After an intimate moment is shared online, Little Bill must cope with the consequences of being a homophobic bully.
Little Bill’s Peep Show is a horror/comedy/fantasy revenge plot that uses horror film tropes to provide justice to LGBT youth who have taken their own lives. While the film sends off an incredibly deep and realistic message, director Kevin Rios knew to use comedy at the right moments to create some relief, all while keeping a strong point on the overall purpose.
After the suicide of Tyler Clementi at Rutgers University, I was angry. After being filmed online in his dorm room, Tyler Clementi jumped off the George Washington Bridge and ended his life. Around that time I was a senior at NYU film school and the amount of LGBT suicides were spiking. I felt inclined to make something to channel my rage into art. I had one more film to make and decided to create a “b-horror movie”-esque revenge fantasy film that will provide a sliver of justice to the fallen LGBT youth. The production itself helped calm me down but the initial rough cut felt incomplete so I shelved the project. Two years after the initial production of the horror film, the election of Donald Trump fired me up again and I decided to complete the movie. My first issue to solve was to solve the tonal issue from the original cut by filming a Narrator to help ease an audience to the story and getting an animator to capture the overwhelming pain Tyler (in this case, Brad) felt moments before his suicide. Finally completing the film in the summer of 2017, I hope the film could be a lesson for anyone, especially young people, that words matter whether they are spoken out loud or online, it’s a matter of life and death.
Filmed on super 16mm on an Arri SR II, the cinematic style certainly drives the eerie retro b-movie mood. Added to that, the film also goes through a mix of visual styles to carry the story forward through its various moments; From documentive storytelling to live-webcamming, with an animated sequence to perhaps the most bone-chilling segment. The cast certainly didn’t have an easy or typical script to follow, but did a great job at finding the intended mood brought forward by Kevin.