Adorable turns deadly in ‘Slotherhouse,’ coming to Cedar Rapids and Iowa City

CEDAR RAPIDS — It’s been a slow climb to get his killer sloth movie off the ground, but indie filmmaker and Cedar Rapids native Brad Fowler, 42, is just fine with that.

He’s ready to see “Slotherhouse” slay on big screens, opening Aug. 30 in nearly 400 movie houses nationwide, including showings at 7:30 p.m. that day at Marcus cinemas in Cedar Rapids and Iowa City. Fowler, who now lives in Clarksville, Tenn., will be in his hometown for the opening showing. However, he told The Gazette he may not sit in the audience.

“I probably won't be in the actual theater. I'll probably be in the hallway,” he said. “Like, I've seen it 200 times — or probably more.”

Watch it!

What: “Slotherhouse,” written by Cedar Rapids native Brad Fowler

When: 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Aug. 30, 2023

Cedar Rapids: Marcus Cinema, 5340 Council St. NE; $13.77

Iowa City: Sycamore Cinema, 1602 Sycamore St.; $13.13

Tickets: marcustheatres.com/movies/slotherhouse?Date=08-30-2023&State=IA&Sort=0

Rated: PG-13

Run time: 93 min.

Cast: Sydney Craven, Stefan Kapicic, Grace Patterson, Lisa Ambalavanar, Olivia Rouyre, Andrew Horton, Milica Vrzic, Bianca Beckles-Rose, Sutter Nolan, Annamaria Serda, Rudi Rok, Tiff Stevenson

Details: slotherhouse.com/

That doesn’t mean he’s tired of it. Au contraire, this baby has been incubating for a long time, and he’s anxious to show it off to the cinematic universe.

Slow and steady

He’s a patient man.

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Keeping the actual price tag close to his chest, Fowler said the seven-figure project has evolved at a snail’s pace. It’s taken the 2000 Cedar Rapids Kennedy High School graduate seven years to research, write, film in Serbia, do the post production, and shop it around for distribution. Gravitas Ventures bit, picking up the pace to move the process forward.

So why take one of nature’s cutest, cuddliest critters and turn it into a killing machine?

The idea crawled out of a buddy trip to Florida. Fowler was getting a little jaded at all the closed doors he had encountered in Hollywood.

“My buddy was like, ‘Well, what makes money?’ I said, ‘I don’t know — stupid (expletive).’ He said, ‘What’s the dumbest ideas you can come up with?’

“So that’s where it came from,” Fowler said.

A horror fan from his preteen Stephen King days, the more he dug into the sloth world, the more he embraced his least-likely-to-kill idea. But when he pitched it to his filmmaking partner, Cady Lanigan, she wanted to lighten it up a bit, skewing it toward a younger audience, ages 13 to 25, and slashing some of the gore.

So where would this rogue sloth find his victims? In a sorority house, naturally. Or unnaturally. Dubbed Alpha, he just might be their omega.

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The action begins with sorority sister Emily who is “obsessed with being popular,” and in her quest to be elected the Sigma Lambda Theta house president, has to get the “queen bee” out of her way.

“Through a chance meeting, she’s given the opportunity to bring an adorable sloth into the home,” Fowler said. “And she realized after doing that, she's getting incredibly popular. But that comes with costs, when she slowly starts to realize that bodies are piling up, and it was due to the sloth.

“At the end of the day, this movie answers the age-old question how sloths survived for 30 million years, with no natural defense mechanism. And the answer to that question is in the first two minutes of the movie.”

Gateway movie

The tagline, “Don’t rush. Die Slow,” is what Fowler calls a “dad joke,” playing off the sorority rush tradition. The title is a nod to the “Slaughterhouse” genre.

“Slotherhouse” is rated PG-13, and it’s a killer comedy, so Fowler sees this as “a great gateway horror movie” for younger viewers who want a little fright night and a jump-scare or two.

“There's some scary moments for sure. I mean, it is a horror movie,” Fowler said.

But, “It’s supposed to be a fun movie,” he added. Imagine “Happy Death Day” meets “Mean Girls,” with a little “Gremlins” twist.

“It’s incredibly cute — and also horrific,” he said. “ … If you Google ‘wet sloth,’ it’s the stuff of nightmares.”

He remembers the thrill of a chill running up and down his young spine.

“I fell in love with horror movies when I was a preteen,” he said. “I was obsessed with Stephen King.” Then along came “Gremlins,” which he called, “One of my biggest influences ever. I still have my Gizmo stuffed animal to this day. Well, I gave it to my daughter, but it's in my house.”

Sloths, however, are no longer in his 5-year-old’s wheelhouse. “She’s never seen it,” he said of the movie, “but she now thinks that sloths are horrible killing machines, just because of Daddy's work.”

