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Emerald Anvil & Blair Witch at 25 with Gregg Hale and Ed Sanchez
210 Plays5 months ago
We're joined once more by filmmakers Gregg Hale and Eduardo Sanchez, the brains behind The Blair Witch Project, V/H/S, Lovely Molly, and many more.
Gregg and Hale talk to us about their new podcast-based audio drama Black Velvet Fairies. It's a tour de force meta narrative that plays with the found footage medium that gave them their big break, but also features real-world interviews with paranormal experts, dissections of EVP phenomena, and a descent into family history that reveals dark creatures and ancient secrets waiting to be let into the light.
We also discuss where BVF sits in the wider dark fantasy universe they're creating, known as Emerald Anvil, set in the world of Hada. This is a multimedia beast, featuring novels, board games, podcasts, and online interactions. The world was born out of Gregg and Ed's passion for storytelling, but also their frustration at the Hollywood studio system, which is becoming more innovative in terms of visual effects, but also more risk-averse and conservative.
Lastly, we discuss the pair's plans for the 25th Anniversary of The Blair With Project, still one of the most innovative and disruptive horror films of all time, and which has spawned a lucrative franchise of its own.
You can listen to Black Velvet Fairies from all your favourite podcast provides, and if you want to support Ed and Gregg in the construction of their Emerald Anvil universe, you can do at https://emeraldanvil.com/
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Transcript
Mars Radio 14 and Earthly Ghosts
00:00:17
Speaker
Hello and welcome back to Mars Radio 14, the third best radio station in the Martian Space Force Broadcasting spectrum. My name is Captain Half-Milk Carton and today I'm joined by Lieutenant Bungalow who has just returned from the planet Earth and the forest of Shanlaba-Feisteen where he encountered the human phenomenon known as ghosts.
00:00:47
Speaker
Can you describe what ghosts are like for the listeners, bungalow? Bungalow? Are you with us, bungalow? No, I'm not. What? I'm not with you. You are sitting across the studio from me. And not only can I see you, I can smell you. You must be mistaken, F. Milk Carton. I...
00:01:12
Speaker
Not here. Captain Hart, milk-cat-ten. And I don't make mistakes. Are you for real? No. That's what I've been telling you. Hang on, Bungle. Is this one of those extraterrestrial tricks you learned?
Miscommunication and Ghosting
00:01:28
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Ah, fiddlesticks. You rumbled me, good sir. How did you know?
00:01:38
Speaker
How did I know what? What are you withering on about, you miserable streak of faluticon? Well, I mean, how did you know I was ghosting you? You mean the expulsion of internal digestion vapors? You wouldn't need to be a Martian Space Force captain to work that one out. Why do you think I left the window open? No, not the smell. Well, maybe the smell a bit. I'm not sure, but I think ghosting is the act of withdrawing all community
00:02:08
Speaker
I mean, it's what the ghosts did to me. Well, they never entered into communication, so withdrawing might be a bit of an exaggeration. What they did was, well, they ran away, I called them. So it's, I mean, it's reasonable to say ghosting is running away. Say nothing, as far as I can tell. As far as you could tell.
00:02:36
Speaker
Right bungalow, that is not very far at all. Let me go out on an anterior appendage here and suggest that the creatures you encountered on earth withdrew communication in the hope that you would go away. I didn't think of that. You don't think of lots of things bungalow.
00:02:55
Speaker
I had to think about things and you. Prove it. No. Because you can't. And you know you can't. The reason I'm a captain and you're a lieutenant is because I think more than you. And I think better than you. Isn't that true? Bungalow. Isn't that true? Bungalow, we're on air. You need to use words when you're asked a question. Hang on.
00:03:22
Speaker
Are you ghosting me again? No! Is that no because you are ghosting me or no because you're not ghosting me? No! Ah, for oddly gone's sake. We leave it there folks.
Introduction to the Emerald Anvil
00:03:42
Speaker
Hello, welcome back to Cron's cast of fantasy science fiction and horror podcast. We're here with Greg Hale and Eduardo Sanchez.
00:03:50
Speaker
producer, director of Blair Witch Project. We talked about Under the Skin, the 2013 movie last time we were together and now we're going to talk about a much more recent development in their careers. It's a whole world actually in the long tradition of horror creators building their own fictional geographies and fictional worlds.
00:04:17
Speaker
We've got Ed and Greg building a world called the Emerald Anvil. And in particular, we're going to be talking about an audio drama called Black Velvet Fairies, which I believe has it has it actually dropped yet, Greg? Tuesday in the States. Okay, so we're recording this. Alright, so we're recording this on Sunday, the 17th of March. So today, two days as the 19th of March. So by the time this goes out,
00:04:41
Speaker
It will be available. That's Black Velvet Fairies. So, yeah, can you tell us a little bit about the story? I know you very kindly gave us a sample episode, episode one, to listen to. So can you tell us a little bit about the story, about the thinking behind it, and what led you to push forward with this?
Multi-Platform Storytelling
00:05:02
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, just the framing device really is the whole Emerald Ample universe.
00:05:08
Speaker
which is a story world about a fairy realm full of fairies that aren't like Tinkerbells, more like Game of Thrones. So we're exploring this fantasy world in four platforms. A podcast is the first thing. This is Black Velvet Fairies, a novel, a board game, and an NFT storytelling interactive, interactive storytelling NFT game.
00:05:37
Speaker
and trying to explore different parts of the same story or the same story world. And the podcast is our first entry into that. And it's kind of telling an earthly side of the story. It all takes place on earth. It is presented kind of Blair Witch style in a, is it real manner? Not that we necessarily think that people are gonna believe that berries are real, although apparently a lot of people do.
