Screams, Blood, and Entertainment — An Exclusive Interview with the Creator of Midnight Chainsaw Rhapsody
Written, directed, and starring Grady himself, Midnight Chainsaw Rhapsody makes history as Asdana Prison's first film, now boasting over a million viewers. On this occasion, we tracked down director Grady to discover how he achieved such remarkable success.
Reporter: The creation of dream bubble movies is a revolutionary technology. Developing such an innovation in prison seems especially challenging. How did you create this entirely new technology from scratch?
Grady: It all started when I was washing my face. I spotted dreamscape memoria residue on the mirror and had a revelation — dreams might be hard to grasp, but the memoria that hold them can be controlled.
If I could build a machine to stabilize memoria while they held dream imagery and then capture them, I'd essentially have a dream camera! Luckily, I knew a little about machine repair from before my imprisonment. I collected discarded parts from around the prison and spent about a year or two experimenting until I finally created this little contraption.
Reporter: What inspired you to make movies in prison? And why horror films specifically?
Grady: Initially, I just recorded dream scenes with my device, but that got old pretty fast. Then █████ suggested, "Why don't you make a movie? You've got nothing but time." Entertaining yourself gets dull eventually, but bringing some thrill to our dreary prison life though...
Filming in the Synesthesia Dreamscape proved tricky at first. I thought dreams would let me create anything I wanted, but memoria typically behaved in one of two extremes. They're either too stable, just like reality, forcing us to manually create props and sets, or, too chaotic, like jelly, where an actor's face could transform nine times within one second. Dreams were so unpredictable that we ended up shooting many scenes on physical sets in the actual prison.
As for why horror films: First, they're relatively cheap to make with fewer technical demands. Second, after toggling between prison life and nightmares for so long, I figured people needed something more thrilling. And honestly, the very last thing I did before imprisonment was watching a horror movie in a theater. I only got halfway through before IPC Dogs dragged me onto their ship. Perhaps making horror films is my way of finishing that interrupted movie.
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(A roughly produced newspaper, widely distributed during the prison era, secured publishing rights after Ozaka bribed prison officials)