A Bloody Good Time: Behind the Scenes of ‘Eli Roth’s BE MINE: A VR Valentine’s Slasher’

Two weeks ago, we announced Eli Roth’s BE MINE: A VR Valentine’s Slasher—a follow-up to the Halloween-themed Eli Roth’s Haunted House: Trick-VR-Treat. Just in time for Valentine’s Day, BE MINE stars Peyton List of Cobra Kai fame as Becca, a young woman who’s been stalked for years by a crazed killer in a Cupid mask.

You’ll have to wait until 7:00 pm PT on February 10 to catch the premiere in Meta Horizon Worlds.* But in the meantime, we sat down with Eli Roth to whet your appetite with a behind-the-scenes scoop where he talks about his influences, what it was like to bring the slasher genre into VR for the first time, and more.

Eli Roth: ​​It’s funny because we knew that whatever we did for the first one, Trick-VR-Treat, we were going to probably break every rule for the next one, even though every time we think we have it figured out. We go, “OK, what if we tried this? What if we tried that?” The idea is that with each film, there’s a real progression.

I meticulously planned Trick-VR-Treat where you’re walking through and the camera is a person, and I was really careful how I panned and I did different motion tests because I just didn’t want anyone to get dizzy.

And then the last shot of the night, we were just screwing around with the camera, and we tried pulling back with someone running towards us—it was the person with the mask, and it was the most heart-racing shot of the piece. We thought, “OK, the camera moving forward or someone coming at you with the camera low is very scary.” I definitely wanted to write something where we could do that, but what I really noticed was the behind the scenes, when we cut it together, editing worked way better than I thought it would. I was really surprised that you could just really move the camera around and edit like a movie without it getting disorienting.

We were focusing so hard on the camera work and Trick-VR-Treat that, the behind the scenes, we weren’t even paying attention to it. I was just taking my GoPro camera and sticking it on the crane or putting it around like, “Alright, let’s just capture what we get just to show people what it was like making the film.” And while we were cutting that together, I realized, “Oh, wow, I could actually edit this more like a traditional film way more than I thought I could.”

When I was writing BE MINE, I thought, let’s try and do this much more like a traditional slasher movie where you have the killer’s point of view, you’re doing coverage this way, coverage that way, and then a wide shot. What if we just didn’t think of it as a VR movie in that sense but really approached it like a traditional slasher? But then how do you deal with eye-lines and using 180 degrees to frame it? Those were the challenges.

When I talked to Adam McDonald, he really had the right attitude. I said, “If we’re going to make this and you’re going to direct it, we can’t look at it as being frustrating. We have to be like, ‘OK, this is exciting.’ If your attitude is, ‘Oh, no,’ if you try to make it 35 mm film, you’re going to be frustrated. But if you think, ‘Oh, wow. Actually, I can place characters at this edge of the frame and this edge of the frame and high and low and move it around.’” And then what you get is things like the party scene. When the camera is moving through the party, it’s absolutely thrilling and so immersive. It really feels like you’re one of the characters in a slasher film. It’s really incredible.

ER: I haven’t really done a straight-up slasher movie before. I’m about to go and make Thanksgiving, my holiday slasher, but the closest I got to it was doing the fake trailer in Grindhouse for Thanksgiving, which was in the tradition of Halloween and My Bloody Valentine and The Prowler and all those kind of great slashers from the golden age of horror.

I wanted to write that type of movie, where you could turn it into a feature film if people like it. I already have a premise of how to turn it into a feature, but for the short, you just get right to the good stuff. You don’t have a lot of set up, there’s not a lot of talking—it’s just start with the kill right away, then we set up what’s going to happen. Who’s this person that’s trying to kill her? But instead of making her the victim, I like the twist that any guy she likes becomes the victim.

She’s never in danger. In fact, she’s protected by her stalker. But she feels bad because it’s sort of denying her the chance to live—to be a teenager, be a college student and date around and explore life. She’s completely trapped by this guy. And I like the idea that she has agency. She carries, she has a gun.