00:06:02
Speaker
but rather presenting it in a real format. So it is presented as an audio diary podcast from a young woman whose grandmother dies, leaves her these four black velvet paintings of fairies, but not little tinkly sprites, more like grim warriors and kings and queens. And as she begins investigating her family's connection with the artwork,
00:06:26
Speaker
increasingly strange things start happening to her and pulls her into this world of people who really believe that this very world called Hata exists. And there's a way to reconnect these two worlds that at one time were really connected and no longer are. And so that's kind of the overall story arc of season one, which is 13 episodes.
00:06:50
Speaker
And that dovetails directly into the story. There's a direct connection. I won't give anything away, spoiler-wise, but there's a direct connection between the story of the podcast ending and a very pivotal point of the novel, which is from a completely different point of view. Okay, so you got four different pieces of work. You got the podcast, you got the novel, you got the board game, and you've got this NFT
00:07:18
Speaker
game game. Okay, we'll talk about exactly how that works. But they there is a sequence to the events so they don't all exist concurrently. They are it's not necessarily chronological the podcast and the the podcast and the novel on the earth side of the novel story are taking place at basically the same time. The board game is like super deep prequel
00:07:47
Speaker
where you're really setting up the world like 150 years ago, the fairy world 150 years ago. And then the NFT is another reverse engineering thing where we use the game to literally create the map of the world that the kids are being teleported to in the in the novel. I love all this sort of innovative ways of telling a story.
00:08:10
Speaker
A while
Inspiration from Star Wars
00:08:11
Speaker
ago we did House of Leaves on the podcast, which again was just a really innovative way of formulating a novel. And so I'm really intrigued to see how this is all stitched together and where the various points of intersection are.
00:08:29
Speaker
But what made you what made you conceive of telling a story in this way? Where did the idea come from? Well, that's a really banal question. Where do you get your ideas from? But why why decide on a multi-platform approach? Excuse me for telling this story. Yeah, I mean, we always kind of prefer that kind of storytelling, like with every
00:08:55
Speaker
film that we've done, we've tried to put something together like with Blair, which was the first time where we, you know, um, were able to like, kind of just use different forms of media to, to tell different stories. And, you know, um, like, uh, I think, I don't know if I think Greg is too, but, um, I'm a huge, I was a huge fan of that. Shadows of the empire, um, that star Wars.
00:09:20
Speaker
series, which I loved because it was like, there was no movie, there was no TV show. There was just like books and there was a book and then there was a comic book and video game. And they all told different sides of the story. And I think when we, when we started doing Blair Witch, um, we were, we all kind of gravitated toward that kind of thing. We're like, Oh, we could do this. And so, um, Greg's had this idea in his head for a long time. And, um, you know, for us, it's like, instead of, you know, investing all our time,
00:09:49
Speaker
and energy into like doing a TV show or a movie or just a novel.
00:09:53
Speaker
Uh, we like the idea of just like kind of spreading the idea of the, the, the, the IP around and just having different ways of people getting into it. You know what I'm saying? Um, you know, maybe somebody doesn't read, but does, you know, board games and, or listens to podcasts, you know, um, just different kind of entries into the world. And you know, and that's, that's just fun, you know? Yeah. Well, it does sound fun because yeah, it's like it's different ways of creating, right? It's different ways of.
00:10:23
Speaker
of approaching your art, is there a sense that after you made Blair Witch, which went absolutely gangbusters and you had a global hit on your hands, and then all of a sudden production companies are interested in what you have to offer, but then you have the oversight as well. And when you're looking at something like this, you're completely free of those sorts of corporate constraints.
00:10:53
Speaker
Yeah, no, I think that's definitely part of it. I think anytime where you're dealing with a studio or a network and there is some sort of corporate connection to your creative process, yeah, there's inevitably controls and stuff that a lot of times don't necessarily work out.
00:11:14
Speaker
And this is an opportunity. This is all independently financed. We raise a little bit of money. So we're kind of going back to our indie
Hollywood vs Indie Creativity
00:11:21
Speaker
filmmaker roots with this. But in this case, we're just independent storytellers trying to tell a story in some interesting ways. And there's a lot of creative control with that, complete creative control. I mean, it's me and Ed, but also Mike Minello, who was a co-producer on Blair Witch.
00:11:42
Speaker
as heavily involved, especially on the podcast side. Mark Hodesky and Jane Fleming are executive producers, Lord of the Rings and The Quest and Golden Compass and all this stuff from their history. So we have an incredible team of people that we're working with, but very much in that kind of low budget, indie way, so that Ed and I and the rest of the team have the creative control that we want, but also that we retain ownership
00:12:09
Speaker
And if we get lucky and we find an audience and people start watching it or listening to it or playing it or whatever, that we would be at least that much more in control for that much longer of something that we've created. I guess there's a flip side to that as well. So you do have the freedom, creative freedom to do something on your terms and in your style and you can market it and deliver it how you want to. But the flip side of that is
00:12:39
Speaker
Well, I'm assuming, tell me if I'm wrong, is that this is a symptom of the fact that the Hollywood machine, the movie making industry in Hollywood is becoming ever more conservative and less willing to take a punt on outliers, outliers in terms of IP and new ideas and different ways of approaching story. I guess when you were cutting your teeth in indie movies and learning your craft in the 90s,
00:13:09
Speaker
and growing up in the 80s, there would have been a lot more risks taken and a lot of the box office would have been generated off our original IP.
00:13:22
Speaker
After the turn of the millennium, you mentioned Jane Fleming, producer on Lord of the Rings. Maybe Lord of the Rings is a kind of turning point because after that you get Harry Potter in the same year and then all of a sudden a few years later you get MCU and it's just franchises after franchise after franchise.
00:13:41
Speaker
There's a sense, I think there's maybe a pushback now because you get diminishing returns after a certain number of years and there's less, but Hollywood seems to be doubling down on this stuff rather than thinking, well, actually let's take a punt on some original IP. I don't know what you think of that. I mean, it's, you know, it's what we're most frustrated with, you know, the Hollywood machine.
