One Man’s Bone-Chilling Journey to Screamfest 2009
By Brent Donaldson
Photograph Courtesy John Michael Elfers
“Autoerotic asphyxiation is the technical definition of how my brother died. But it’s a lot easier when I’m standing in front of 300 people in an audience to say ‘suicide.’”
The source of that quote is a thin, curly-haired 26-year old Cincinnati ex-pat filmmaker named John Michael Elfers. And Finale, his slickly produced feature film shot throughout Cincinnati in early 2006, is based on a fantastical interpretation of his brother’s death. In reality, while attending high school in the early ’90s, Douglass Elfers and his friends sometimes clashed with a group of self-declared satanists. When a 22-year-old Douglass was found dead in his apartment bathroom, his parents told young John that his brother died from an “accidental hanging.” But Elfers says his mother was convinced that a satanic cult had murdered her oldest son and staged it to look like suicide.
Douglass’s death haunted the family for years. Then, in 2006, after graduating from the University of Southern California with a degree in filmmaking, his younger brother came home to make a horror film based on the tragic event. Of course, in the movie version, the mother’s suspicions turn out to be right, and no one believes her until it is too late.
Finale won four awards on the indie-film circuit before being accepted to Screamfest 2009—a 10-day, A-list horror bash at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. Elfers says that through the film, the tragedy that “co-opted my whole adolescence” has now brought his family together. “There were still a lot of lingering issues,” says the director (pictured below), “and Finale] was a way for us to approach the topic from a safer place. It’s a story. It ended up being a way for us to deal with our family demons.”
Originally published in the October 2009 issue.