You’d be hard-pressed to find someone who hasn’t heard of Angelwood Studios. Last year’s The Ridge Grave Girls was the talk of the town, and now you can barely move for casting calls for their myriad projects. But what’s really going on with Angelwood—and who are the faces between the manic shoots you might see playing out around town?
I sat down with writer and director Junko Karo, composer Abena Oppon, and production manager and assistant director Sarah Rebecca Levy to find out more.
Credit: Angelwood Studios.
Talk us through your shows. What’s been released, and what’s yet to come?
Karo: Our first film was The Ridge Grave Girls. The premise is a girl is voted prom queen in a small town—but every girl voted prom queen before her has mysteriously died. All our films coalesce around that concept—we explore femininity, coming-of-age, and societal pressure on girls.
Our other films will be about the past prom queens who have died. For instance, Bear Hunting focuses on a girl who wants to take revenge on the guy who murdered her best friend. That’s a thriller, but we dabble in other genres too. Watching the Boys is a romantic coming-of-age saga. Then Heartsick, which we haven’t filmed yet, is a dark satire or dark comedy—think Heathers. It’s only tangentially related to the prom queens. Instead, it focuses on a serial killer disposing of a body, and how they reckon with the act of killing within themselves.
Running a film company is impressive—let alone being a student at the same time. How did Angelwood Studios come about?
Levy: It was all very sudden—before we made Ridge Grave, Junko just walked up to everyone and said, ‘I’m making a film’. We all joined in, and it was at our second premier of The Ridge Grave Girls at BrewCo that we looked at each other and realized we all thought this was so fun. From there, we just kept making films.
Karo: My main inspiration for Ridge Grave was transition. I was fascinated by the idea that when girls turn eighteen they transition from girl to woman. I’m also interested in performing femininity—there’s a famous picture from the 40s of Evelyn McHale, who jumped from the Empire State Building and landed on a car, that’s often called “The Most Beautiful Suicide” that horrified me.
The photo encapsulates the thesis behind Angelwood’s films: women die when they’re at their most perfect. This is most prominent in The Ridge Grave Girls, but the idea of performative womanhood is present in all the other films as well. They’re all feminist or queer or both, and we’ve got a focus on turning stories around and telling them back at their creators in a new way. For example, Bear Hunting is loosely based on Greek myth, but we’ve reinterpreted it heavily.
What about composing? That’s a completely new world for me. What’s it like writing music for films?
Oppon: For Ridge Grave, I used a lot of what I was listening to as inspiration, plus I got Junko to tell me what she wanted. There was lots of back and forth, and I was able to pull in samples I’ve made in the past to create a cohesive final product.
Ridge Grave is very orchestral. There’s lot of organ, violin, piano, but also some synths for a retro, 80s feel. A friend of ours did Bear Hunting, which was similar, though we went with more of a noir feel for that one: strings, pianos, and percussion. Watching the Boys is a much longer film—its runtime is around forty minutes—so we’re using lots of diegetic music, along with piano to underscore.
What has been your favourite part of the production?
Oppon: I love the experience of seeing the shoot come together in a massive production. It’s amazing to watch Sarah coordinate, and I love making friends with all the people in St Andrews who turn up to help. I’m also glad I can get more experience with film scoring. It’s something I like doing and I’m glad to get back into it.
Levy: It’s lots of fun to have everyone working together, especially when we’re all on the right (i.e. productive) track and having fun. The crew are all friends, which makes things easier—it’s always fun to hang out on set. We have a massive list of out-of-context quotes—it’s a testament to how much we’ve all enjoyed the process. Plus, we take a lot of pride in seeing how the actors interpret the characters and bring the script to life.
Tell us more about the actors. What’s it like working with them?
Karo: We keep all the films to a small cast of three to four. Having any more would be a scheduling nightmare! We try to cast new actors with every film—we had one actor reprise their part from Ridge Grave in Watching the Boys, but they were only a side character, not a major player. I love working with different actors—it keeps things fresh and means we’re very inclusive.
Have there been any surprises from being a part of Angelwood?
Karo: The Glasgow Short Film Festival was a huge one. We weren’t expecting to get picked for the largest film festival in Scotland. I actually got to do a Q&A onstage which was super cool. I couldn’t believe we were able to compete in a film festival.