00:14:09
Speaker
Um, it seems like, um, and I've taught, you know, I talk about this all the time is that it's not about like cool things. It's about keeping your job, you know, you know, like a lot of the executives and it seems like the structure is all based on like, is this going to get me in trouble when this comes out? Is this going to get me fired?
Blair Witch's Impact on Horror
00:14:31
Speaker
You know, is this a bad idea? Is this going to make money? And, um,
00:14:36
Speaker
You know, and, you know, generally that's unfortunate. That's how it is. You know, there definitely are some places that, and people that are different and like, you know, kind of like to do some new things, but unfortunately it's like, you know, the marketing department runs the show so many, in so many places. And it just seems like, um.
00:14:59
Speaker
you know, they're all they're interested in is, again, is this going to make me look bad or look good, you know, in a year when it comes out? You know what I mean? Um, and it's frustrating because it's just, and that's the reason why we, you know, we did emerald amble the way we were doing it is that, you know, we, we could have gone out and tried to sell it and, you know, they could have taken it any, you know, they could have been like, well, we love this part, but we're going to throw this other part away.
00:15:27
Speaker
And for our thing, you know, our thing is like, you know, let's just kind of roll up our sleeves, especially Greg, who did most of the work, but just kind of see if we can create a world and then create a little bit of, get a little bit of an audience. And then, and then you can go to the big companies and say that, you know, kind of, you know, like, like, again, like the control that JK Rowling has, has kept over.
00:15:52
Speaker
Harry Potter, it seems like they can't do anything without her, you know, which is great. Or like, you know, again, back to Star Wars, you know, Lucas had over Star Wars, which is an amazing thing. And, you know, and for us, like there is a little frustration with with player, which were like, you know.
00:16:10
Speaker
we we want, you know, we had this idea and we, you know, sold it and, you know, look, we're very happy that we sold it and everything's gone pretty well for us. You know, can't complain. But there is even now, like now I'm like, you know, but it would be cool to be able to take charge of the Blair Witch World and do something cool, do a TV show or do a movie or do whatever, you know, because we did have a plan for this. You know, it wasn't just one movie. We had a kind of a whole plan for, you know, like, you know, just a
00:16:39
Speaker
you know, a series of movies and all kinds of things. Unfortunately, that was funny because it was wholly original.
00:16:49
Speaker
in the first instance, but now it is established IP, isn't it? In the world of Hollywood, it's spawned several sequels, documentaries, the 2016 Blair Witch. That was a sequel, wasn't it? Yes, because it was about the... Yeah, video games. I went to a Blair Witch escape room last month in Vegas.
00:17:15
Speaker
Awesome awesome. Did they invite you or did you just turn up? No, I I mean I I
Blair Witch Marketing Tales
00:17:23
Speaker
got it. I got in touch with lions I was gonna go in a Vegas to see you two in the sphere, which was crazy
00:17:30
Speaker
Um, but, and then, uh, I was like, I just got in contact with some people. I know it's a marketing people at lion's game. They hooked us up and, you know, so I met the owner and the people who run it and really nice people. And just, they rolled out the red carpet for my wife and me. And it was, um, it was a lot of fun. There was a lot of fun. So anyway, yeah, it's definitely, there's IP there. I mean, it's, it's one of the most recognizable horror
00:17:57
Speaker
franchise, you know, at least titles, you know, ever, you know, even people who haven't seen the movie know what Blair Witch is, you know what I mean? Well, that was your bootstraps marketing campaign, apart from anything else. I mean, I, I read the stories about you. Was it Cannes? Was it Cannes that you pitched up at with flyers saying, you know, missing students? Was that, was it Cannes or Venice? We did that at Sundance too. Sundance. Right. Okay.
00:18:21
Speaker
Yeah, by the time Ken came around, Artisan had already bought the movie. So I think they did it as well, but we were like, not really. And Sundance, we were literally going to shops and saying, hey, could you, can we put this up and can we put the poster up? You know, kind of just us, you know, doing the marketing ourselves, you know. It feels like the last great trick.
00:18:46
Speaker
that a filmmaker pulled. The first one probably is the film itself, but it's almost like an echo of Orson Welles doing War of the Worlds. It's a classic
00:19:02
Speaker
a piece of theater that bleeds out into the real world and people got, I got fooled. I remember it. I remember being fooled. I was only 17, 18 when it came out. And I was very open-minded young man at the time. So I wanted to go along with the premise. I wanted to go along with the deception, with the suggestion. And so it was great marketing. And I don't think you could do that now.
00:19:30
Speaker
Well, so many people have taken it and run with it outside of Blair Witch, whether it's found footage or whether it's trying to create that very similar to, but the thing that Blair Witch has done is, I mean, people can talk about, oh, this happened with Cannibal Holocaust, or was the other one Jersey, the New Jersey Devil one, or it wasn't. Yeah, the last broadcast. That was it, yeah. It wasn't done before Blair Witch. In the way that this was done, the way that it creates this mythos,
00:19:58
Speaker
that I mean I remember after I was so interested in the mythos after seeing the film for the first time that I bought this book which was epistolary you know lots of letters going back to the 1700s
00:20:13
Speaker
really just yeah that's it beautifully embossed front cover and we've got this thing now where the Blair Witch isn't about that film it's about this whole unknown factor of whether it's just Ellie Kedward or whether it's this weird time shift um talk about a prequel like you were talking about the um you know the potential for a series is just amazing um it's it's
00:20:42
Speaker
It's far bigger and has far more integrity than say where Freddie went from scary to a punchline. It's this IP where it remains terrifying. It certainly is a hardened horror fan. Horror is my thing. It's the only time I've sat in a theatre waiting for it to start thinking
00:21:06
Speaker
Am I going to be fucked up by this? I've never felt that before. And I just enjoyed it. I absolutely enjoyed it. And I'm a massive fan of found footage, even ones that are executed poorly. And it's all down to the Blair Witch Project because it puts us in that sense of abject horror rather than just prosaic horror.