Beyond the killing, Fowler thinks: “Sloths to her represent Daddy having to go away to work. The film even took me to Serbia for four months — that was hard for Luna. So, she isn't a big fan of sloths. I think as she gets older she will appreciate what sloths did for our family, but you never know.”

Hurdles

Writing is an interesting process for Fowler, who works around a reading comprehension disorder.

“I got held back a whole grade in elementary school,” he said. “I still can’t spell (and) my grammar is atrocious, which is hilarious, because I legitimately make a living as a writer now.”

His wife, musical theater actor Victoria Matlock Fowler, is the first person to read anything he writes.

“Second of all, honestly, the higher up I'm going in the industry, the more I realize people don't care. I mean, they want you to have the spelling and grammar right, and obviously, you can't put it out there until it's finalized.

“But at the end of the day, if you can write a good structured story that can make people laugh and cry and be scared, that means a lot more than if you get ‘where, wear and ware’ correct. Which was always my argument to my teachers in elementary school. But instead, I got my papers marked up and I failed.

“I remember I got sent to the principal's office at Coolidge Elementary School, because I accurately predicted the future by telling my teachers that in the future, computers will be able to fix my spelling and grammar.”

Failure has been a major teaching success even through college at the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls, where he majored in business and had a good grade-point average, by learning “how to pass tests, but I don’t think you learned to think.” He also played football where he warmed the football bench for “six seconds of playing time.”

“All that taught me was how to fail,” he said. “I have a hard time letting go of a goal.”

That trait has sustained him as an actor and writer in the reel world, too.

“I feel like everybody has their things that they're good at, and the things that they're not good at,” he said. “And if you're willing to really dive into those things that maybe are challenging, sometimes that's where your talent actually is.

“I really believe in that sort of yin and yang of life. Like, if you focus on the things that are just only pleasurable or only easy, there's a negative to that, usually at the end of the day. But if you're willing to dive in the deep end, and you sort of dive into that thing that you're afraid of, or that can hurt you,” that’s a positive.

He felt his teachers just didn’t understand how his brain works. And he ended up feeling stupid.

“And then as I got older, I just refused to feel that way. And so I just worked harder — that Iowa thing, right? I just worked harder and harder and harder and harder. And I kept daydreaming and I kept daydreaming and I kept daydreaming.”

He decided he could write, and sent his first screenplays to Fox Studios, where he was told he “sucked at structure” but was a good writer. That made him work even harder.

“At that point, I started reading every book on structure that I could find, and then I just started writing incessantly,” he said. “And now I write probably four or five, six scripts a year, and it usually doesn't take more than a week to write them. Because again, it goes back to structure.”

He wrote “Slotherhouse” in about six days.

The research aspect depends on the movie, but usually takes about a week.

“In the morning, I get a cup of coffee, and I write for eight to 10 hours. Then I'm like a zombie because … I get to play every character.”

That helps him work out the dialogue, flesh out the characters and decide where to take the structure in terms of comedy, violence or other plot factors.

“You take those elements and put them in a soup,” he said. “And then you put a voice to it.”

“Slotherhouse” worked outside the norm.

“The reason it took us seven years to do this movie is we did our research, and we were very intentional about who and how — who we made this movie for and how we made the movie,” he said.

Leaving Hollywood

Letting go of living in Hollywood was tough, but through several moves as he followed his wife’s career to Las Vegas, then graduate school in San Diego, made it much easier to move to Tennessee, where his wife is now teaching musical theater at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville.

“My wife and I wanted a little bit better lifestyle,” Fowler said. “You can be living in Los Angeles and you can live in apartment for 10 years and not know your neighbors. But you live in somewhere like Iowa or Tennessee or some of the Midwestern areas, and you do (know your neighbors). And people help each other and people are kind. That's pretty special.”

The Hollywood scene also was proving less friendly to independent filmmaking, which is Fowler’s focus. After scouting U.S. states for good tax incentives and good talent on-screen and behind the scenes, he found what he was looking for in Serbia. That’s where he went to make “Slotherhouse” come to life.

“We started looking internationally, and we found out Serbia is just a hotbed for talent,” he said. “There’s so many movies that shoot over there because they have really high-level crew.”

He did bring a few American actors and puppeteers into the project overseas, but most of the cast members are European actors.

While there, he also got to travel to Germany for business, then to the Cannes Film Festival in France, where he spoke at a seminar for independent filmmakers and financiers, “which is pretty cool,” he said.

Back on his home turf, after bringing his daughter to spend some time with her aunt and grandparents in Cedar Rapids, he’s ready to have others see his dream of a wide release become a reality.

“I feel so blessed. We are going to be in 300 to 500 theaters, and it's there,” he said. “It's an actual shot, and that's all any artist — I'll speak for the entire artistic community — but it's really all you can ask for.”

Comments: (319) 368-8508; diana.nollen@thegazette.com