A 'Found footage' film following an aspiring filmmaker who creates an urban legend of a killer of foreigners. A multi-talented actor/journalist investigates suspicious accidents surrounding the creation of this fictional slasher and interviews a retired psychologist to dig deeper into the subject. All of this is intercut with short vignettes of a killer attacking different victims and footage of the killer stalking a woman in her 20s, which leads to a horrifying conclusion.
Written and directed by Todor Pateshanov.
Todor Pateshanov was born in Bulgaria. He studied filmmaking at the National Academy of Theatre and Film Arts (NATFA) in Sofia, Bulgaria, where he created numerous short films. While working on his third-year project, he ran out of budget for his film, which led him to travel to the UK, where he shot his feature debut, The Immigrant Slasher
It's Time To Meet Your Creation
An aspiring filmmaker creates an urban legend about a deranged killer, which might be real. What would you do when your creation sends you an invitation to meet?!
Two Sides. One Legend. No Budget. Be Scary
Every story has multiple points of view. Urban legends are no different. But when there's no one financing your idea, how do you distinguish yourself in an era where so many people can make movies for cheap? Funny enough, 'Be Scary' was the initial working title of the project.
Have You Heard of the Immigrant Slasher?
How do you create a new myth in this day and age, without using the internet, when your idea is about a killer of foreigners? You go through these communities and ask one question...
Have you heard of the Immigrant Slasher?
Filmtrotter and The Immigrant Slasher
Write about what you know, which is what they tell you. Well, that's what I did. I came up with the idea for this film when I first moved to the UK in the latter half of 2013.
At the time, I was surrounded by people with superficial and materialistic mentalities. What frustrated me the most was that those mentalities were combined with low intelligence and a lack of any culture in most of these people. My irritation turned into a dark fantasy that I expressed in the form of...
The Immigrant Slasher.
Filmtrotter is the immigrant story of someone ready to conquer the film world and The Immigrant Slasher is the first step on their way there.
Origin and Development
As I was developing the story, my focus and interest changed from a simple found footage film about a killer of foreigners into a meta-commentary on creating an urban legend about this killer and the people around it. Initially, the film's structure was based entirely around Robert Rodriguez's 12-minute film school and his book Rebel Without a Crew. The film's initial title was 'Be Scary' from the last lines of the initial 12-minute film school video by Robert Rodriguez.
Eventually, the story evolved into something completely different by the 16th draft of the script, which was the screenplay version when I first started shooting. There were numerous changes after that as well. I want to think of the film as a fresh and stylish take on the found footage genre. In a period where more and more people know how to edit random videos... allows this movie to turn into a different kind of found footage film.
Because I self-financed the whole project, I decided to make it a found footage so it wouldn't require a massive budget and I could get away with many 'mistakes' along the way as I was learning many of the stuff on the go and I'd perform all the roles behind the camera as well as some in front. Sometimes, I'd even have some actors operate different cameras themselves. However, making it a found footage led me down a rabbit hole of research on both other found-footage films and viral videos on the internet claiming to be genuine found-footage recordings. So, I took different elements from all of them to create my own.
The film took much longer to finish than I initially expected. As per Murphy's Law, everything that could have gone wrong - did! From the first night of filming when I got arrested and spent more than 14 hours in jail, through a friend of mine's wife throwing away part of my equipment and prosthetics, to having most of my audio recordings corrupted and when we add the pandemic to that, the list just goes on and on. But each setback only fueled my determination to see this project through to the end.
During some of the ebbs and flows of the production of this film, I wrote most of the other projects that you will find on this website and I almost completed the filming on one of them (The Bankside Rambler). Unfortunately, I also had to abandon a few others due to different reasons, from losing the leading actor on one to not having enough time and budget for the rest