She’s very reasonable about it, and the other kids and the other girls in the sorority, instead of saying, “Well, this is terrible. How can you bring this to our door?’ They think, “Great. Let’s kill this guy, and then Ryan Murphy will make a series about it.” It’s a very 2023 attitude about it.

And then I wanted to do something that was just a straight slasher movie, like Halloween or My Bloody Valentine or The Prowler or Scream, where you’re guessing who the killer is right up through the end. And the cast was fantastic. Right after Trick-VR-Treat, Meta said, “Can you give us a horror movie that we can set up for Valentine’s Day?” I had the idea right away, and I had a really fun time writing it. And we just couldn’t have gotten luckier with our cast and our director, Adam McDonald. Everybody did such a fantastic job.

ER: Yeah. I was not into the gun world at all until I made Death Wish in 2016, the Death Wish remake. And I really researched how that world works and who has guns and how you get it, and hiding stuff in tactical furniture and getting a concealed carry permit and having firearms in your house, and what would it take to get a concealed carry permit?

I like that if you were a victim in a slasher film today in 2023, you wouldn’t just wait around for the killer. You’d train, learn how to use a gun, and you’d have it registered, you’d register with the school, you’d do everything properly, and then if they show up, you kill them. It seems so obvious to me. It’s very fun that the other girls, nobody’s freaked out. They’re like, “Oh, well, let’s do this as a sorority activity. Oh, my god, that’d be so fun. Can you show us how to shoot?”

The fun was also taking classic fraternity/sorority horror movie stereotypes and flipping them. Most of the fraternity guys in movies are really jocks and into sports, and these guys are really into theater and archery. It’s just putting a spin on it, and then actually having those things pay off in the story—not just doing it for the sake of doing it, but building into the character and just making a movie that felt like it was set in 2023, that didn’t feel like it was old and didn’t feel like it had clichés.

Of course, everybody thinks they have a perfect plan—this is how we’re going to catch the killer—and as soon as the killer shows up, it all goes to hell. Everybody starts freaking out, people start getting shot left and right and getting killed.

ER: I’ve always wanted to do a Killer Cupid. It’s one of those ideas I’ve had, but it’s so absurd. I couldn’t think of a way to do it that wasn’t just ridiculous, like in a fake trailer kind of way. I thought, “OK, if I do another fake trailer, that’ll be one of the things is the Killer Cupid who shoots people on Valentine’s Day.” It really was just fate that the response to Trick-VR-Treat was so overwhelming and positive. People really loved it, and watching it in Meta Horizon Worlds with people in the theater, in the virtual theater, was so fun and strange and thrilling, and the kills really worked. You could tell people were really engaged when there was carnage on screen.

Trick-VR-Treat was really inspiring, especially the audience response. Now that I did one, I wanted to do more. What worked the best? It was amazing filling up the room with candy, but just moving the camera backwards and having the guy chase us—it was just as scary, and that was super low-tech. How do I do more of that? And I just had this idea and it just poured out of me. When I really focus, I can write pretty fast, and I just burned it out. I pitched three Valentine’s Day ideas to Meta. I said, “I have this, this, and this.” And they went, “OK, that one sounds like not just the best to do, but there’s the least amount of visual effects and post-production.” I wrote it, and they said, “Can you start shooting this in a month?” And we said, “Yes, of course.”

I knew I could do it because I had a great team with Crypt TV and Cream Productions in Toronto, who I had just done Trick-VR-Treat with. I said, “What if we just get a lot of the same crew? Or Adam MacDonald is from there—I’m sure Adam has some of his own crew. What if we just kept it going and did another one?” And the nice thing about six-day shoots or one-week shoots, you’re not getting a huge commitment from people. You can get really, really talented people. Production Designer Peter Mihaichuk, who had done Trick-VR-Treat, also did this, and Steve Newburn, doing gore effects with just a lot of the people that we had. But really, Cream Productions pulled the whole thing together in record time.