00:21:29
Speaker
And to go back to the thing we're talking about Hollywood, sorry, I know I'm talking a lot. If we go back to that thing about Hollywood production of horror is in genre fiction, in genre, particularly horror, there is no shortage. There's no shortage of good horror films. There's just shortage of advertising and the knowledge of them to the muggles and to the public.
00:21:55
Speaker
If I want to watch Spanish-language horror, there's an Argentinian director who did this film called Atorados, which is phenomenally scary about a haunted street rather than a haunted house. There are loads and loads of small horrors, independent, small-funded, that tend to be far more impactful than
00:22:19
Speaker
the boogie man or whatever, the remake of Pet Sematary, all this stuff that they think are going to be brilliant, but it's not, it's just more of the same and it's garbage. An idea has just popped into, thoughts just popped into my head. Do you think horror loses a lot of its impact the bigger its budget? So as it goes
00:22:38
Speaker
up the studio chain and it gets a bigger budget. Do you get less return because you lose that, maybe that intimacy, that sense of, I detest the word, authenticity?
Innovation in Horror
00:22:53
Speaker
I mean, look, there are definitely, I mean, The Exorcist was a big budget film and I still think that's, to me, probably the best horror film ever made, in my opinion, still.
00:23:06
Speaker
There are examples of higher budget film. I think the, I thought the American remake of the ring at the, I thought was very effective or film as a big budget film, but you know, in general, I think a lot of it is like, you know, horror does work really well on low budgets. And as probably for that reason, there's something, there's something about the stripped down nature of a lot of horror films that make them work.
00:23:32
Speaker
Right. And that's kind of unique about horror. Right. Horror kind of doesn't get hurt by having no budget. And in fact, sometimes it seems to help it. Right. Yeah. So I don't think they're mutually exclusive, but I think it's a weird strength.
00:23:47
Speaker
that the horror genre has that no other genre has. I mean, you know, you can't make cheap fantasy movies by and large. You can make cheap science fiction movies. People pull it off, but not as easily, right? Because there's so much of the bells and whistles that your
00:24:03
Speaker
expecting that are not. Well, we mentioned bad taste earlier, didn't we? Yeah. So you can do it. But also, it's in the execution. You know, your company Haxan, is that influenced the name from the silent film? Okay, perfect example like that for
00:24:23
Speaker
that film is still scary to this day. Maybe it's because it's the uncanniness of it. But you know, that's ancient. And that wouldn't that's not a massive budget. I mean, who knows for the day? Who knows relative? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Go ahead. I think the thing about horror, the thing about horror is that, you know, more than any other genre, you have to kind of
00:24:50
Speaker
reinvent, if you really want to take people, at least for me, like as a horror filmmaker, like if I want to really take people on this journey, you got to take them to somewhere unfamiliar, you know, you got to take them to, you have to, you know, once people recognize a jump scare, they know what to expect that, you know, the cat coming out, you know, they know what's going to happen. And
00:25:12
Speaker
The horror audience is so savvy. It's, you know, they're so educated. And like you were saying, they, you know, they watch everything. There's a lot of good horror movies out there. So for me, it's like with good horror, you have to kind of take a chance. You have to like do something new, something that's unproven. And that's just, you know, the opposite of what studios want. A good horror is.
00:25:37
Speaker
One of our friends, Tade Thompson, he's a British Nigerian author, and he said that his definition of horror was something that offers a threat. That maybe when you're saying horror has to continually reinvent itself, it's got to invade the familiar space. So you've got to find a new familiar space for horror to bastardize, to change, to corrupt in order for it to refresh itself and stay scary.
00:26:06
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it's hard, it's hard to stay scary, you know? And, um, I think that the, that's why, I mean, you know, most of the good horror and most of the innovative horror comes from the, you know, independent world, you know, or the eight 24s, you know, of the world, which they do, you know, that their whole thing is their whole business model is taking chances, you know? Um,
00:26:29
Speaker
Yeah, otherwise, you can't, and again, like the big budgets, that means it's something, it's either going to be a sequel or IP that's already succeeded, a book, you know, a Stephen King book, because they're, you know, they're going to take that chance on, you know, on something unknown. And it makes sense. I mean, it's a business, you know, nobody's, nobody makes movies to make, to lose money, you know, so it, you know, but yeah, like Greg was saying that, you know, horror is the only genre that you can, that
00:26:58
Speaker
is helped by
00:27:00
Speaker
by low budget and even low production values like the horror audience just accepts just can can live with that, you know. And I suspect it change your what you're scared of changes anyway. So when you're a young child, it's the cupboard, what's under the bed. As an adult with with kids, what happens? What happens to my kids? What happens if somebody takes my kids? You know, those kind of things. And so to to try and be inspired by something, you might be able to to produce something that is going to get a portion of
00:27:30
Speaker
your audience rather than everybody. Yeah. And the other interesting thing about horror is like, you know, it's two sides of the same coin. Like on one side, to really be effective, you have to constantly be coming up with this innovative way, right, this new way of disturbing the normal.
