Valley-born filmmaker Steven Escobar breaks Guinness world record
After making 10 horror films, Steve Escobar got kind of bored and murdered 155 people.
Now he’s just sitting back and watching the awards and attention roll in on the wave of blood.
Escobar, an Edinburg native, has lived in Los Angeles for 12 years, and he has compiled an impressive body of work, including music videos, an Emmy for working on the reality show “The Amazing Race” and the aforementioned horror pics, which he did with his creative partner Joe Castro of San Antonio.
Castro, who directs he films while Escobar produces, had the idea to murder a mass amount of people – on film, obviously, not in real life. His ultimate goal was to nab the Guinness World Record for highest body count in a slasher flick. And nab, stab, slash, mutilate and decimate, he did.
“The idea came from Joe that we wanted to break a record for on-screen death in a slasher film, because that had never been done before,” Escobar said during a phone interview this week from his home in Los Angeles. “Since we’d made so many horror films, we wanted to do something different.”
The end product was “The Summer of Massacre,” which was shot largely on sets in Escobar’s back yard and garage. The world record officials told the filmmakers they needed 50 deaths at the hands of a stalker or killer while he was stalking and killing the victims.
Using four plot lines and a narrative device reminiscent of “The Twilight Zone,” the movie wracked up 155 deaths with a combination of aesthetic murders and visual effects. In other words, once they started killing they just couldn’t stop.
The run time clocks in at about 98 minutes. One of the four plot lines goes a solid 15 without death. It’s far and away the longest stretch in the film without a murder.
For obvious reasons, Escobar says no one under the age of 17 should watch this film, which he classifies not as horror but rather as a straight-up slasher film. He describes it as a combination of “Friday the 13th” and the gruesome cable series “Spartacus.”
“The Summer of Massacres” will officially be released on DVD, Blu Ray and OnDemand Video on Jan. 10. Escobar also expects it to be on Netflix.
“We’d always want to break another record,” he says. “We hope our record stands for a little bit before people start finding out about it. We think some of the studios will find out about it and try to break it.”
They might just cut the record down before its time. Slashing, murdering and mutilating it.
Zack Quaintance covers features and entertainment for The Monitor. You can reach him at zquaintance@themonitor.com or (956) 683-4447.
