Inside THE PARTY Of Portland, Maine Filmmaking: Interview With Director Mackenzie Bartlett

If Maine changed their welcome sign to The Way Life Should Bleed, the summer people might go away. But that’s not the case at Damnationland, an annual invitational festival that showcases thriller and horror short films by Maine filmmakers.

“It started with people wanting to organize some sort of film festival of Maine-based filmmakers. They made it an invitation only to conjure up excitement about making movies and then give people an immediate way to connect their movies to their community and celebrate what was going on locally,” said Mackenzie Bartlett. Herself a Mainer, Bartlett wrote and directed her script The Party for last year’s festival. An interstitial film, The Party tells in chapters the story of three female friends with a joyful plan for revenge up their sleeves.

Land of the Damned

“It’s a small community, a town out in the middle of Maine somewhere,” she said. “Everybody knows everybody and everybody knows everybody’s business, which I feel like that’s where I grew up. There’s a weird biodome of secrets but nothing is actually ever a secret.”

The festival always includes short, interstitial films to go between the pillars films. To get there required some creativity on Bartlett’s part. “Damnationland used to run a contest to make a movie. For a while they weren’t really sure how to source new talent, so to be considered to make a movie, you could make a minute and a half concept, or trailer, of the movie that you would make for Damnationland. So I did that,” Bartlett said.

“I was living in Idaho at the time: I’d moved there for a year. With a crappy camera in the middle of a canyon, it was just me in a wig. I made a bunch of fake teeth out of clay, and I spat them out with fake blood from my mouth. The next year I was invited to make a movie, and then I started bugging all of the producers about wanting to be more involved. I started showing up to things and am now a producer for the festival,” she added.

On the Scene of Portland Filmmaking 

Filmmaking in Portland at times has limited opportunities. An older state without its own film school, narrative and creative opportunities can be harder to find.

“The filmmaking community is very small here. A lot the art communities are, or they’re a little removed,” said Mel Salmi, who owns and runs the media production and video marketing agency, MEDIA LOMA. Many people working in film in Portland find opportunities in media through commercial work. Damnationland provides a festival, concerted support, and funding for narrative projects.

“I was new on the film scene and film production scene in Portland, and I was looking for people to possibly work on projects with,” said Natalie LaPlant, a Portland-based editor. Groups like the Maine Female and Nonbinary Filmmakers seek to create connections among filmmakers in a male-dominated industry. Notably this year’s festival features films written or directed predominantly by women or queer people.

The Party offered Salmi and LaPlant a rare opportunity to be part of a team of makers atypical in a male-dominated industry.

“I was so invigorated leaving, and I realized these are people I’d really like to work with outside of work, and we’re going to make really cool stuff,” LaPlant added.

“What made me really excited was Mackenzie’s excitement, and that’s huge for me,” Salmi said. “I used to work as a producer before I started my company.” Her time working as a producer during film school in Finland showed her how attached the director and producer are.

“You really have to like your director and trust your director,” she added. “I had been looking for that in Maine and seeing what people were doing and really liking what people were doing. Definitely Mackenzie as a person, as a creative, and a person with a really interesting vision got me excited. And the script is kind of everything I wanted.”

Brewing a Script in #MeToo  

“Around this time every year, I feel like I get very nostalgic for 90s witch movies, like Hocus Pocus and The Craft, Practical Magic,” Bartlett said.

“They’re movies about women who are friends and find camaraderie in their power, which usually manifests as witchcraft. I also remember being really pissed off with the way that the world is, but specifically with everything that was happening this time last year with #metoo, Blasey Ford and Kavanaugh. I wanted to find some sort of way to make something that was really relevant but was more so an expression of my anger and inner grief with what was going on around me through the lens of spooky, Halloween-y witch stories. I feel like that’s very true to who I am,” she added.

Key to The Party is a revenge narrative, though the approach and the conclusion are remarkably different from other horror films that take up the theme.

“I feel like sometimes with revenge movies, though I think they’re always powerful, we kind of center the female characters who are seeking revenge on usually a male figure, and they’re always doing all this intense emotional labor and they’re always kind of downtrodden and their lives are falling apart. They’ve been totally ruined by this person and therefore are seeking revenge,” Bartlett said.

“I felt it would be really cool to do something that was a revenge piece that wasn’t so centered around the antagonist, that was just kind of an afterthought, and it was more of a joy-filled act at the hands of the women. Their motivation is anger, but it’s an anger that’s tied to friendship and their strength and they’re not so completely consumed by it. It’s a reframing of a normal revenge narrative. Something that’s more fun,” she added.

In the film, the three friends mix blue potions and look for margarita mix. They watch Night of the Living Dead in a dreamy bedroom while working on a crown for a witch ritual. They wear witch hats and cat ears.

“The hardest thing for us to figure out was how much we wanted to push the campiness of it,” LaPlant said. She and Bartlett worked closely in the edits to ensure each chapter individually cohered and to decide what feeling they wanted to convey with the film.