00:27:51
Speaker
But at the same time, the horror audience is also, it's almost like kabuki theater for horror audiences, right? Where it's like, some films just go straight down the road of trope, trope, trope, trope, trope. I'm gonna give you exactly what you're expecting every time you know it's coming and I'm gonna give it to you. And horror audiences love that too, right? You love by- If it's well done, it's gotta be well done. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But even horror audiences, I would still say horror audiences
00:28:21
Speaker
enjoy bad horror films in a way that like no other genre like you know horror fans all the time talk about like all the bad horror films that they like there's no other I mean maybe B movie science fiction but there's really no other genre where you're like oh I love those bad fantasy
00:28:41
Speaker
movies? Well, maybe, I don't know, I guess you could be like, I really love crawl. Yeah, no, I mean, yeah, yeah, I think there is. But you're right, horror, by far has the most of like that kind of I love the bad movies is just they're just as fun as the good movies. You know, there's a tribe, a tribalness as well to horror fans and horror producers, or everybody supports each other and promotes each other. Yeah.
00:29:04
Speaker
No, it's it's it's amazing. Like, you know, I go to these conventions and I'm going to one next week and there's just so much love. It's amazing. I'm always, you know, it's so funny because horror is horror. It's all about like people killing each other in the dark side of humanity and like
00:29:29
Speaker
you know, just torture and violence. And the fans are just like the loveliest people on the earth. You know, it's just crazy. You know, maybe I always think that because horror horror fans, they're able to, they're able to look the devil in the eye, right? And if you can look the devil in the eye voluntarily, then you're probably okay. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you cut you come to terms with darkness in a different way than somebody who
00:29:58
Speaker
is always trying to avoid that, right? I think that's why people who present as really good people aren't necessarily good people.
00:30:10
Speaker
Yeah, that sounds like something we could talk about forever in terms of the political state of our countries. Let's not go down that rabbit hole. Not in this year anyway. Shall we go back to Black Velvet Fairies because you mentioned how the NFT game is going to form part of the
Interactive Fantasy and NFTs
00:30:34
Speaker
uh, the offering, let's say part of the world, the Emerald Anvil world. And, um, I'm a little bit sketchy on the detail of how an NFT game might work. So I'm really interested in how the mechanics of that stack up. Yeah. So the novel is called, the novel is called Journey to Hata. And the basic story is, and this is, you know, it's all fantasy 101 stuff, a brother and a sister, Morgan and Orion Deleon.
00:31:02
Speaker
get teleported to Pada, this fairy planet, right? And their arrival kicks off all this whole planet of fairies, right? So it's billions of fairies.
00:31:14
Speaker
And so multiple religions. And when these kids show up, it kicks off different prophecies in different religions. And some of them are like, oh, the kids are here. It's time to go to Nirvana or start the journey toward paradise. And other ones, it's literally like the Antichrist has arrived. So it basically is the beginning of what's going to be a multi-year giant genocidal crusade against humans who live on this planet. So that's the novel.
00:31:44
Speaker
And that's called Journey to Hada. Journey to Hada. And that's co-written by the two of you? Actually co-written by me and Ed's oldest kid, Bianca. Oh, okay. Interesting. He actually wrote it. And I don't know if you guys are like Dungeons and Dragons geeks, but Bianca and I wrote the first draft of the novel as a role-playing game. We did it remotely.
00:32:12
Speaker
I kind of created the world and the settings and the characters other than Morgan, other than the main character and Bianca, who had been a 14 year old Hispanic girl in her life and I have not. She plays the role of Morgan, a 14 year old Hispanic girl. And I just put situations in front of them.
00:32:31
Speaker
on the computer, a Google, Google doc. And we literally wrote the first draft of the novel, like a role playing game. This happens. What is Morgan do? And I would play the other characters and describe situations and Bianca would react to that. So we built the dungeon master dungeon master. So that's the way we really cool way of, yeah, of going about producing a manuscript. So is, is that's presumably that's not available yet, but that's in, that's in, uh, in production.
00:33:02
Speaker
Oh, we lost him. Yeah. Dan, we can't hear you for once. It's the Blair Witch. Back to the book. Yeah. So, so the book is, that's not out yet. That's coming. Right. Yeah. The, the podcast, Blybo Ferry's first episode is March 19th. The Kickstarter for the board game was called Glim. Uh, what was that? Glim. G-L-I. Glim. Glim. Uh, like, you know,
00:33:33
Speaker
Like Glimmer. Like Glimmer. The Kickstarter goes live April 23rd and the novel drops May 21st and then the NFT sale goes live on June 2nd is the timeline that we're looking at right now.
00:33:53
Speaker
So the story of the novel is these kids getting teleported to this fairy world, which does have this long and kind of dark history of interaction with humanity and Earth. But there's this 150 year period where there was no interaction between the two planets. And 100 years of that was this giant anti-human war called the Portal War. And then there's 50 years between the end of the Portal War and the kids arriving
00:34:23
Speaker
in the book. So what the NFT does, the NFT is called Battle for Hata. And what the NFT game does is, do you have the game Risk? Oh, yeah, yeah. Love Risk. So imagine Risk, but instead of 42... Sorry, I got to interrupt. I went to the board game convention in Birmingham last year, and they have Risk, obviously, but then they have the Risk fanboys.
00:34:52
Speaker
who will build a table that's the size of like a tennis court. Wow. And then they'll put a map of the UK or America on top of it and then they'll just reenact the Civil War or they'll reenact Waterloo. Oh, that's awesome. It was pretty cool. Yeah, so this is so Battle for Hata is imagine risk, but instead of I think it's 42 territories in risk.
00:35:22
Speaker
you have 12,000 hexes. So we've taken this two thirds of this fairy world. There is a reason that one third you can't go into is called the Reeve Land, which a human did, of course. But so two thirds of the planet divided up into 12,000 hexes. And by picking which dominion, 36 dominions, which is what they call their kingdoms,
00:35:47
Speaker
depending on which kingdom you decide to buy your NFT from, you're literally creating the borders of all these countries, right? So the NFT purchasing process is a way of reverse engineering a hundred years of war. So you buy your NFT and you've created the map of the world a hundred years ago, the borders of all these different kingdoms of these dominions a hundred years ago. Then once you buy your NFT,
00:36:17
Speaker
We're gonna, we drop you into a discord where you can only get into the discord if you own a hex from that dominion. And then we're gonna do, I think eight to 12 weeks of interactive storytelling where you're voting on story events for that your dominion is doing. And that's literally gonna create the history, the written history between the end of the portal war and the kids showing up in the novel.
