BLACK EYED SUSAN: First Look at New Film From Cult Filmmaker Scooter McCrae

Desperate for work, Derek accepts a job replacing his recently-deceased friend at a tech startup. Continuing to develop the company's innovative project means working intimately with Susan, a bleeding-edge BDSM sex doll meant to receive and appreciate punishment as an integral part of her evolving AI. Derek will soon test the limits of his own desires and explore the nature of man and woman, pleasure and pain, and life and death in a morally uncertain future world.

Dark Sci-Fi Black Eyed Susan Wraps Production in New York

 

Third Feature from Cult Underground Filmmaker Scooter McCrae Now in Post-Production, to Premiere in 2024

 

Black Eyed Susan, the long-awaited third feature from cult underground filmmaker Scooter McCrae is currently in post-production. The stylishly spare, lo-fi aesthetic erotic science fiction feature was filmed on Super 16 in Brooklyn and other areas of Upstate New York. Its cast includes Damian Maffei (The Strangers: Prey at Night, Wrong Turn), Marc Romeo, and ex-WWE Superstar Scott Fowler. Model Yvonne Emilie Thälker marks her feature film debut as the picture's titular character. 

 

The project's synopsis reads: 

 

Desperate for work, Derek (Maffei) accepts a job replacing his recently-deceased friend at a tech startup. Continuing to develop the company's innovative project means working intimately with Susan (Thälker), a bleeding-edge BDSM sex doll meant to receive and appreciate punishment as an integral part of her evolving AI. Derek will soon test the limits of his own desires and explore the nature of man and woman, pleasure and pain, and life and death in a morally uncertain future world.

 

Known for his previous SOV (shot-on-video) horror and sci-fi features Shatter Dead (1994) and Sixteen Tongues (2003), McCrae was overjoyed to lens his third feature on film stock. Says the director, "My so-called 'career' seems to have been built upon shooting on whatever format is least fashionable at the time, hence shooting on analog and digital video when film ruled the Earth, and now shooting film stock while the rest of the world has comfortably settled into digital capture mode. I guess I'm only comfortable when I'm an iconoclast." 

 

Black Eyed Susan also marks McCrae’s second collaboration with legendary Italian composer Fabio Frizzi, best known for his efforts with fellow countryman Lucio Fulci, the director of such horror classics as Zombie, The Beyond, and City of the Living Dead. McCrae and Frizzi previously collaborated on the award-winning 2015 short film Saint Frankenstein. "I think the driving force behind wanting to make another movie at all was to have another chance to work with Maestro Frizzi," says McCrae. "I'm incredibly lucky to count him not only as a friend, but a collaborator, and the music he conjured for Saint Frankenstein was so hauntingly beautiful that I wanted another opportunity to create more sonic magic together." 

 

Black Eyed Susan is a co-production between Not the Funeral Home (The Last Drive-In with Joe Bob Briggs), Little Cannonballs, and the recently-launched Vinegar Syndrome Pictures (New York Ninja). It is produced by Justin A. Martell (Subspecies V: Bloodrise), Aimee Kuge (the upcoming Cannibal Mukbang), Seager Dixon, and Maureen Costello.