When filmmaker Fidel Ruiz-Healy made a trip back to his hometown of San Antonio from New York City during the pandemic, he knew he couldn't stand idly by before creating another movie.
So, he and fellow screenwriter and director Tyler Walker, who he met when they were both students at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, dug into their virtual files and dusted off a script for a short they could shoot while the world was shut down.
The resulting movie, Dead Enders, is a horror-comedy about a gas station clerk named Maya (Skarlett Redd), who encounters a hostile race of mind-controlling parasites during her late-night shift. Dead Enders, which premieres at the South by Southwest Film Festival next week, explores the idea that working a dead-end job is comparable to serving as a host to a face-sucking organism that detaches one's brain from reality.
"We wanted to do some of the science fiction stuff that we like, like Alien and the game Half-Life and those sci-fi tropes," Walker said. "We thought about what the embodiment of a soul-sucking job would be. Something that takes away your face and destroys your spirit."
The original story for Dead Enders was set in Walker's home state of Pennsylvania, but the duo decided to expand the narrative, change the location to Texas and give it a "Buc-ee's gas station sort of vibe."
"Every part of America has its favorite gas station chain," Walker said. "We wanted to tell that story and let it have this midnight-monster-movie energy to it."
With Ruiz-Healy in San Antonio and Walker in Los Angeles, the pair wrote most of the script via Zoom sessions. It became Ruiz-Healy's job, however, to find a convenience store that would agree to serve as an overnight shooting location.
Ruiz-Healy made a list and called dozens until he found Mr. C's Food Mart in Southeast San Antonio. The mom-and-pop shop, located on the way to Elmendorf, closed daily at 5 p.m., so it fit the bill perfectly. Of course, it also helped that the owner was open to the idea.
"It was this old family business, so he had complete control over it," Ruiz-Healy said. "It's one of those gas stations that has no branding outside. He had been working there since the '60s or '70s. He let us remove whatever we wanted — except the lottery machine."
Production on Dead Enders lasted five days. The directors ran into a technical problem when they found out the puppeteer they lined up to control their creepy-crawly creatures couldn't make it to San Antonio due to the pandemic.
In the end, he mailed Ruiz-Healy and Walker the puppet, so they could control it themselves. Then, by "messing with the frame rate," the duo created bugs that looked like something out of a Tim Burton movie.
"[The puppet] showed up with a bunch of chopped up coat hangers to control it," Ruiz-Healy said. "We were like, 'What are we supposed to do with all this?' Slowly, we started piecing it together in our heads and were like, 'Oh, now I see what he was cooking.'"
Working together to solve problems is something Ruiz-Healy and Walker have been doing for more than a decade with the American Standard Film Co., a studio they co-founded with filmmaker Jordan Michael Blake.
Ruiz-Healy said he and Walker work well together because they have developed a shorthand way of communicating. They're also good at settling disagreements that come up during production.
"We have a way of pushing each other to come up with better ideas," Ruiz-Healy said. "Neither of us likes to settle on the easy solution. We have different skills that work together nicely when we're on set."
Looking ahead, Ruiz-Healy and Walker want to expand Dead Enders into a full-length film.
"In our brain, this is like the first 15 minutes of the feature movie," Ruiz-Healy said. "Right now, we're grinding away writing it."
Dead Enders premieres during the Austin-based South by Southwest Film Festival's Midnight Shorts Program at the Alamo Drafthouse Lamar, 1120 S. Lamar Blvd., on March 13 at 9:45 p.m. It screens again on March 16 at 9 p.m.
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