Rene Rivas’s Short Film ‘Rejected’ Lands on CryptTV

While sitting at a coffee shop, filmmaker Rene Rivas scrolled by a Facebook post announcing that a camera store nearby had three Sony Mavica cameras that they’d be giving away to the first person who came to get them. Being a collector of cameras, he immediately packed up and headed down the road towards the store.

As soon as he arrived, he was told that someone had just come and grabbed all three of them. He and the owner began to talk about the cameras and Rene concocted a story about a fake commercial for a Mavica where a group of photographers go into the wilderness and are attacked by Bigfoot.

The owner laughed and told him that he should write that script, and Rejected was born.

Rejected follows three separate mock infomercials for a “Sonu Mavico” camera that go terribly wrong. Winning eleven awards at various film festivals across the country, Rejected features incredible gore effects and nostalgia. This is the first project in which the filmmaker felt he was able to blend comedy, and includes the writer and director playing a kitschy host of a television show.

He tells us, “All of my projects have been pretty serious in tone; this one, it was just like alright. I’m going to be self aware and a bit meta and poke fun at myself.”

Rene Rivas is a writer and director based out of Arizona who has been residing in the world of independent horror for nearly fifteen years. He has written and directed eleven short films (The Spirit of Haddonfield, 10/31/85, Bite Size, Judy) and one feature (Northern).

After fully fleshing out the story that he had passively thrown together in conversation, two more commercial ideas involving a Sony Mavico came to his mind.

Rivas explains, “I wrote the first one and thought it was a fun world to play in.”

The three stories all revolve around deadly mishaps with a Mavico camera, but each segment tells an individual tale. “Another reason why Rejected is pretty solid, in my opinion, is that it’s got a lot of different flavors. The first segment is kind of like our ghost story, a paranormal story; the second one is the creature feature, and the third one is a black magic voodoo sort of scenario and it’s all wrapped into this whacky little infomercial.”

Before he knew it, he had a finalized script for a short film. Wanting to bring it to life, he started a crowdfunding campaign. As support for the project began to roll in, he was able to start the process of shooting his script.

The first thing he knew that he needed was a score that encapsulated the 1990s and so he sought one out online. He stumbled upon an artist named John Bartman who has a website selling scores that are inspired by various theme songs from the ’80s and ’90s.

Rivas recalls, “At the very beginning of the project, I knew that I had to have some really inspired ’90s type of music to wrap-around the project. I had the music before we even shot anything.” Rene found one that he thought was perfect for his concept and purchased its license. Next came the wardrobes. The thrift stores near him were packed with clothes reminiscent of the time. When it came to the Bigfoot costume, Rene knew that it could be one of two things: incredibly realistic or charmingly tawdry.

“I deliberately wanted it to look a little bit hokey because this is a hokey world that we’re playing in and I feel like we have a lot of liberties to be a little hokey in it.” 

The idea of having three separate stories allowed Rene to play around with practical gore effects more than he’d been able to in his previous projects. Despite knowing that he’d most likely only have one take to make a gag work, he was committed to remaining as practical as possible like the horror films he grew up loving. With proficient effects artists working beside him, he was able to pull off over 90% of the stunts practically, including a shot of the inner workings of a vintage eMachines desktop.

“That was a complete practical set that I built. None of that was digital at all. Every single wire that you see in there, everything that you see on screen was meticulously hot-glue-gunned. That prop took me about a week to build for ten seconds of coverage.” 

Rejected was filmed over the course of a year and included about seven days of shooting. Once everything had wrapped, Rene felt as though something critical was missing. He wanted to find a way to tie all three stories together and realized that the perfect way to do this would be to have the three stories be shown on a talk show, akin to a home video show of the ’90s.

“Segments one, two, and three were pretty much all cut together in post but I had been tinkering with the idea in the back of my head to have a wrap-around. I called my DP and asked his thoughts on adding a little context to this. It would be a one day shoot, here is the script. It was about two pages long and it was a wrap-around where these two characters set up and describe the three stories and he said yes. This is what it needed. It needed that because otherwise the audience might be a little lost and wondering what is this? We don’t get it.”

He then remembered how infomercials used to showcase the products they were selling, and decided to show a 360° of the Mavico following each segment and dressed it as a result of the story. Initially naming his film “Rejected Mavica Ads,” he found it to be too wordy a title once he finished post-production. Landing on Rejected, he realized that this shorter title would also give the opportunity to play around in that world later on if he wanted to.

“It was three words and I was like that’s a little verbose. That’s a little wordy. Let’s just call it Rejected because that also opens up the possibility of this being a bigger world. It could be like Rejected Part 2, now we’re doing the 1970s. That’s why I reduced the name because we can spoof something else down the line.”

He began to take Rejected on the road to various film festivals and conventions and while in Columbus, Ohio at Nightmare Film Festival, associates of CryptTV found their way to a screening. They began to talk with Rene after the film had played and decided to acquire it for their platform.

You can watch Rejected on the platform CryptTV here.

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