Director hooks up with horror royalty

A dollar may not be worth what it used to be, but for one Czech filmmaker a single greenback still goes a long way.

Robin Kašpařík, a 24-year-old Brno native who studies film at Tomáš Baťa University in Zlín, managed to secure the film rights to a short story by best-selling author Stephen King for $1.

Kašpařík is something of an up-and-comer on the horror movie scene, as his latest short film Séance was screened at 20 international film festivals last year, securing Kašpařík a pair of Best Short Film wins.

Séance tells the story of three people trying to find the lost fortune of a long-dead baroness. They begin, as the title indicates, with a séance.

"But then everything turns against them," Kašpařík says.

Kašpařík managed to secure well-known Czech actors Klára Jandová, Zdeněk Julina and Pavel Nový for roles in Séance. Ten days of shooting in a 16th-century palace included a brief scare when part of the set fell off the wall in the midst of a chanting incantation.

"To all of us, it was pretty chilling," Kašpařík says.

The finished product was apparently chilling enough to make its mark on King, as well. After taking the film to Toronto's Rue Morgue Festival of Fear Horror Expo, Kašpařík was approached by writer Jack Ketchum, who was impressed with the movie.

Ketchum, a friend of King's, recommended Kašpařík to the best-selling author, and, shortly thereafter, Kašpařík had the rights to the short story "I Am the Doorway."

"It was a great feeling, because Stephen King's books are a great inspiration to me," Kašpařík says.

King - author of the novels Carrie, The Shining and Misery, among others - has made a practice of offering some of his stories to up-and-coming filmmakers.

"Over the objections of my accountant, who saw all sorts of possible legal problems, I established a policy which still holds today. I will grant any student filmmaker the right to make a movie out of any short story I have written (not the novels, that would be ridiculous), so long as the film rights are still mine to assign," King writes in the introduction to the published script of The Shawshank Redemption. "I ask them to sign a paper promising that no resulting film will be exhibited commercially without approval, and that they send me a videotape of the finished work. For this one-time right I ask a dollar."

"I Am the Doorway" tells the story of an astronaut who returns from space and realizes he has been infected with a strange virus with the ability to control his actions.

"It is pretty dark, so I plan to express myself in that way," Kašpařík says.

Much like King, Kašpařík has had a taste for the blood and suspense of the horror genre from an early age.

"I shot short films on my parents' camera, and, thanks to lots of video rentals by my father, I had unlimited access to movies from all genres," Kašpařík says. "My bedtime stories soon became The Exorcist, Predator and A Nightmare on Elm Street."

Kašpařík's interpretation of "I Am the Doorway" is in its early stages. He says the finished product will be about 20 minutes in length, and the project will cost 600,000 Kč ($31,797). For now, Kašpařík is in search of financing and is getting help from his former Séance collaborator, Nový.

"Since childhood, my dream was always to be a director," Kašpařík says.

If Kašpařík's brief past is any preview of coming attractions, it seems there will be many more movies and - eventually - many more dollars to come.

- Petr Cibulka Jr. contributed to this report.

Benjamin Cunningham can be reached at
bcunningham@praguepost.com