“How many independent, Revolutionary War-era slasher movies are there?  I can only think of half a dozen,” muses Philadelphia-based filmdirector Andrew Repasky McElhinney with a wry smile.  His atmospheric, eerie A Chronicle of Corpses has been playing to packed midnight screenings at the Pioneer Theater in New York City.  While it’s admittedly difficult to make a period film on the cheap, McElhinney stresses the larger challenge of breaking down genre boundaries: “Corpses is a fusion of highbrow and lowbrow aesthetics.  It’s a shame that movies are automatically branded as one thing or another.  The House of Mirth and Jeepers Creepers are both interesting, maybe great pictures, but the crossover audience is virtually nil.”

Corpses takes place within the confines of a musty plantation during a long, increasingly deadly weekend in 1807.  An elusive, unseen executioner ritualistically massacres the Elliott Family one by one (including a particularly nasty infanticide).  The conventions from Friday the 13th are used as a bitter allegory for what’s happening to the Elliott clan.  They’re being crushed under the wheel of their dwindling place in history.   McElhinney says, “Their way of life is moribund; they don’t know where else to go.  These people are haunted by memory -- where they are now is a direct result of what happened before they were born.  In some ways, the killings occur as a type of wish fulfillment or natural selection.”

In discussing the inspiration for his sinister parable, McElhinney sites the last days of country club culture in his hometown of Chestnut Hill, PA in the late ‘80s and links it to his prep school studies of the French and Indian War and the American Revolution.  “What we learned about in class, we were seeing in our own social circles.  It’s not a stretch to take the fading country club aristocrats and imagine AIDS as this mad slasher coming after them for their past transgressions.  To translate that into a genre film set in 1807 seemed rather natural -- instead of industrialization in the early 1800s, we had the computerization of the early 1990s.”

McElhinney continues, “The subtext of the mid 80s was reading AIDS as divine payback for aberrant behavior.  Now, no one deserves AIDS, but this idea of plague seemed very much in conjunction with the end of this epoch.  This cultural anxiety appears in the fantastic Friday the 13th films, which might be reactionary pictures, but are reactionary pictures that clearly state the mores of their era.  Even if they weren’t conscious social documents, they didn't have the budget to hide anything.  Watching the series now overwhelms me with great nostalgia -- it's a chronicle of a vanished way of life.  Who goes to sleepaway camp anymore?” 

Filmed in a stately manner reminiscent of Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, the slayings in Corpses are interspersed with hypnotic long takes, painterly tableaus, and contemplative, revelatory monologues.  McElhinney points out, “The story is stylized in such a way that an involved viewer will be directed to metaphorical readings: the mystery of faith, the nature of guilt.  Most horror films are very close to fairy tales or fables.  They’re primal --that’s their appeal.”  As the handful of survivors retire to their neglected chapel, they seek salvation for a lifetime of thinly repressed desires, lost love, and the ambiguity of their belief system.

Part of McElhinney’s technique is to inform his films with undercurrents of mordant, hyperreal black humor.  “Corpses is both a satire and an elegy to the culture it evokes.  I take these important themes and ‘Piaf’ them, making them larger and more surreal than they actually are.  I’m often facetious, and guess my sense of humor can be very dry and a little dark.”

Amidst the fatalistic march toward death (“It’s not called A Chronicle of Corpses for nothing,” McElhinney quips), a chance of personal redemption is found within the youngest Elliot son, Thomas (Oliver Wyman).  Initially presented as a frustrated alcoholic whose first instinct is to block out the horror with drink.  As bodies pile up, he makes the noble attempt to redeem himself before pointedly facing his demise.  “When he sees his time is up, he decides to go out in style.  There’s something romantic about dressing up as a gentleman to go to the guillotine.  You don’t have to, there’s no reason to, it’s not expected, but it’s a matter of personal dignity and self-acceptance.  When it’s my time, I hope to go out that way -- after I’ve made another two-dozen movies, of course.”

Since Corpses' success in NYC, McElhinney has received several lucrative offers and has been invited to present his film at major European Film Festivals.  “What really opened doors was a rave review in the New York Times on the day we opened,” McElhinney beams.  “The notices have been very good.  It’s incredibly gratifying to see the hard work of the crew and actors acknowledged.”

McElhinney is already planning his follow-up feature, the provocatively titled Flowers of Evil.  Located within the contemporary, sinister industrial wastelands of Philadelphia, a boy from the country is lured into the world of a dangerous 16-year old femme fatale.  “He falls madly in love with her, beyond reason -- it’s the type of love you only have once -- when it’s the first time.  But nothing lasts forever.”  McElhinney throws a teaser caveat for horror fans, indicating that his characters see the latest episode in an imaginary horror franchise (called The Flowers of Evil) and, as the director cryptically intones, “toward the end they start re-enacting the movie and [the boy] is able to give her what she desires most.”  Judging from McElhinney’s wild flourishes of Gothic morbidity, it won’t be happily ever after.