‘Big Break’: In This Meta Horror Comedy, a Real-Life Sketch Group Pursues Fame and Dodges a Killer

When the New York-based sketch group Simple Town considered making a movie, horror seemed like the most practical way in.

“We obviously wanted it to be a funny movie because we’re a comedy group,” Sam Lanier, the film’s writer and a cast member, said. “But we felt that the horror genre would be a super fun way to make a movie, because it’s a way to get an interesting plot into a comedy. We sometimes feel like it’s hard to make comedies interesting, like you want to know what happens next. So we thought, ‘OK, what’s a scary, real, dark thing about our lives that we could write about?’”

Perhaps unsurprisingly for a troupe of 30-somethings, nothing seemed scarier than career malaise. The group, comprised of Lanier, Will Niedmann, director Ian Faria, Caroline Yost and Felipe Di Poi, has had plenty of experience getting to know the NYC scene through live performances and viral sketches, but they channeled anxieties about success and being competitive with friends into the bones of their feature, “Big Break,” which is set to debut on July 19 at Fantasia Festival.

In the movie, which stars all the Simple Town members — outside of Faria — playing fictionalized versions of themselves, Lanier hits it big on a movie project and leaves the rest of his sketch group behind. But years later he invites his friends to reconnect at this bougie vacation home, and the underemployed trio hopes to ask Lanier for work on his next project. Unfortunately, a serial killer may be lurking in the woods around the house.

Yost, who also edited the film, says that the main dynamic between the friends is something she’s seen take shape in the comedy community.

“We’ve been doing this long enough that we see what happens when people’s lives change after so long,” she says. “People are unknown artists and struggling to get by, and then, occasionally, someone skyrockets to success. I think that has a big impact on their relationships. People really want to be known or feel some kind of security, to work against the uncertainty of how your life is going to be and how difficult it is to establish yourself. Often it comes from this innocent place of trying so hard to get something going for yourself.”

When it came to getting their vision on the big screen, Di Poi said that beyond the laughs and scares in the script, the group had to work to find a cohesive tone to thread the film together.

“I remember having a lot of conversations when we were rehearsing where I was like, ‘Are we playing this big and silly? This dialogue could go big and silly,’” he says. “We could play it really real. I think we all have different approaches. Some of us lean toward the more real, some of us lean toward the sillier at different moments. It just came together both in rehearsing and playing it together, and then doing it in front of the camera and feeling the emotions, feeling each other’s emotions and trying to match each other. Then in the edit to say, ‘That take was a little too big’ or ‘Let’s get this moment dumber now.’”

Given the comedic sensibilities of Simple Town, Faria said he was frequently considering the look and feel of the film in order to make sure there were plenty of visual moments to keep audiences on the edge of their seats.

“It was fun trying to make something that’s very tense all the time,” he says. “I was trying to frame open doorways in the back, so you’re always wondering, ‘Is someone going to pop in?’, or light the room a little dark or high contrast. There’s a lot of parts in the movie where there’s tension or scares, but it’s a comedy movie using a horror vocabulary where it’s almost making fun of the fact something would be scary in that moment.”

Simple Town is following in the footsteps of sketch comedians-turned-filmmakers like Jordan Peele, Zach Cregger and Curry Barker. Niedmann says there’s a clear through-line linking their humor with scary movie sensibilities.

“There’s something very similar about the two genres, where if you take an anxiety or a fear you have in comedy, you can heighten that thing to be really funny,” he says. “You can do the same thing in horror where it can become very scary. You can make a monster out of something. We were very excited to take this thing that did feel real for us, and use this language that we’ve worked out of making comedy and the beats of that. The experience of being in an audience watching the two is similar. It’s really fun to be at a big, scary movie in the theater and feel the energy from people scared and shouting.”

Watch an exclusive first clip from “Big Break” below.