Welcome to the Blumhouse, a four-film Halloween event on Amazon Prime, kicked off October with two new horror movies, Black as Night and Bingo Hell. While the former is about a group of teens taking back their community from devious vampires, the latter is about a group of senior citizens trying to accomplish the same thing. However, Bingo Hell's foe is more mysterious.
In Bingo Hell, a strange man (Richard Brake) moves to town and takes over the local Bingo Hall. He promises major winnings that seem too good to be true. Although many locals are blinded by his promise of wealth, Lupita (Adriana Barraza) remains skeptical. She refuses to give up on her loved ones and community. In an exclusive interview with CBR, Brake, Barraza, and fellow actor Joshua Caleb Johnson discussed the importance of community to them and their horror movie characters.
CBR: One of my favorite things about this film is the emphasis on community and how each of your characters sees this specific community in a different way. For you and your characters, what does community mean to them, and why is it so important in this film?
Joshua Caleb Johnson: For me, community means family because community very much is family. If you grew up with the same people, your neighbors become family. The mailman stops by. Everybody knows him, and it's just such a cool thing for everybody to know each other. You can walk out and say, "What's up neighbor? What's up, Jim? What's up, Carry?" That's really cool, and then to Caleb, in the beginning, Caleb doesn't care about anything, so he's a very self-centered, selfish kid because of what happened to his father. He lost a father to cancer, so he's grieving by being rebellious and acting out.
But, by the end of the movie, Caleb understands that family isn't just your blood relatives. It isn't just your mom or dad. It's whoever believes in you, and whoever loves you for you, and whoever wants to protect you, and whoever is loyal to you.
Adriana Barraza: For me, community is everything. Community is the meaning of everything. Community is not walls, streets, buildings. Community is people, and then in this movie, especially at the beginning, Lupita thinks community is the things, the walls, and I think Lupita has a wonderful lesson because she discovers community is more than that.
Richard Brake: Community and sort of the way communities are slowly dissolving, I think it's something that's worried me for a while, particularly gentrification and the way we're becoming more involved in our phones and less involved with our neighbors. The sense in this film, I play the other side of the coin -- all the bad things. What's really making us think about everything else, except the person next to us. What's really important in our life? Rather than think about what we get, what's the next thing we can do to raise our bank balance? Or how we can do that?
Always wanting more, more, more, rather than really appreciating what we have, which I think is part of what's behind the communities slowly falling apart around where I live, for example, which is sad, really sad.
All three of you play major roles when it comes to the film's climax. What were some of the most exciting or challenging things about the culmination of this film and that really fun, balls to the wall ending?
Brake: Spending days covered in goo. Both are fun and challenging at the same time.
Barraza: For me, the blood and happiness because we -- I don't want to spoil -- but happiness, blood, and everything.
Johnson: It wasn't really a challenge. More so it was just super fun, in general, to see all the goo, to see all the blood, to do the science. I had never done a horror movie before. It was a very new experience for me, but it was one I liked a lot.
What do you each hope that audiences take away from this movie?
Johnson: What I hope audiences can take away from this movie would be that anybody can be a hero. No matter the age. There are no cultural or ethnic limitations to being a hero. In this case, all the heroes of this movie are older people.
Barraza: For me, to give the people, first of all, a scare, and to enjoy, but think about this gentrification. Think about the community. Think about diversity. Think about every kind of level that the movie has.
Brake: I agree with Adriana. Most important is they enjoy it, just have fun, and it's a great ride. A real up, down, and crazy roller coaster that Gigi has created. She's so wonderful, but also there are so many levels in it. Take a moment to look at all the many different issues that are brought up in the film as well.