00:36:46
Speaker
So you're going to be making story decisions as a member of this Dominion. We're going to be recording those story decisions between all these interactions between these 36 Dominions. And then we're going to write, again, I don't know if you guys are a Dungeons and Dragons people, but like when I was a kid, there was this thing called the Gazetteer, the Greyhawk Gazetteer. And a Gazetteer is just like a, um,
00:37:11
Speaker
like a historical document that's like really kind of like, here's maps and things and just kind of like super by the book of how history went down. So we're going to use all those story points that the NFT owners are creating, right? We're giving them prompts, but they're making the decisions to move the story points forward. We're going to assemble that as a gazetta and that's literally going to be the history
00:37:34
Speaker
of the world that goes up to the moment that the kids arrive. So this is going one step further than crowdfunding. This is crowd building. Yeah, we're trying to really legitimately... I mean, look, this all kind of comes down to, for me and Ed especially, of the five guys, the Blair Witch guys that made the
World-Building Influences
00:37:56
Speaker
film,
00:37:56
Speaker
You know, Ed and I are both in the film business because of Star Wars. And we're both like the like I was 11 when Star Wars came out. I think it was nine. We're like the perfect age for that first film. Right. But even when I was a kid, I never thought about Star Wars as just a film ever. I always just looked at it as like it was a world.
00:38:17
Speaker
And the film was just one part of it because there was comic books and video games and action figures. And I always just looked at it as like, oh, that's just the story, right? And Star Wars is like really one of the first franchises to do it that way. But for filmmakers at an age, you kind of grow up with that being an assumption of how storytelling works, right? You're not telling one story, you're building a world and then you figure out
00:38:43
Speaker
what pieces of that story world do I want to explore in all these different things, right? So we did that with Blair, Blair Witch kind of naturally, like we knew we wanted to make a film, but Ed could code websites. So we're like, well, what's the parts of the story that we could put on the web?
00:39:01
Speaker
and entertain people. And I would love to think that we thought about this as marketing. I mean, obviously we knew that there was a marketing component to it, but we were really motivated first and foremost as storytellers to like want to create cool things and put it in front of people. And ultimately that's why it worked because people I think inherently knew that we weren't just marketing to them, that we were just, that we were really trying to tell them another part of the story in a different way.
00:39:28
Speaker
And that's what we're trying to do with Emerald Amble. Like, yes, do we want it to be successful and find an audience? Absolutely, but we're not doing any of this stuff because it's a gimmick or a marketing thing. We're doing it because we think it's a cool way of not only telling a story, but especially with the NFTs, really allowing the audience to buy into the universe from the very beginning. And then if we're successful, they're gonna own that piece of Hata forever.
00:39:57
Speaker
And we're promising that as long as we're successful, we're always gonna give them interactivity connected to that NFT. If we can, right? If we're successful, we want everybody to come along for the ride, not just as observers, but as owners and participants in at least a little tiny piece of the world.
00:40:19
Speaker
I think that's outstanding. I just I love the idea. I think if I could if I could own a part, if you know, if I was into something the way the way I am, you know, about Star Wars, if I could earn
00:40:32
Speaker
Naboo might be over the moon, you know? Yeah, exactly. It's just, but if Disney ever do approach you to do anything with Star Wars, can you please make sure it's got B-wings in it, B-wing starfighters, because you never see enough of them in Star Wars, and it's my favorite spaceship.
00:40:49
Speaker
But I think that... I thought you were going to ask for a job consulting on the script. I don't think I could write. No, if it's not horror, I'm not going to do it. Maybe we can get your camera out, you know? Well, you know what, Star Wars hasn't gone into a pilot. Yes, OK. A viewing pilot. Ed and I have pitched Star Wars horror before. That would be amazing. Especially you could do so much with found footage in Star Wars. I've said that three or four times on the website.
00:41:18
Speaker
Yeah, sure. Yeah. I mean, technologically. Yeah. It's the perfect world that it would have cameras everywhere and just things to record. And yeah, absolutely. Yeah. It's part of that surveillance state. Yeah. Well, or even like, even just like, yeah, I mean, even just like stuff that you don't even, it's never explained. Like where do the images of the, of the holograms come in?
00:41:43
Speaker
Like sometimes, yeah, you're standing on a thing that makes sense, but sometimes they're just like out in the field. And like, what's filming that? What's filming that? Yeah, they turn around. They turn around to see if there's an omniscient camera somewhere. Somewhere. Well, when you're freed from, you mentioned the marketing men of Hollywood, of the studios, you're freed from that, but you still got to, like you said, you still want to find your
Promoting the Emerald Anvil
00:42:07
Speaker
own audience. So how are you, given that this is spread over
00:42:11
Speaker
four different modes of telling the story, four different vehicles, let's say. How are you marketing that? How are you finding an audience? Well, we'll see. We'll see if we find out.
00:42:31
Speaker
That's a really good question. You know, we'll see. This is like, you know, you're one of the first people that we've talked to about this. This is only just now starting. Like I said, it's all in the finance. We have a little bit of money that we're putting towards some paid advertising. But when I say a little, I mean, like a really truly little. But we're mostly kind of hoping, you know, that we are putting a quality entertainment product in front of people that they like.
00:43:00
Speaker
And that that brings them into, because look, you could listen to black velvet fairies, the podcast, and have that be a standalone thing. And we think hopefully be a, uh, you know, a satisfying entertainment experience. You could read the novel and be satisfied with that as a standalone thing. You can play the board game. You could certainly play the board game and just enjoy the board game.
