An original script. A location shoot in the jungles of Panama. An Academy Award® Winning special effects master, and a director who took the little budget he had and made a movie that looks a lot more expensive. If you haven’t heard of the Tribeca selected horror movie “Indigenous”, take note, you will probably be hearing a lot more about it before it releases later this year.

Director Alastair Orr

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Director Alastair Orr talks to me about making the film, his inspiration and the perils his cast and crew had to endure in the rain forests of Panama to get it done. The movie revolves around a group of young Americans, vacationing in Central America, but what starts out as a fun holiday, turns into a fight for survival.

As an official selection at the Tribeca Film festival, “Indigenous” is creating quite a buzz in the horror movie circuit. Orr tells me that distributors were eager to get ahold of this film after its screening, “Indigenous had its world premiere last year at Tribeca,” he said, “where distributors from around the world snapped it up. I think the plan is to synchronize a release schedule, for theatrical and VOD, across the planet later in 2015. Having been produced completely independently, with no studio backing, we’re kind of at the mercy of the distributors, who are slotting us in amongst the bigger, higher profile movies.”

Orr says that he has always wanted to make a creature feature. Remember those classic late night monster movies that scared us as kids? He hopes that “Indigenous” is that kind of movie. I asked him how the premise came to him, “I always wanted to do a monster film. I wanted to make the kind of film I would stay up and watch late at night when my parents thought I was sleeping. The guys over at Kilburn Media concocted the idea.”

A vacation in Panama? What could happen?

Wanting to take advantage of the encouragement to film in Panama, Orr packed up his crew and headed closer to the equator; perhaps a perfect place for Orr’s creature to be born. I asked about the monster in the film, and why Panama:

“We had a funding incentive from Panama so the film had to be shot there, and they came up with the whole Chupacabra angle. It was great to do a film about the Chupacabra, there aren’t any decent films about it, so we kind of got to make up the rules about it without having to answer to anyone.” He said.

Although the creature in “Indigenous” is the legendary Chupacabra, there were other beasts that attacked the crew within the forests of that country. Not quite as big, the vermin still terrorized the crew as they battled heat and heavy air, “Working in Panama was tough. It was hot and humid and at any given time you’d have a number of species of bugs sucking your blood. We had to trek through jungles and rivers just to get to our shooting location.”

One location called for a cave. Orr found one in the thick,  tropical landscapes of the country. Shooting scenes within it seemed to bring his cast to the very edge of their stability, but like any good director, Orr used their uneasiness as an asset:

“The cave was rank and disgusting,” Orr says, “but it shows on screen which is awesome. There’s no foam rocks, the actors are crawling through sharp crevices and bat shit, they’re not acting, they’re reacting. The locations were far apart, sometimes we had to take canoes and go 3 hrs upstream to where we wanted to shoot. It was tough, even the actors had to carry camera gear.”

Too bad this isn’t the Batcave!

Although the trailer for “Indigenous” has implications of being a found footage film, Orr is quick to point out that it is not, “I kind of wish the film was found footage, it would’ve made it a lot easier to shoot. There are definitely mixed media elements in the film, like we cut to the characters’ cellphones and ipads and gopros [sic], even news footage, but the film is essentially a conventionally shot narrative. We didn’t want to do another low budget found footage movie about tourists getting taken out by some malevolent force, we wanted to punch above our weight and make the film look bigger and better than what we had to work with.”

The star of the film, like most horror movies is the monster. With acclaimed special effects master Dave Anderson (Dawn of the Dead (2004), The Cabin in the Woods) on board, “Indigenous” is unique in that the creature is not created from computer software. Orr says that it was important to him to make the creature as believable as possible:

“I wanted to make the monster realistic, and not create it with CGI. Dave Anderson, who’s won Oscars for Men In Black and Nutty Professor, came on board and designed and built our Chupacabra. I think he’s also just finished doing some of the freaky clown stuff in the latest American Horror Story. We had a great creature performer, Mark Steger, doing all the contortions and screaming on set. He was the nicest guy, but once you call action there’s no stopping him. Then we did some  post VFX stuff, distorting limbs and adding in tongues to just make the creatures more sinister. Because we spent so much time in makeup, the effects really blend in and you battle to tell what’s in camera effects and what’s been added later. There’s a sense or reality to this fantastical beast.”

One last selfie before we die!

Estimated to release later this year, “Indigenous” has all the elements to take the horror movie community by storm. An original story, an exotic location and a memorable movie monster. The trailer has iHorror intrigued, and we will be keeping an eye on this director in the future.

Orr is already working on another film and he promises it will be another original idea,” I’m prepping a film now. It’s a genre bender. It’s about a bunch of kidnappers who abduct this girl and when they take her back to their inescapable lair, they find out she’s possessed.”

A possessed kidnapped girl being held hostage in an isolated location? What could happen? Stay tuned to iHorror for details on that film as well as “Indigenous”.

Release date TBD

“Indigenous” stars, Zachary Soetenga, Lindsey McKeon, Sofia Pernas, Pierson Fode, Jamie Anderson, Juanxo Villaverde, and Laura Penuel