And now we know more about how to do these. We have an idea of how long it takes to set up a shot and what can we do, and the fun was really pushing the boundaries. But it was wild being there on set with all those people and all those extras partying and moving the camera through it and then looking at it in the headset. That feeling of being in a party in a slasher film, it’s really exciting. I haven’t felt anything quite like it because I’ve seen people doing immersive movies before, and I wanted Trick-VR-Treat to be an immersive horror film. I think what we learned on Trick-VR-Treat, we really got to dial up in BE MINE.

ER: It was so fun. Dorian Giordano, who was the kid dressed as Harry Styles in Trick-VR-Treat and got his arms and leg ripped off—he was such a great actor, and he was so nice. I thought, “Does he want to be in it? We can kill him in the opening scene.” But I was really happy that Peyton List signed on because I’m a big fan of Cobra Kai.

ER: I’ve always found that the Disney kids are often the best in horror movies because they really want to shed that image.

It started with Rider Strong in Cabin Fever, but certainly Vanessa Hudgens as the witch in Trick-VR-Treat and Peyton in BE MINE. She was really fantastic and covered head to toe in blood. She was such a good sport about all of it. She loved it. Alanna Ubach, I was just thrilled to work with. I love her. I’ve been a huge fan of hers for a long, long time. Freeway is one of my favorite movies. I loved her on Euphoria, and I was really happy she said yes.

As soon as someone like Alanna starts acting, once you put them in the scene, you say to yourself, “Oh, this is a real movie.” Once you’ve got Alanna and Peyton and then Inanna Sarkis comes in and is so good and so funny as Morgan, as, like, the president of the sorority, as just the boss. She really owned it, and she was fabulous and so fun and everybody that was there, Callan Potter, all the kids were so into the blood and the gore and the special effects, and they just wanted it to be great.

It was a really good vibe on set. Everyone was having a fun time. You need someone who’s as experienced as Peyton because the shooting schedule was so tight, because in a slasher movie, you need a lot of pieces. And by pieces, not just body parts, you need different shots to build tension. You’ve got to have the POV down the hall, the face coming from behind, and that stuff takes time. When you get to the dialogue, I remember the first day they shot, like, nine pages, which is crazy. Most feature films shoot three pages, maybe five in a day. Nine pages is fast. Even a fast television show is seven pages.

So nine pages the first day was crazy. It was all the stuff in the library, a lot of talking. It was Peyton’s first day, and she got off the plane and showed up and nailed it. Now, usually on a first day, you want to let the actors find the character, find the voice, find the way they move. Sometimes you just have to parachute in and go. And Peyton really did that brilliantly. It was just amazing. I couldn’t believe how much she was shooting that first day. She just did it. You have so much to do. You’re not even overthinking it. You’re like, “Alright, just roll the camera. Let’s go. OK, next thing, go.”

That was day one. And then the rest of the days, we got to really more carefully craft the kill scenes. I remember watching that scene of the girls when they’re deciding that they want to throw the party, when a lot of the house was like, “This is crazy. We’re not professionals, we’re not police, we’re not catching a killer.” And their response is, “Our mission is helping women.” Catching Peyton’s stalker clearly qualifies.

The way that Adam staged them, watching some girls on the right, some girls in the center, which goes in left, you could really follow the conversation and look around and cutting back and forth, it really felt like you were a fly on the wall in the room. And when the dialogue was bouncing around—because on the page, there were concerns, is the scene going on too long? Are you stopping for too much dialogue? I was like, no. My idea was there’d be lots of people talking over each other, but on the page, that comes out a lot longer than it is. And when it happened, when we were shooting it, I thought, “Wow, this really, really works.”