00:43:23
Speaker
The NFT is a little bit more dependent on somebody giving a shit about the rest of the world for the NFT thing to make sense. But you could, if you were an NFT person and you liked fantasy stuff, I could see you looking at this and saying, okay, I'll buy a little piece of this fairy world. But we're kind of hoping that it's, even though I hate this word, that it's like a synergistic thing,
00:43:47
Speaker
where the different platforms support one another and get people excited about the other platforms is kind of the hope. Because we definitely do not have anything remotely resembling like a traditional advertising. But you do have one thing I noticed when you sent us the first episode to listen to.
00:44:09
Speaker
It's got production values, it's highly polished, there's some good stuff going on, it's clearly a product of some quality. One thing that we did notice, we had a little hurdle to get over with the fact that our narrator is this Gen Z West Coast owner. Here at Crohn's Castle, we prefer our horror protagonists to be stuffy academics who are on field trips to the coast.
00:44:37
Speaker
preferably in the 19th century. There was a slight hurdle for us to get over that.
Black Velvet Fairies Podcast
00:44:44
Speaker
But what I loved about it was the was the this this mystery, you know, this the opening question is is it captures your mind. And also, there's a there's a game called Alan Waits. And it put me in the mind of Alan Wake as well, this sort of going to this island and it's very
00:45:06
Speaker
mysterious and and then obviously we'd only had the first 20 minutes so you know we don't know any more but this that it's setting it up really nicely and I think it'll go down really well on with our members I think it really will because there's a much stronger bias towards fantasy and dark fantasy on on the website as opposed to stories about fairies actually very popular very popular exactly there isn't really sure um
00:45:37
Speaker
Yeah. And in the second episode, we have a real, he's a British author named John Cruise, K-R-U-S-E. He's written about a dozen books on fairies. I don't know if he lives in London or outside London, but, you know, in kind of that, is it real way, kind of like Blair Witch, we have real experts that come on. So we have a, John Cruise is a real fairy expert. He comes on and talks about fairies. We have a real black velvet painting
00:46:04
Speaker
uh expert that comes on later you we there's some crossover into witchcraft and we have a real witchcraft person get on
00:46:11
Speaker
So we are trying to do that, you know, give it like this little touch of authenticity through the use of guests who were more than happy to kind of play along with the narrative. You know, we're like, is that how Greg, didn't you get Greg Newkirk on from Hellier? Yeah, exactly. I really liked Hellier and I was really pleased when I saw him do something about it. Yeah, yeah.
00:46:37
Speaker
No, it's not YouTube. It's I don't know if it's Amazon or I mean Prime or Netflix, Netflix, but it's, it's great. I mean, he was awesome. He's one of my favorite parts of the show. There's a there's a EVP
00:46:55
Speaker
thing that happens. And I think Jamie, the writer director, who's also like, there's so much crossover between Black Velvet Fairies and all our horror stuff. Like Molly is played by Gretchen Lodge, who was Molly and Lovely Molly. Chris Osborne plays James and Chris was the lead in Exist, our Bigfoot movie. And then Jamie Nash, who, you know, wrote, altered, wrote,
00:47:25
Speaker
you know, co-wrote Lovely Molly with Ed, wrote Exist. He's the writer director of the podcast. So we've got a lot of crossover with the hacks and horrors. It's not the same thing. But, you know, when we, when Chris and I and our other co-host Pete, we knew each other for a long time before we started this venture.
00:47:45
Speaker
But the fact that we did know each other for a long time meant that it wasn't such a pun. We trust each other implicitly with our approach to things, with our sense of humor, with the seriousness with which we take the material. We trust each other to be able to carry this sort of thing. So it's really nice when you build up that sort of network. And you know you can rely on these people to share your vision and take it on. Okay, so the podcast is out now.
00:48:14
Speaker
How can people support this financially? How do they buy into it? How do they buy the NFT? How can they buy? Well, I guess the novel will be, you know, that will be bought off the shelf or online or whatever. But how do people contribute to this, support it maybe financially or otherwise? Yeah, well, emeraldadvil.com is kind of like the hub for everything. You can connect to everything through that website.
00:48:43
Speaker
Yeah, as you know, the podcast is subscribed to the podcast. It's on every major podcast platform that I know of. The book you can buy, the game you can kickstart, and then the NFTs, yeah, they go on sale at the beginning. Is that through the website as well?
00:49:02
Speaker
You will be able to get to it through the website. Everything is there through the website. The whole buying an NFT thing is, I know enough about the NFT space to be dangerous and that's about it.
00:49:18
Speaker
There's a lot with the NFT buying process that I don't understand because of blockchain and all that kind of stuff that I don't totally understand. But yes, you'll be able to do everything through the... Well, we probably should wrap up fairly soon because, Ed, that brush isn't going to clear itself, is it?
Blair Witch 25th Anniversary Plans
00:49:38
Speaker
I got, I gotta get back to that Island. Yeah. So look, I'd like to ask, is there anything that you're planning on doing for the 25th anniversary of Blair Witch? Because it's what, a few months away, I believe. Yeah. Um, we have, I mean, I don't, I guess we can talk about it, right? Greg, they haven't really officially announced it yet, but there's a DVD that we're working on. Um, I guess Blu-ray DVD, I'm not sure what, but it's where, um, we re we're working with these, I guess we can say second sight, right, Greg?
00:50:10
Speaker
I don't know. Anyway. Yeah. So they, and they're, they've been like amazing. They actually, we actually went back to the original tapes that the movie was shot in.