“I was worried about treating it lightheartedly. But by pushing that lightheartedness, that’s why it’s so effective at the end when the twist is revealed, and you realize how angry these women are about what happened to their friend,” she said. “It proved their connectedness as a group and it explained what their group dynamic was, and that’s so relatable because that’s the dynamic you would have with your closest friends.”

Revenge stories like The Treehouse and The Perfection capitalize on female revenge, but in a way that defines women by their trauma only. Additionally, their revenge exists in service of reform of a man.

“What I wanted to do with The Party, even though it was upsetting and we showed some upsetting things at the end, was to prioritize the people who could relate to the victims in the movie, and by the victims I don’t mean the guy that gets burned alive. I mean the woman who’s drunk on the couch and being taken advantage of. If I’m not taking care of those people, if you’re not catering to those people in your stories you’re going to make them feel isolated and used. I think that’s what The Perfection did and I think that’s what The Treehouse did as well. There was a big missed opportunity in both of those stories for more powerful storytelling just by taking the right people into consideration,” Bartlett said.

State Theatre Calls Susan

After the final chapter, the film includes a quote from Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony. The team was in post-production during the hearings, and watching everything happen drove them to take action with their film.

“I remember being in the edit and watching Blasey Ford’s testimony. I think it was literally the middle of the night and I texted my editor and my DP and asked, ‘What if we throw one of these clips in or a quote here?’ And it just kind of seemed to make sense, like we were supposed to all along, and it almost felt like it would be wrong if we didn’t do it,” Bartlett sai

“The idea of the using the quote seemed so right to me. It made so much sense,” LaPlant said.

“It almost felt like if we hadn’t acknowledged it, given the timing of it, it would’ve been crazy. It added so much to the fire of the film. Everyone in the theater was simultaneously bogged down and so upset about what happened, including Susan Collins. She was a key vote, so to be able to experience that in Maine and witness people’s anger towards her was incredible. That was definitely one of the highlights of my life: to see people’s response to that in the State Theatre.”

LaPlant connected with the film’s political messaging prior to shooting. Working on The Party provided people on set with the opportunity to connect and be empowered.

“It was a situation where it felt like there was this mass movement but in your day-to-day there wasn’t a way to add to the conversation other than sharing your own stories. The main draw was to be able to make art that was in response to that,” she said.

Salmi similarly found the set to be electric.

“People I met during the filming, like Amber, who was my assistant camera, were incredible. I’d be blessed to work with her again in any capacity. You form these relationships like that, and it was so cool to have so many,” she said. “I don’t think it was your usual crowd. We had a lot of female filmmakers there, and that’s really cool.”

Figuring out the Festival Circuit

Since its release, The Party has shown at other film festivals: Boston Underground in Cambridge, The Final Girls Film Festival in Berlin, and Medusa in Las Vegas. This October, it will play at Grimmfest in Manchester. Bartlett hopes that more filmmakers participating in Damnationland will continue to submit to other festivals. The cost to submit and the amount of research and festival know-how provide a lot of barriers to younger filmmakers who are less familiar with the industry.

“It’s an issue that I think Damnationland runs into a lot: people will make movies and then not really know what to do with them. People spend all this time and effort making something and then not submitting it. And that could be that they don’t want to, but I think more likely it’s folks not having the resources,” said Bartlett.

Salmi added, “There would be interest in seeing work by Maine filmmakers and Maine films. Young filmmakers who are just making films need the old pros to tell them to, and they need mentors and help so that they don’t just make a film and show it once or twice and then drop it.”

A year out from the initial release of The Party at Damnationland, and almost a year since Kavanaugh’s confirmation, Bartlett has wondered whether or not she should remove Blasey Ford’s quote from the end of the film. “I’m worried that it happened a year ago and it seems a little irrelevant. But then I think that if I do it loses something. It loses a little bit of perspective, and it loses a little bit of palatable, actionable anger that I was feeling. And also if it’s been a year, people could use a reminder. We could always use a reminder. Even if it’s three years from now, I want people to still be talking about that. It’s still a really important part of our recent history we need to be taking into consideration.

“I think that those hearings completely reframed my own personal narrative on being a woman in this country. It completely shifted a lot of things for me. It was a big upturning of the ground beneath me and I’m sure I’m not the only person who feels that way. So I think I’m going to keep it in,” she added.

“The quote that she’s giving is about waking up at this party and being laughed at by these men around her after she’d experienced a sexual assault. There’s obviously ways for the quote to tie in with Trevor and the party he’s at and the phone recording, but I wanted to twist it in a way that was powerful. I meant it from Matt’s perspective. While he’s at the pyre and being confronted by these women and they’re just laughing at him and not listening to his suffering at all, what’s happening to him is real but his perspective isn’t important because other people are getting what they need from it.”