Trivia / The Houses October Built

• The Danza: The five core actors share first names with their respective characters.
• Reality Subtext: Brandy was hesitant to sign on for the sequel, since the first had been a rather grueling experience, mirroring fictional Brandy's reluctance to accompany her friends on a haunted road trip thanks the trauma of last time. The guys also kept portions of the script from her to get a more genuine reaction, but she decided to trust that her friends wouldn't cross any lines with her. In the film, Brandy decides to trust that her friends are there to help and support her, only to learn they've been lying to her and are working with The Blue Skeleton. Real Brandy's trust was well-placed, fictional Brandy's... not so much.
• Serendipity Writes the Plot: Zig-Zagged. For the sequel, they planned to shoot at the Zombie Pub Crawl in Minneapolis, MN, and end with Mikey and Bobby entering a brain-eating contest and losing to world champion eater Kobayashi, but had no luck getting in touch with him. Going to Minneapolis early and preparing their contingency, they stopped in a bar, mentioned their plans to the waitress, who pointed out Kobi sitting only a few tables away having dinner. Turns out he'd always wanted to be in a horror film and happily accepted the offer to appear in Houses 2.
• Troubled Production: Less so than most, but both films had some issues.
  • The first film was initially funded completely out of the pockets of the cast, who were also the crew. Filming in the haunted houses was difficult, recording audio in them near impossible. Shot in standard definition to maintain a cheap documentary feel, the film was finally finished right as the Paranormal Activity series began to take off, resulting in several potential distributors thinking Houses would be more of the same and disappointed it was not. Once they found a studio to distribute the film, the standard definition and dodgy audio proved such problems the studio decided to just give the filmmakers the budget to remake the film in acceptable cineplex quality, as well as a full crew (which came with benefits and headaches of its own). But by the time the remake was done, found footage had become old and worn out, so the studio backed out, leaving the filmmakers scrambling to find another distributor. They did, and the film performed exceptionally well, more than well enough to make the sequel.
  • The second film was shot over two successive Octobers, since most haunts are only open that month and a 31 day shooting schedule is pretty short, especially factoring travel between distant locations like Minnesota and Georgia. The first film was unsurprisingly embraced by the Haunt community, robbing the five core actors of their anonymity. This was good in that it opened up venues that might otherwise have been closed, bad in that they had to be a lot more cagey about potential spoilers for the sequel. Many were bribed with merch to keep pictures of Porcelain off social media. As they were about to shoot the climactic sequence at Hellbent, the special effect supervisor had a death in the family, forcing him to leave the production and the rest of the cast and crew to work and shoot the effects as best they could. Finally, during the editing process, when only the sound mix remained undone, their sound editor had a mild heart attack. The crew accepted that they'd get behind schedule because he needed to stay in the hospital for a few days, but he snuck out of the hospital, finished the sound mix, then checked himself back in.

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