From Jordan Downey to Kate Siegel, Certified Forgotten is always down to talk to filmmakers from the V/H/S franchise. And with the latest entry in the series fully embracing its Halloween roots, who better to guide us to the holidays than Micheline Pitt-Norman and R.H. Norman, the married writer-director duo behind "Home Haunt," the final segment in V/H/S/Halloween. Pitt-Norman and Norman join the podcast to talk about their short feature, their lifelong love of the genre, and this week's perverted movie of choice: Lew Lehman's The Pitt.
Jamie Benjamin (Sammy Synders) is not a good kid. His neighbors know this. His parents know this. In fact, the only person who doesn't seem to recognize how creepy Jamie can be is Sandy O'Reilly (Jeannie Elias), the babysitter the Benjamins hire to keep an eye on Jamie while they're traveling for work. But over time, Sandy begins to notice odd things about her new ward. Such as his lack of friends, or his obsession with nudity. Or maybe, just maybe, the fact that Jamie admits that he has been secretly feeding a group of "tra la las" (troglodytes) who live in a hole in the woods near Jamie's house. What happens next in Lehman's feature? Only the weirdos need stick around and find out.
In this short excerpt from the episode, Norman highlights one of the underrated challenges of making a found footage movie: finding ways to add a soundtrack to a film where everything is inherently diegetic.
We wanted it to be a really authentic found footage film, meaning that everything's edited in camera, right? If Keith or Zach are turning off the camera, those are the cuts. I'd say we got about 95% there, there's always producer notes and you trim something there, but if you watch it, it feels like it's just a sequence of events, start and stop from the camera, from where they start to where they end. And that doesn't allow for a score, right? The music has to be diegetic and we knew we wanted some music.
The The Pit episode of the Certified Forgotten podcast with Micheline Pitt-Norman and R.H. Norman is now available to stream on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, or the podcast platform of your choice.