VR is a great medium that’s going to evolve, the technology is going to change. These are the things that are going to get ironed out. There will be new ones where they’re lighter and it’s just like, over your eyes, and then there’ll be AR glasses. It’s fun to be there at the beginning of it. There are just very strange, fun things about the medium that we’re learning as we do it. That’s the fun, is to be at the very beginning of it is to come out and be the first one to do this stuff where people go, “Remember those early VR things that Eli was doing with Trick-VR-Treat? That was so great.” And then, “The first slasher movie that was ever in VR was BE MINE. That was incredible.”

I love the challenge of new technology. I like telling stories. I like pushing the boundaries. I’ve got to say, Meta has been amazing. I’m not just saying this because I’ve done two projects with them. It’s been an absolute pleasure to work with them. They like that we’re pushing it.

ER: The classic Valentine’s Day horror is My Bloody Valentine, which was remade in 3D. But I love the original George Mihalka 1981 film. Halloween is the first one. There are other oddball ones, like Mother’s Day. There’s a really fun one called April Fool’s Day. I love The Prowler. There are some big ’90 slashers films. That’s where you get into Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer. There’s one I really love called Mute Witness. Whenever I’m making a slasher film or looking at it, that’s one of my go-tos. Silent Night, Deadly Night, of course, is another holiday classic. It’s just one of those genres that never dies. There’s always a way to put a killer and a stalker and turn any holiday into a horror movie, and that’s what I wanted to do with Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving was the one holiday that was always missed. And I grew up in Massachusetts, so I was like, I just wanted to see that.

Part of the fun of slasher movies is obviously the final girl. You have to have a great final girl and guessing who the killer is. These are the things that are in a slasher movie where you set up a bunch of red herrings and a bunch of suspects and everyone has something that’s shady. And part of the fun as the director is misdirecting the audience into letting them think they know who the killer is until they’re guessing right up until the end. I’ve seen enough movies to know when it works and when it doesn’t work. It’s always really great when they get you, and you never saw it coming. And I think we have a really fun twist in this one. I don’t think people are going to figure it out until the end.

ER: It’s hard because you sort of never know what’s going to be your favorite scene—it feels like picking your favorite children. You love them all equally. But there’s stuff that you write and then when you see it, you just have an additional emotional reaction. And the moment the party kicks off, where you’re moving through these great slow-motion shots and it’s just fun and you’re in it and everyone’s dancing—and then Peyton comes down and she’s led through the party up until the first kill. That section of the movie is, wow. I looked at that and I was completely blown away at the way Adam shot it. He had a camera rig called the Ronin—that’s like a steady-cam rig. And the Ronin operator was on a Segway, so he’s like floating through the party. We’re watching the headset, and he’s shooting in slow motion and we’re playing it back, going, “Oh, my god.” Our jaws were on the ground because it just looked so fun.

And our costume designer, Brenda, had these fantastic angel costumes with wings and everyone just partying, we thought, “Yeah, this just looks like you’re in a slasher movie.” And you can look all around and really see it. It really gives you the sensation of what it was like to be there in that room at that moment. It’s this incredible trick of your brain. And the way Adam cut it with the music playing, I just want to live in that. It’s one of those scenes that goes on for the right amount of time because as soon as it’s over, you’re like, I want to go back to that. They all look so fun.

And then once the killing starts, it’s incredible. It’s just so much fun—the carnage and just seeing it and seeing people die right in front of you. You don’t have that distance of a movie. You’re looking down and seeing them at your feet. You’re like, “Whoa, this is intense, this is crazy.” It’s a visceral experience.

I don’t want to give away any spoilers because the kills are so good, but that moment of the party starting where Alanna Ubach just kind of throws her hands up, like, “Alright, I give up.” And then the music comes in. It’s just people dancing and just hard cut slow motion. That kind of fun, college, old-school Animal House, you just can’t go wrong with that. There’s a part of us that loves that, to reminisce of that first moment when you’re out of your house and you’re, like, 19 or 20 and you go to some party and everyone’s just going crazy and behaving like animals and the adults aren’t around—it’s so much fun. It really hits me in a very nostalgic spot.

