How to Sell an Indie Vampire Film

Bloodsucking Bastards is such an easy sell, you don't need a full elevator ride to make the pitch. You only need the doors to open up just long enough to scream " Shaun of the Dead meets Office Space!" at the suit holding the money.

The flick—out now in select theaters and VOD—delivers on that promise in spades. It stars Fran Kranz (The Cabin in the Woods ), Joey Kern (Cabin Fever), and Emma Fitzpatrick (The Social Network) as three coworkers who discover their management team is soulless in a literal, vampiric sort of way. Its depiction of the mundane office-cubicle domain we all know too well is spot-on, and cathartically gory in how it dispatches said environment.

"In the old days, you didn't have the internet immediately making up its mind on a movie and instant word-of-mouth, so you could roll a movie out from market to market and kind of control the dialogue around your film," said Ware. "So you can either fight that, or accept it and use it."

Plenty of box offices have been spoiled by premature bad press reporting a movie had "flopped," creating a weird self-fulfillment loop that keeps audiences away, thusly making it an actual "flop." (Hi, Waterworld.) The internet just injected the process with mainline hits of speed. The multi-platform release of utilizing select theaters and VOD, then, avoids possibly interested parties being put off by negative sentiment and low Rotten Tomatoes percentages, getting ahead of criticism, if there is any.

The VOD strategy also allows the film to find an audience it wouldn't necessarily locate through the normal route of "in select theaters" or even a wider distribution model.

"Some kid in Anchorage or Omaha who reads a horror blog is probably never going to get the movie in his town anyway so why not give him a chance to see it right when he's most interested?" said Ware.

In all, the whole process from production to premiere was less than two years—albeit six years after Mitts typed those first words on his screenwriting program. That's fast by Hollywood standards. And it sets up a hard act to follow.

"My last film I shot in 2011, and it came out on Hulu just last week," said O'Connell. "We sold BSB basically while we were still in Park City. I expect to sell the next one in a blink of an eye," he joked. "That's how this works, right?"

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Bloodsucking Bastards is out now in select theaters and VOD.