A career counsellor who finds himself in a Torturers chair in a case of mistaken identity.
This hilarious award-winning short film is self proclaimed by director Angus Swantee to be a blend of ‘Hostel‘ meets ‘Office Space‘.
You would think of this blend as unimaginable, but Torturous takes the right amount of gore and puts into a comedy movie, actually it makes much more sense the other way around – the right amount of humor in rather somber horror setting.
An outstanding group of people joined the cast and crew to make Torturous over a two day shoot in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. Horror aficionados will recognize our cinematographer Jeff Wheaton from his ace work on the amazing short films ‘Treevenge‘ and ‘Game‘ (among many others).
I’m a huge fan of filmmakers like Eli Roth, James Wan, Leigh Whannel who can take a budget that is low by Hollywood standards and create a film that entertains it’s audience from start to finish. That was my goal with Torturous.
The story was written by Swantee and Craig Gunn in an airport while returning home from the Toronto International Film Festival. The setting is straight from your favorite horror films, with a man tied down on a chair in a plastic wrapped room. But things take a comical turn once the torturer realizes he got the wrong guy.
We had the opportunity to shoot on 35mm film which was very nice, but also we only had a few thousand feet of film stock, so our actors only had one take in many of the shots. Kevin Kincaid and Craig Gunn (co-writer) nailed their performaces under pressure.