What were some of the other influences for you on this? HtN: Let’s talk about influences for minute: Michigan, Esham. I assumed everybody’s influence was that until I started going to festivals and then realized The Evil Dead wasn’t the only film influencing people. So for a lot of guys in Michigan I know that’s like their biggest influence – The Evil Dead. JP: Yeah! That’s why when I was sixteen and I finally saw The Evil Dead it was like, “Oh my gosh Michigan guys made this movie in the woods?” This is all I want to do for the rest of my life is make movies in the woods in Michigan. HtN: And that’s set in Michigan too, right? All through high school I made little crappy The Evil Dead ripoffs in the woods and it was time to do something real and give my love to The Evil Dead and just do it in my own style, and you know, in a much different way than The Evil Dead. But I had been wanting to make a movie out in the woods for a long time. And then at some point the story just takes over and the character does what they want. Usually I just have a bunch of ideas for a script and I just shove them all together so I had an idea about an alchemist, and then I had this weird doppelganger thing, and then I just started kind of throwing them all together. It was supposed to be a doppelganger out in the woods story. So I started to write this doppelganger script and then just one thing led to another. And I was like, “What was THAT?” And Ashley and I thought that we had seriously seen a doppelganger and that this guy was like some creation of satan or something, out to do malicious harm and he just didn’t know who were were and didn’t know what to say. And it was him – and we rolled down the window and were like, “Hey Roland!” and he just turned and looked at us and didn’t say a thing and then just walked into a house that was right there. And we drove by him real slow and we were like, “Maybe that wasn’t him?” Then we turned around and pulled off to the side of the street and just watched him. And we thought we saw this old friend of ours, Roland, walking down the street like a zombie. Joel Potrykus: It started off when me and my girlfriend/producer were driving on a street in Grand Rapids, a city where you kind of know a lot of people. Hammer to Nail: What first attracted you to this idea? Was it the location? The genre? Joel Potrykus may have abandoned the grit and grime of urban life in order to shack up in the woods, but he sure as shit didn’t leave behind his penchant for weird-ass punk-infused shenanigans! While I ultimately don’t know what this movie means - is going off the grid a bad idea? has the world made all of us insane? is Satan realer than Bigfoot? - the performances by Ty Hickson and Amari Cheatom and Potrykus’s assured filmmaking made this one of the more original films I saw at this year’s fest. In his SxSW wrap-up, Michael Tully wrote: The film follows an outcast (Sean) living in the woods of Michigan who makes amateurish attempts at alchemy and reckless conjurings of evil in a genre best described as “WTF?” (in the best way possible). I caught up with Joel Potrykus ( Buzzard, Ape ) after his newest film, The Alchemist Cookbook, played BAM Cinemafest in June. In a movie filled with wrongness, watching him power through a bag of Doritos is somehow the uneasiest.( Charles Poekel caught up with Joel Potrykus at BAM Cinemafest regarding his latest film The Alchemist Cookbook. The result is the following chat which is one of the best interviews you’ll read all year! Potrykus’ film is available NOW in a pay-what-you-want format.) His efforts, while rarely pleasant to watch, give this bizarre little squiffle of a film some real fascinating impact. Here, he appears to be taking his cues from somewhere in another dimension, sporting tics and obsessive patterns that don’t land anywhere on the standard Hollywood chart of afflictions. The Alchemist Cookbook’s biggest weapon, however, proves to be Hickson, a talented actor who was downright terrific in the SIFF fave Gimmie the Loot. With an effects budget likely ranking in the single digits, Potrykus’s film beats the recent Blair Witch revamp in making the woods a place where a Terrible Thing could be lurking behind every twig, especially-and most impressively-during the daylight. ![]() The fact that it’s often genuinely scary helps, too. Any attempt at a plot description, though, neglects the small, absorbingly bizarre bits scattered through virtually every scene. ![]() The camera keeps uncomfortably close to the main character as he works on his slowly disclosed plan, while barely tolerating the occasional visits from a semi-concerned family member (the hilarious Amari Cheatom). Support local, independent media with a one-time or recurring contribution. More than ever, we depend on your support to help fund our coverage.
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