.”

Howdeshell managed to pack a lot of horror and action—two genres he loves—into his film’s brief running time. “I love to be scared out of my mind as well as to get caught up in intense fight scenes and gun battles,” he says, fondly recalling the first moment he realized genre filmmaking was his calling: “A long time ago, I was invited to an early cut of the first RESIDENT EVIL. There is a moment when a dead woman is floating in the water. Alice [Milla Jovovich] walks past her and the camera lingers on this floating corpse. All of a sudden, the dead woman’s eyes open and she puts her hand against the glass. I jumped out of my seat, and at that moment I knew that those were the type of films I wanted to make.”

As everyone knows, however, watching and doing are two very different things. Strong FX work is half the battle, and Howdeshell had an experienced team to help him accomplish that goal. “The monster makeup, blood and eye were all done practically by the wonderfully talented Alyssa Morgan. The visual effects were done by Dmitry Tokoyakov, the VFX supervisor from WANTED, and his company Piastro in Moscow.”

Though he someday hopes to make PROJECT: S.E.R.A. a full-length feature, right now he’s happy with the short version, for which he decided to go the Internet route rather than hitting the festival circuit. “I wanted the easiest and fastest way for people to see it, and that was YouTube,” he says. “Social media is such an efficient and effective way of distributing independent content, because it lets the fans decide what gets attention. It’s basically a democratization of the content-delivery system.”

His movie will be in good company, with an impressive amount of well-made shorts already on-line. Howdeshell has a few favorites of his own: “[I liked] MORTAL KOMBAT: REBIRTH. It was a fantastic blend of action and horror in a realistic setting. I also love what they did with the web series MORTAL KOMBAT: LEGACY. I’m a huge fan of the Machinima series RCVR, and [filmmaker] Freddy Wong is a testament to what a filmmaker can do with YouTube.”

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