THE NEW YORK STALKER IS ON THE LOOSE!
Ben Warren has become unstuck from sanity.
THE NEW YORK STALKER is a trilogy of music videos following Ben Warren’s lurid journeys through Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens on a misguided quest to connect with humanity. Director Matthew Glasson (God The Band’s “General Queer”) creates a fractured and darkly comic portrait of Ben’s obsession as he succumbs to his madness. With each video, a new side of Ben’s deranged mind is explored as he stalks another potential victim and falls further away from his own sanity.
THE NEW YORK STALKER steeps in a nostalgia for the grindhouse slasher cinema of the 1970s and 1980s set on the mean streets of New York City such as MANIAC (Joe Spinell), DEATH WISH (Michael Winner) and Lucio Fulci’s NEW YORK RIPPER. It both embraces and sends up the genre that shaped the videos and is complementary to Ben Warren’s raspy voice and intense musical stylings.
OK enough PR pandering, here's the real deal...
"Broken Girl" was an idea so fundamentally twisted and wrong that naturally I was compelled to do it. The idea came to me as I was brainstorming different music video ideas for Ben, and felt the dramatic bleakness of the chorus in the song lent itself to some nice unbroken slow-motion shots of dead serial killer victims being discovered by innocent bystanders. I was actually pretty cautious about treading in the whole mysognistic/serial-killer territory because a) it's totally played, b) it's ethically shaky and c) it's a nasty place to mentally reside. Oddly enough, it was my then girlfriend Jen Rock who was most supportive of the idea and agreed to help make the video by taking on the task of handling the make-up. I discussed the idea with Ben (who is always down for doing anything that involves putting himself in front of the camera) and found a willing actor in Laura Baron (whom I contacted through myspace) as his newest target. The remaining cast was made up from friends and actors who either wanted to work with me or friends who were willing to get dressed up and play dead.
My tendency is to always inject a little bit of subversive (if not downright slapstick) humor in my work, so the challenge for "Broken Girl" was establishing and maintaining an utterly fatalistic and bleak tone. This was to be true "horror" and would not have any winks to the viewer to let them off easy. The initial cut of the video had some pretty hokey acting in it (priceless for a blooper reel) but after showing that to Ben and some other people and hearing them laugh out loud, I went back and found some more subtle reaction shots as his victims are discovered.
The biggest irony with this song and the video that it inspired is that, lyrically, it's about a guy who is suffering in a disfunctional relationship with his girlfriend ("broken girl/you're my world/every waking moment that you spend drowning by my side"). But that didn't bother Ben, who, by all accounts, enjoyed putting on his black hoody and sulking around the streets of Alphabet City as "The New York Stalker."
THE NEW YORK STALKER is a trilogy of music videos following Ben Warren’s lurid journeys through Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens on a misguided quest to connect with humanity. Director Matthew Glasson (God The Band’s “General Queer”) creates a fractured and darkly comic portrait of Ben’s obsession as he succumbs to his madness. With each video, a new side of Ben’s deranged mind is explored as he stalks another potential victim and falls further away from his own sanity.
THE NEW YORK STALKER steeps in a nostalgia for the grindhouse slasher cinema of the 1970s and 1980s set on the mean streets of New York City such as MANIAC (Joe Spinell), DEATH WISH (Michael Winner) and Lucio Fulci’s NEW YORK RIPPER. It both embraces and sends up the genre that shaped the videos and is complementary to Ben Warren’s raspy voice and intense musical stylings.
OK enough PR pandering, here's the real deal...
"Broken Girl" was an idea so fundamentally twisted and wrong that naturally I was compelled to do it. The idea came to me as I was brainstorming different music video ideas for Ben, and felt the dramatic bleakness of the chorus in the song lent itself to some nice unbroken slow-motion shots of dead serial killer victims being discovered by innocent bystanders. I was actually pretty cautious about treading in the whole mysognistic/serial-killer territory because a) it's totally played, b) it's ethically shaky and c) it's a nasty place to mentally reside. Oddly enough, it was my then girlfriend Jen Rock who was most supportive of the idea and agreed to help make the video by taking on the task of handling the make-up. I discussed the idea with Ben (who is always down for doing anything that involves putting himself in front of the camera) and found a willing actor in Laura Baron (whom I contacted through myspace) as his newest target. The remaining cast was made up from friends and actors who either wanted to work with me or friends who were willing to get dressed up and play dead.
My tendency is to always inject a little bit of subversive (if not downright slapstick) humor in my work, so the challenge for "Broken Girl" was establishing and maintaining an utterly fatalistic and bleak tone. This was to be true "horror" and would not have any winks to the viewer to let them off easy. The initial cut of the video had some pretty hokey acting in it (priceless for a blooper reel) but after showing that to Ben and some other people and hearing them laugh out loud, I went back and found some more subtle reaction shots as his victims are discovered.
The biggest irony with this song and the video that it inspired is that, lyrically, it's about a guy who is suffering in a disfunctional relationship with his girlfriend ("broken girl/you're my world/every waking moment that you spend drowning by my side"). But that didn't bother Ben, who, by all accounts, enjoyed putting on his black hoody and sulking around the streets of Alphabet City as "The New York Stalker."
posted by Mugs at 1:18 AM
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