Movie Spotlight: Tonight You Die

A woman is slumped against a tree, dead. Her husband is inches away, and next to him lie the charred remains of their unborn child. Nobody in town knows who did it. Somebody does, though, and that person isn’t waiting on the sheriff’s department to figure it out.

That’s the opening of Tonight You Die, made in 2011 by Jim Roberts on a budget of $5,000, when he was 20 years old. Roberts built the whole movie around one question: what happens once the people supposed to deliver justice stop being able to, and someone else picks up the job themselves?

A sequel to a zombie movie that isn’t a sequel at all

Roberts and his company, Blind Sight Productions, had already made a splatterfest called Welcome to Deer Creek in 2009, a small town infection movie soaked in gore. Tonight You Die shares no plot or characters with it. It’s connected in spirit instead. “TYD was a followup to our 2009 small town infection slash zombie splatterfest ‘Welcome to Deer Creek,’” Roberts said. “We just wanted to make a crazy slasher slash serial killer movie.”

A title with no room for subtlety

The title does exactly what it says on the poster. There’s no metaphor buried in it, no wink. “I wanted it to promise a total revenge movie,” Roberts said. “No apologies, just an eye for an eye kind of flick.” That bluntness carries straight into the way the film opens.

Starting at the worst possible moment

Tonight You Die doesn’t ease into its violence. It opens with the crime already committed and the bodies already cold. “I wanted to start the movie with something appalling,” Roberts said. “An act of violence that would demand nothing less than unhinged vigilante justice.” From there the film runs two tracks at once. A police investigation that goes nowhere, and someone else who already knows more than the cops ever will.

Grief that turns into a body count

Roberts wasn’t interested in the police doing their job well. He wanted them useless. “The authorities aren’t personally invested in so many horrifying cases and the justice system sucks half the time,” he said. “I just wanted to make a simple and brutal tale of revenge that also had a nice helping of cheese.” The part he won’t spoil is who actually ends up carrying that revenge out. “I think the idea of who was actually seeking the revenge was what gave it a different feel for us,” he said. He credits a lot of that instinct to his mother and co-writer, Karen Roberts, who also built the film’s gore effects by hand. “She’s been a huge part of all the movies we make,” he said. “She always brings awesome ideas to the table and is a big horror fan, so we come up with all kinds of crazy stuff. All the bloody, gory SPFX in the movie are her handiwork.”

The horror convention that got them a mayor

The film’s strangest bit of casting traces back three generations. Karen Roberts’s grandfather was mayor of St. Cloud, Florida in the 1960s, right around the time gore pioneer Herschell Gordon Lewis rolled into town to shoot Two Thousand Maniacs. Decades later, Jim and Karen ran into Lewis himself at the horror convention Cinema Wasteland and told him the story, photograph in hand. “He told us how her grandfather helped him make the movie and was very gracious with the production shooting in his town,” Roberts said. On a whim, Roberts asked Lewis if he’d do a cameo. “He said, ‘Sure, I’ll think of it as returning a favor.’” They filmed his scene the next morning in a hotel lobby. “He was a kind and straightforward man and did each one of his shots in one take.”

What to know before you press play

Roberts doesn’t dress the movie up as anything more than what it is. “We made this movie for $5,000 when I was 20,” he said. “While it is microbudget, I believe the bloody heart and soul shines through. So grab a few good friends, a few good drinks and let it rip.”

Horror

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Streaming now on Relay.