Levy: I think we’re quite good, but I’m also biased! (laughs) Having never really worked on any of this film production stuff before, I was happy to figure it out. I’ve had lots of fun stunt coordinating. I do martial arts, so that role started with me needing to pretend to kill someone, and morphed into my role as official stunt coordinator. We’ve had some awkward moments though—once, a neighbour walked in on me cutting a girl’s throat with a fake knife. I think that made it onto our blooper reel!
Oppon: It’s been insane to be recognised. People have come up to me saying, ‘Oh, I know Angelwood’. One girl who came to auditions said she’d found out about the studio before she arrived at St Andrews. I could never have imagined that happening.
Levy: When I was in line for our screening at Glasgow I mentioned Angelwood while doing a fit check. Someone got really excited and said, ‘oh my God, that’s Angelwood’. That was amazing.
Tell us more about your upcoming films. What’s Bear Hunting about?
Karo: It focuses on three characters: Calista, played by Amelia Stokeld, whose just graduated; Juliette (Abigail Harper), the dead prom queen and Calista’s best friend; and Hunter, who Calista thinks killed Juliette. The plot mainly focuses on Calista trying to bring Hunter to justice.
Levy: I like to call it twelve minutes of anguished, angry woman. There’s nothing like a good dose of female rage. It’s a slight retelling of the ancient Greek myth of Callisto, but a lot of things have been changed. It’s very loosely inspired, and more like a reinventing. Like Junko said, we like the idea of reclaiming stories: we wanted to spin something off Calista’s suffering.
Karo: Like our other films, Bear Hunting is set in the late 90s. We’re going for a retro aesthetic. The historical setting ties into the coming-of-age anxieties that are so important for us. Ridge Grave’s tagline was ‘let’s give the dead girls their voices back’, and that’s what we’ve tried to do with every spinoff.
What about Watching the Boys?
Karo: Watching the Boys is the story of Mia Meadows (Castille le Chatelier), the prom queen who dies in the first film. The film is about her: how she transferred to Angelwood and experienced the repressed, religious town as an outsider. Then she falls in love with a girl, and we go into loads of Bible parallels—if the Bible was Sapphic! There’s still drama, of course—there’s a massive backstabbing stemming from a love triangle where all the sides connect.
Levy: The production team’s ship name was the Holy Trinity!
Karo: It’s not a happy film—we know that Mia dies from Ridge Grave. But Ridge Grave is a deconstruction of familiar tropes like burying your gays: here in Watching the Boys, we wanted to reclaim the narrative and ask how we can give Mia her voice back. We’re not trying to play the trope straight (pun intended)—but it bothered me that in Ridge Grave, Mia wasn’t really a character. I wanted to ask if I could still reclaim this woman’s agency despite her tragic end.
Watching the Boys is around forty minutes, so we’re releasing it after Bear Hunting so people can get a sense of the studio before watching such a long film. But funnily enough, Watching the Boys was filmed before Bear Hunting. There’s a lot of whiplash in seeing them in reverse order.
What’s it like being on a shoot?
Karo: That depends on the shoot! But it gets crazy and intense. Last semester, we did a nine-to-five shoot in UCO, because it was too expensive to book a second day. We needed to shoot twenty minutes of Watching the Boys' forty-minute run time, so the pressure was intense. We had the schedule down to the minute. Half the extras didn’t show up, so we had to stick crew in instead.
You also forget that film sets have a shocking amount of standing and waiting. Filmmaking is a coalescence of all art forms (sound, lighting, framing, acting)—and everyone has to be set up before we can start. And even when you think you’ve got something right, inevitably you’ll have to run a shot over and over and over again. Getting the balance right is quite difficult.
Levy: Recording outside is really difficult, especially on windy beaches. On many occasions, everyone who isn’t strictly necessary in a scene will line up shoulder-to-shoulder to try and create a sound barrier.
The actors are fun too. Most of our actors have a theatre background, and it’s great fun to work with them. Theatre actors are so good at trying many dimensions and variations of a scene. But theatre acting is bombastic and open. Acting for the screen is much more subtle, and it’s cool to see the actors tackle the differences.
I’m very grateful for how hard our actors have worked, and how down they’ve been for doing some really uncomfortable things, like filming outside in the cold. It doesn’t help that the Watching the Boys costumer understood the show was set in a California summer and we were shooting in a Scottish winter—but the actors were great sports!
Bear Hunting premieres on November 1st in Buchanan Lecture Theatre.
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