ER: There are certain things that people don’t know. Is AI going to take over? Are we ready for AI to start creating images for us? Do we want to see it in a theater with other people? Do we want to put a virtual rig on and go into a theater with other people? Nobody knows. I remember when Amazon started, people were like, “Wait a minute, you’re not going to shop at home? What about going out to stores?” And now people are like, “Do you want to go to the store to buy jeans?” And other people are like, “What are you talking about? Why would you do that?”

It’s interesting how fast our behavior changes when the technology is fun and it makes sense. I do see a world where a lot more of these movies start to get made, but if you recall, there was MP3 sharing in music—people were going on LimeWire to download stuff and Napster. And then iTunes started. And it was like, “OK, here’s the one centralized place where we can all go to get our music.” And then movies started on iTunes. And then we’re like, “OK, this is where we can all go to watch movies online.” Now we have Apple TV and when I watch a movie, I know where to go. And I think that’s what the metaverse is going to build. I think that when there’s enough movies out there, once we have the place where everyone can go that is like that central theater and that’s figured out, then everyone’s going to go there. People start putting content there. More people go there. It starts to become like the central hangout. I think it’s great.

It’s amazing to see the technology involved, how this certain amount of people can go into the virtual theater before the theater overflows. As the technology evolves, I think that it’s going to be on us, on the filmmakers to just keep giving people a reason to go there because I think the technology is going to evolve at its own pace. But what’s going to drive it I think will be great content—hat one thing that absolutely everybody has to see.

Remember when Funny Or Die started? And it was like Will Ferrell and his son, the son was the landlord. And everyone was like, what is that thing with Will Ferrell and the baby? It was just a moment where you thought, “This is going to be something. Is this a business? Are people going to be legitimately doing stuff here?” And then YouTube takes off.

I do see a world where a lot of filmmakers are going to embrace the technology and are going to make great interactive immersive experiences that they can share and put in these virtual movie theaters. Because when you watch it, whether you watch it as a standalone or whether you watch it in a theater, it feels like you’re watching the world’s biggest IMAX screen.

I’m excited. I feel like we really are at the beginning of something, and it’s fun to sort of see what it’s going to be in five years—whether I was completely right or I was totally insane. I think that once the headsets get lighter and it doesn’t smudge your makeup or leave circles around your eyes, that’s when we’re going to have longer experiences. People go, “Can we do a feature film?” And I go, “You can, but the mark on my nose will stay there.” It’s like wearing ski goggles. Until that gets adjusted, I think that 30 minutes will be the maximum, but that’s the fun and that’s the challenge. Who knows where it’s going to go, but it’s exciting.

ER: People can write to me on Instagram and let me know what they thought. I’d love to hear your thoughts—what worked, what was the most effective? People recording their reactions and posting that is really fun, to watch people during the moment of the scare.

And I think that BE MINE is enough of a mainstream slasher movie type film that it’s a great way to convert a non-VR person.

Getting my wife to put the headset on, she likes it, but it’s the makeup and the hair and she’s Italian, and it’s like, what is this? She doesn’t play games. But then when I showed her the cut of BE MINE, she didn’t want to stop watching it. Now she’s into VR. You can use the short as a gateway—show it to a family member or a friend who has never put on a VR headset and then tell me what their reaction is. It’s us in the VR community letting our friends and family try it out, that’s going to convert them. And I think if you play the movie, it’s a really great way to do that.

VR horror fans can experience the premiere of BE MINE in Worlds’ creepy cabin, which is designed for immersive viewing, on February 10 at 7:00 pm PT. BE MINE will also be available for on-demand viewing in VR on Meta Quest TV. And people without a Meta Quest 2 or Meta Quest Pro headset can enjoy the short film on Facebook and Instagram.

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