00:50:21
Speaker
with and retransferred the footage. So like where you're you're going to see Blair Witch on this DVD like you've never seen it before. And really like we've been comparing the images and it's like it's literally like going from remember when we went from VHS to DVD, it's not quite HD because, you know, the movie was shot and on high eight. And, you know, it's a very it's kind of an inferior video.
00:50:47
Speaker
you know, kind of video, but it really does look amazing. And I think people, the fans are going to love it. And hopefully, you know, we're going to be able to do some other stuff with that cup. But we're also Dan, the other director, writer, director and I are
00:51:02
Speaker
um going in and editing uh deleted scenes like at least at least an hour i think of deleted scenes if not a couple couple hours so a lot of exciting stuff um and then and then i'm doing a lot of you know with the actors a lot of little little conventions and film festivals and stuff like that you know when i can so it's you know it's great again we love the
00:51:29
Speaker
the enthusiasm that some people that the fans have and the love that they give the movie and Greg and I are both, you know, just still amazed that people like you guys still want to talk about this movie, you know, 25 years later, but.
00:51:43
Speaker
We gladly, you know, we gladly joined you guys because, you know, why why would we not want to talk about our movie? You know, so there's a lot of cool stuff. And again, we, you know, we're hoping that that this, you know, maybe maybe leads to other things in Blair Witch. But again, we just want to get the film out in a new format and, you know, deleted scenes and all kinds of stuff. And, you know, so that the fans have been asking for for many years. So.
00:52:12
Speaker
That sounds absolutely phenomenal. I think that will land with a big splash. Yeah. I'm certain of it. Yeah. There are three scenes I can't wait to see now. The coffin rock scene where she's reading her book, the etched in stone scene when they're at Birketsville. And there's that scene when they first coming up and it's black and white, the famous trees, the black and white
00:52:39
Speaker
there's the road and there's just these trees just straight, all straight up. You know, the one that had the publicity shot, you know, thing. That scene, those three scenes are my favorite. And to watch them on a Blu-ray or, you know, whatever quality is going to be an absolute treat, I can't wait. Yeah, it really is. Like they uploaded the footage for us to look at the other day. And it was really like time travel because even us haven't seen it look that way since
00:53:09
Speaker
looking at the very original transfers that we did before we pulled it into the media 100 and started editing. Literally nobody has seen it look that way since then. Cause this is from the original high eights and from the original 16. So it looks really, really cool. And there's a UK, a cool UK connection. Uh, Jed Shepard who did the host and dash cam great British horror filmmaker.
00:53:38
Speaker
Jed is doing the documentary, the behind-the-scenes documentary about Blair that's going to go with the 25th anniversary thing that Second Sight is doing. And Jed knew more about the movie than I did when he was interviewing me. He would ask me stuff that he knew the answer to, and I'd be like, I have no idea. And he'd like, well, that was actually
00:54:10
Speaker
There's so much. There's so many aspects of the movie, you know, the marketing and the way we made it and just the aftermath and.
00:54:18
Speaker
You know that he's thinking he's trying to maybe there's gonna be like a little series on that like maybe more than just a feature but again, we're excited and we couldn't have asked for some you know, anybody better than Jed to To do this. It's just a you know, it's a labor of love for him and we're just so glad we're so Glad he was he was able to do it for us, you know
00:54:44
Speaker
Are you able to tell us when, when this is going to be released or is that still under? I don't, I don't think it's not secret, but I don't think they, I don't think they fix it this summer. Right. I think so.
00:55:01
Speaker
Yeah, but they're rebuilding the whole, you know, if it was just like, oh, re-transfer it, but they're rebuilding. It was crazy. We have the original, we still own the original Hi8 and the original 16. We did a brand new transfer of all that. And then they have like this bot thing that I think uses AI.
00:55:22
Speaker
and it watches the movie and then it crawls through, because we have 22 hours of just video plus the 16, and it crawls through and finds all the shots automatically and rebuilds it automatically. I mean, that's the only way that you could possibly afford to do it. So it's a brand new cut of exactly the same film. It's really cool. Sounds amazing. Really cool. Sounds really cool.
00:55:53
Speaker
And we've probably run out of time, but this has been phenomenal. It's been such a privilege, such a pleasure to talk to you both about the old stuff and the new, you know, it's been great. Yeah, thank you so much. Yeah, we appreciate you guys. I mean, you guys have definitely got one of the most serious science fiction, fantasy and horror fan bases on the internet. So the fact that we can like get
00:56:16
Speaker
tied into you guys is great. Well, in fact, that means a lot. You know, that's exactly what we're going for. When we started this, we always said that we're starting small, but if we take it seriously and we do a good job, then it will find its audience. Same thing, you know, the same thing that you went through, you know, it was small.
00:56:36
Speaker
But you took it seriously and you found your audience. So I guess we're, hopefully we're on that sort of journey as well. There we go. Comparing ourselves to the success of the book, budgeted film in history. Yeah. We haven't quite got that return on investment, but you know, we're working on it. Yeah. All right. Well, thanks for having us. It was, it was a lot of fun. Yeah.
00:57:03
Speaker
It's been great. Yeah. Thanks ever so much. And best of luck with black velvet fairies and emerald anvil. It all sounds really exciting. We will put up all of the links on our show notes and push everybody to that as much as we can. And yeah, hopefully maybe we'll talk to you soon. Yeah. Yeah.
00:57:42
Speaker
This episode of Kronskast was brought to you by Dan Jones and Christopher Bean, and our special guests Greg Hale and Ed Sanchez, with additional content by Brian Sexton and Jay Starper. Special thanks to Brian Turner and all the staff at Kronsk, and thanks to you for listening.
00:57:59
Speaker
Join us next time when we'll be talking to the comedy writer turned novelist Richard Sparks. Richard will be talking about his new book, new rock new role, as well as life, the universe and everything, because we'll be discussing The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
00:59:41
Speaker
You know.