In simple words, my inspiration was the need for originality. I just wanted to see something really fresh. I love horror in all of his iterations, slasher movies, gothic or cosmic horror, possession films and so on, but I feel recently that's all I was keeping seeing. I lost count of how many demonic possession movies are getting made, or how many slasher flicks' homages are getting pumped out. And everything is a call back, call back to the 80s, call back to 90s, remakes and sequels and reboots are really poisoning the genre and killing new and fresh stories that I believe are out there. So my question was why? Why always look back instead of forward? So I set out to create something fresh myself because I could not find it anywhere else.

 

Also nowadays it seems like mainstream horror can only be extremely "arthouse" or heavy "Jump Scares" injected.  Recent horror films are so worried about the aesthetics or how many jump scares they deliver that they forget that what makes a good horror film or any good movie for that matter, is and always will be a great, original story first. And a simple one. Simple stories are the best. Stories don't need to be convoluted or "message heavy" in order to entertain. A good script is the life essence of any great film and a good script is also a simple script especially when it comes to horror.  Add to this that there is also a tendency to approach horror films with the idea that "more is better" and you end up in what I believe to be overkill. And this happens both in mainstream and VOD horror films. So you get so many horror films that pump on the accelerator all the way and in the end they have no clear ending, there is no conclusion to the story, no meaning behind it. It just ends. And reading many reviews for different horror films that's an issue that many fans have. Too many movies end letting people go like "That was it? Really?" On the other hand you have some very "artsy" elevated horror movies in which nothing really happens all the way and then they go bonkers in the last five minutes. Balance is lost in many recent horror films.

 

So I was inspired to create "Escalation" to kinda show that to create good horror or horror comedy you don't need to go "big and fancy", you do not need huge budgets nor do you need to go all "cerebral and mind bending" on it. I understand it is hard to be fresh after decades of movies and tv shows. Many ideas have already been explored. But human imagination is limitless. There is always something new to bring to the table, it will obviously be influenced by what we have seen before, even in my short "Escalation" the shadow of Sam Raimi or Dario Argento is evident. But still, you can always find a good, honest story, simple, fresh and engaging, and you can always do all your best to bring the story full circle. To prove so I thought, demons, ghosts, masked killers, mutations, we have seen it all before. Then what if I could create a film with just one actor, set in just one location with an enemy that is not even there? A low budget film that visually looks amazing and is as shocking and funny as classics like "The Evil Dead" or "Dead Alive" and like those classics, at their time of release, also feels new? I basically wanted to prove that you can be both "arthouse" and "mainstream" at the same time and have a fun, original story that makes people go "damn, never saw that before".

 

This became a sort of challenge for me. Bring horror back to what made it great in the first place. Simplicity, even ingenuity I dare to say. And freedom. No rules, no chains. Just as great Directors like Sam Raimi and Tobe Hooper did at the beginning of their careers. Just go wild like a kid in a toy store.

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