Shoestring Transcendence

After spending 15 years making over 30 feature-length films for next to nothing—buying DSLRs and running them into the ground, having budgets just big enough for gas money or an Airbnb to shoot in—Scout Tafoya is leaving DIY behind. That’s not for nothing: in setting his ambitions for working with “real” budgets, Tafoya has left a body of work whose rough edges reveal plenty of digital diamonds beneath. A filmmaker, critic, and video essayist, Scout Tafoya is someone that my friend Lukas Armstrong-Laird and I have referred to as “the Rainer Werner Fassbinder of Film Twitter” for a number of years. That moniker was invented in jest, I’m sure, with Lukas and me trying to find parallels between our contemporaries and the greats we all aspire to, or at least wish to mimic. However, I think there’s more to that title (which upon reflection I think he genuinely earns) than just what presents itself on the surface. It’s more than just Tafoya’s ability and drive to create at a rapid pace, but also the worldview of his criticism, his ability to create a cinematic reality that is at once shaped by all the collaborators around him as much as it is his own.

There’s a punk rock ethos to it Tafoya’s DIY impulse: make the movie at all costs, no matter how little money, and not gatekeep people’s ability to see it just based on some idea of profit. Tafoya told me he’s trying to “keep the Fugazi method alive here. For less than 50 bucks you watch my entire output, and frankly zero dollars would get you about half of them.” Tafoya’s production company—Honors Zombie Films—is like in a band, Tafoya is a front man, and behind him are a collection of talents in their own rights who pop up like stock company regulars: Juliane Lazare operating the camera, actresses Michelle Siracusa and Emily Crovella shining in front of it, or Tucker Johnson producing, writing, or even acting himself. Seeing a group of regulars (and those previously mentioned are but a small handful) perform again and again over the years feels as much an artistic endeavor as it is a collection of documents of a group of friends as moments in time rush away.

In 2009, when Tafoya bought his first camera and started making films, the market was totally different: mumblecore and its lo-fi necessities were still a factor on the festival scene, and Hollywood adoption of digital as a replacement for photochemical film was in the midpoint of its transition between Slumdog Millionaire (2008) winning the Oscar for Best Cinematography and The Social Network (2010) showcasing the parity that Red cameras had reached with than of 35mm film. Now, digital images made at the amateur level are expected to match that of the professional—even a website like NoBudge, founded by mumblecore alumnus Kentucker Audley, likely wouldn’t readily release films that have the same digital harshness as Audley’s own early pictures.

Tastes change in the marketplace and technologies advance, and Tafoya stayed on the frontlines of making movies for pennies while the rest of the world tried desperately to figure out how to sell cleaner products. In an age where every film industry person likes to tell young aspirants that they can make a movie, “Just pull out your phone!” Scout Tafoya is one of the few people that I believe would actually go and do it. A lot of bona fide filmmakers have turned to digital for its convenience and cost efficiency, in particular those like Lav Diaz or Hong Sang-soo who value their ability to pick up the camera and make a movie whenever they like above all other production considerations that theoretically could make for a more palatable product. But those filmmakers had their time in the spotlight as “real” filmmakers first, and it takes an admirable amount of determination, gumption, and straight up moxie to start DIY and keep at it for 30-some-odd films.

Looking back at his massive body of work, Scout Tafoya is opening the door for viewers new and fans of old to his last three features in a special screening event. From July 31st-August 2nd, Tafoya is doing One-Night-Only online screenings of Hang the Pale Bastard (2022), Epigenesis (2022), and Four Nights (2023), respectively.

Hang the Pale Bastard is a winter western starring Tafoya as a man many want to kill for their own reasons. The film, shot in eastern Pennsylvania, is a prisoner escort with a tight cast à la Anthony Mann’s The Naked Spur (1953). But as all the adversaries of the past start to converge as the narrative’s threads knot together, the film reveals a new genre twist that slips it into sensational fantasia. It’s a moment that transcends its low-budget limitations, as experiment works often do, and also reminds me that Tafoya wrote the book on Tobe Hooper, and that Hooper’s whirlwind editing in Down Friday Street (1966) can have as much to say as any of his rich mise-en-scene in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) does. The end of Hang the Pale Bastard is interesting for this, as it reveals something about this kind of no-budget filmmaking—a certain magic that can happen on set or in the editing room, where the project ceases to feel like friends playing around and instead a realization happens that you’re making a real movie. That feeling is addictive.

Epigenesis (2022) is also a blend of genres. Ostensibly a queer romance mired by the complications of being a pariah in a homophobic community, and what that does to a person’s relationship to morality and justice, Epigenesis is also a film whose opening credits include spacecraft and creature designers. There’re echoes of regional horror bouncing around Epigenesis and its suburban locations, where audiences get to play a game where they choose if they value scrappiness or if it’s bothersome seeing a group of people make a movie out of the backroad locations and wall-to-wall carpeted condos available to them. A lot of people, understandably, can’t get past that hurdle—it’s not the level of quality they’re told to expect. But like the punk show that interrupts Epigenesis’ story, maybe some of that abrasion is the point—and beneath it are some new rhythms to be found. Whereas Hang the Pale Bastard really soars when it reaches for landscape and abstraction, Epigenesis finds its peaks closer to theater, and its best moments are like when a Bergman movie somehow ceases to bore you, and a monologuing takes on a certain enrapturing quality that you forget where you were before the conversation started.

Four Nights (2023) is about a woman alone in a house, besieged memories of lost love and constantly prodded by the literal ghosts around her. Even more than the previously mentioned works, Four Nights works as an acting showcase, in this case highlighting the abilities of its lead, Emily Crovella. In her character’s volatile, drunken wrestling with her paralyzing psychosis, Crovella gives a deceptive performance where she’s simultaneously acting against the physical actors in front of her, but with the character’s knowledge that they’re not corporeal, creating a strange and devastating on-screen presence where even if she’s in the same frame as someone it seems like, to her, she’s the only person left in the world—everyone else is a memory. It’s an appropriate way to close this chapter on Tafoya’s career, with an emotional reflection on the ability that memories—or images—have to trap and haunt us. Scout Tafoya’s DIY days might be in the rearview, but I think it’s more than worthwhile taking a look at.