Blood Drive

  Photos from Screen Gems Sean (Kerr
Smith) encounters one dark and mysterious delay after
another during his cross-country road trip in J.S. Cardone’s "The
Forsaken."

By Emilia Hwang
Daily Bruin Senior Staff

In the blistering Arizona desert, the heat isn’t the only
force to be reckoned with.

Filmed on location, “The Forsaken” features a young
group of bloodletting creatures that prey on helpless victims in
the dead of the night.

“I just came across the script and I just thought it was a
really cool idea, a different take on the vampire story,”
actor Kerr Smith said at a Los Angeles press junket.
“(Writer-director J.S.) Cardone wanted to make a different
kind of vampire movie and he wanted to make a movie that was edgier
and a step above the teen horror genre.”

In the film, Smith (“Dawson’s Creek”) plays
the young Sean, who is driving cross-country to attend his
sister’s wedding. His trip, however, takes a detour when he
picks up some unusual hitchhikers.

After traveling miles together, Sean learns that his companions
have been infected by a deadly blood virus.

When Sean himself is infected, he learns that the only cure is
to kill the leader of the vampire gang, Kit (Johnathon
Schaech).

“It’s a little different twist on what a vampire
really is,” Schaech said. “It’s more like a
disease that’s going through their veins. So it’s more
like trying to feed an addiction, like a crack addict.”

Because there are no capes or fangs in this vampire movie,
Schaech explained that Cardone tried to have fun with the genre and
do some unconventional things while filming.

“We slept during the day and worked at night most of the
time, so we sort of felt like vampires,” said Izabella Miko,
whose character, Megan, is almost killed by vampires.

Since the film strays from tradition, actor Phina Oruche knew
that learning vampire folklore wouldn’t help her play the
fiendish bloodsucker Cym.

“I think the point that (Cardone) was trying to make was
“¦ it’s not a good versus evil story in the
quintessential sense,” she said.

  Megan (Izabella Miko) becomes a human
lure for the non-traditional vampires in "The Forsaken." The
villains in the film don’t have blood-stained fangs, so it
can be difficult to tell the good guys from the bad guys. But
though the killers may not leave teeth marks on the necks of their
victims, they have plenty of other vampire quirks.

Schaech’s character bores easily and is always trying new
things to entertain himself. In one scene, he sticks the venom of a
rattlesnake into his veins.

“I had to bring the rattlesnake up to my face and look in
its eyes,” Schaech said. “I was so scared. It was one
solid mass of muscle and you could just tell it wanted to kill me.
So I grabbed it really, really tight.”

The snake was supposed to stick its tongue out at the villain,
but it didn’t.

“Finally the wrangler came over to me and said,
“˜Could you let go of him a little bit? You’re
strangling him. He can’t breathe. That’s why his
tongue’s not coming out,'” Schaech said.

While Schaech went head to head with a venomous rattler, Miko, a
former dancer, had the chance to tango with a live tarantula.

“Those were real tears,” Miko said. “I was
crying. I hated it.”

The actors were also behind the wheel in the chase scenes and
Oruche recalls driving a wicked machine through the desert.

“The car was crazy,” Oruche said. “The car had
a life of it’s own, a mind of it’s own. You’d
turn the ignition off and it would still be driving.”

In addition to the weird onscreen incarnations, there were
plenty of strange occurrences in the remote outskirts of Yuma,
Arizona.

Miko said that a lot of stuff just “sort of
happened” on the set, such as an actual car accident that was
caught on film, and a house on the set that was blown right off its
foundation.

“The house blew up a little more than it was supposed
to,” she said.

“It was total guerilla filmmaking,” Oruche said.

FILM: “The Forsaken” is now playing
in theaters nationwide.