Sybil Presley doesn’t realize what’s in store for her in Another Evil Night.
Jason Harlow will release his new horror feature film, Another Evil Night, on October 1st.
Just in time for Halloween.
“Another Evil Night is a sequel to a movie from 1992 called Evil Night,” says Harlow, 25. “I wasn’t even born when Evil Night came out.”
Evil Night is about “a killer who wears a creepy clown mask.”
The idea to make a sequel began after Harlow and Evil Night director Todd Jason Cook struck up a Facebook friendship “through mutual friends in the horror community.”
Harlow told Cook, “that’s the coolest mask I’ve ever seen.”
He then told him, “I think it would be cool to do a different take on the film.”
“He was very receptive to the idea right off the bat. He said, ‘Make your film. I made mine. Go out, grab some friends, local actors or whatever, and make a movie with some blood and guts. And it’ll be a sequel.’”
And, Harlow says, “He shipped me the mask in the mail.”
The first movie, set in 1992, “follows a tormented brainiac, just a general college student. And everybody is just mean to the guy for no reason, pretty much.”
The guy, Jimmy Fisher, is a chemistry major who develops a potion that gives him telekinetic powers. “He uses that to kill a bunch of people at a party one night.”
Harlow’s sequel “starts out with another tormented, really smart college kid. He gets bullied at the very beginning of the film. And he instantly comes in contact with the killer in the clown mask from the original film. Same attire and everything. He wears a black cloak with a hood on it and then some white gloves.”
Harlow’s movie takes place the day before Halloween and on Halloween. “There’s a Halloween party planned and all this stuff that the cool crowd is doing. So, the tormented college student gets Jimmy Fisher, the killer from the original film, to go along with him and track down all of the people before the party even begins and he kills them all.”
Ben Purvis plays the tormented college student in Harlow’s film. “He’s so good with improv. He can come up with something just totally on the fly and it really adds value to the film.”
He found Purvis through the film’s cinematographer, Jacob Gordon.
Harlow plays Jimmy Fisher. “I actually did that myself because we needed someone. I don’t have any acting skills, to be honest, but we needed somebody who could be there for every shot because Jimmy is in about 85, 90 percent of the film pretty much.”
Wearing that clown mask from the original film was “incredible. I never thought I’d ever see the mask in person, but getting to wear it for a 70-minute slasher film is just the coolest thing in the world.”
Jason Harlow
A native Memphian, Harlow grew up on horror movies. “I started watching horror films at a really young age. Probably four or five. The first one I truly remember was Child’s Play 2. I was absolutely terrified of all things horror back in the day, but I was addicted to it, if that makes sense. I would watch Goose Bumps and Are You Afraid of the Dark and just absolutely terrify myself. But I didn’t want to stop watching it even though I was screaming and crying.”
Another favorite was Clown House, which Harlow saw when he was in the first or second grade. He described it as “a very disturbing film.” The movie “follows three younger boys who are on their way to the circus. And they encounter three escaped mental patients who follow them home and try to kill them.”
The mental patients are dressed as clowns. “That was absolutely terrifying.”
“I can watch other movies but, for the most part, I think 90 percent of the movies I’ve seen in my entire life are horror movies. I saw the movie Saw the weekend after opening weekend when I was in the fourth grade and it was terrifying. Just the thought of waking up with a chain around your ankle and having to cut your foot off and not knowing how you got there. And just the way the killer went about kidnapping the victims with the creepy pig mask on and injecting them with some kind of sedative. That whole thing was just so crazy. And to see that in the fourth grade was, honestly, pretty ridiculous.”
He and his family were eating dinner at P. F. Chang’s when they “made a group decision as a family to go watch it,” Harlow says. “We had seen the trailers for it and we just decided. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing.”
His parents “are not too big on horror films,” but Harlow and his brother, Garret, and sister, Kayla Williams, are. Williams is the lead in his movie. “She’s the innocent girl that just wants to throw the party.”
By the time he was ten years old, Harlow had seen 100 horror movies. “It got to the point where every weekend at my aunt’s house, I would get her to take me to Blockbuster’s and I would rent two or three horror movies.”
Harlow decided when he was a junior in high school to make horror films. “I just started networking and getting to know other filmmakers. The whole process started with me helping them with their projects.”
He would find someone to do the music for them or to edit their film. “I just kind of saw the process take place on other people’s projects. That helped me to be able to understand what goes into making an entire feature film.”
Harlow made his first short horror film, The Invited, in 2015. “It was not the most thought-out plot. I made a kind of a fun little eight-minute film. And, basically, it’s a guy who wears a burlap sack mask and murders a bunch of people with an ax.”
Buddy High, a friend Harlow worked with, played the murderer. “He’s just built. One of those guys who would play Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers. He’s just a big dude.”
The Invited was in the Unreal Film Festival and played at Malco Studio on the Square “in front of a somewhat decent-sized crowd.”
He and North Carolina-filmmaker Noah Nelson have been working on a movie, Prom Queen. “He came to me with an idea and was like, ‘Let’s work on this together.’”
Harlow wrote “the more horror-style stuff” for the film. “It should be ready to go sometime in the near future. It looks incredible from what I’ve seen.”
Another Evil Night will be released Oct. 1st on DVD and VHS “and should be available on at least a few video on demand outlets. The preview link — screamtimefilms.com — is already live. People are already placing orders on the film.”
Las Vegas actress Tommie Vegas appeared in Another Evil Night.
Cook is impressed with Harlow’s sequel to his Evil Night movie. “I thought Another Evil Night was wildly entertaining with a lot of great cinematography and fun sequences,” Cook says. “The main character is solid and the story brings the elements of the original while creating a new atmosphere and time frame.”
Todd Jason Cook
And, he says, “Back in 1993, I was beginning to develop some ideas for — ironically — a sequel with the same title Jason chose. I was also going to do Another Night of the Clown as a sequel to Night of the Clown. So, it was really cool to see he was on the same wavelength.”
Harlow, who specializes in risk management with Northwestern Mutual, hasn’t decided if he’s going to pursue movie-making as a career. “I honestly don’t know,” he says. “I feel like making movies is something that’s fun, but I really just need to see what the reaction to this first one is.”
And, he says, “Probably, or at the very least, I’d love to still have people come to me and I’d assist with writing their films.”
Meanwhile, Harlow has been playing around with an idea for another horror movie. “I’ve looked into getting a story going with a really goofy title along the lines of There’s a Goblin in the Woods or Night of the Creepy Goblin. I’ve already purchased a mask that would be amazing to use for the goblin character.”
