Elena loves the roaring 1920s. A fondness she’ll soon regret.

Director’s Statement

I have a love for the Roaring 20s. The fashion. The music. The cinema. The Architecture. All of it amounts to being one of the most enchanting and gorgeous eras in modern history. Though, as much as I love it, there’s a dichotomy to this appreciation that has slowly grown over time for me. There’s something about the 1920s that I find genuinely creepy.

Perhaps some of it is owed to my witnessing the gold ballroom sequence of Kubrick’s THE SHINING or hearing the unsettling use of Fats Waller’s music in David Lynch’s ERASERHEAD. Perhaps it’s how the entertainers of the Jazz Age would apply heavy, pale make-up, giving them a look that belonged more on a mortician’s slab than a movie set or stage. Perhaps it’s the crackling, eerie low-fi nature of the music and sound recordings from the time. Wherever it stems from, the impression is strong and I’ve been absolutely obsessed with it for some time.

For me, getting to make THE RIZZLE for Huluween Film Fest has been a cathartic exploration of this darker impression of the 1920s and once I came up with the core idea of the film being about the ghost of a 20s vaudeville performer being conjured by a dance, I immediately knew it had the potential to go beyond my own fears be a tension-filled ride for the audience to experience a protagonist hearing haunted, dancing feet in an old, empty house in the dead of night.