Nathan Schiff - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Nathan Schiff is a Long Island, New York filmmaker best known for receiving a major DVD release of low-budget features he shot in Super 8mm

Super 8 mm film

Super 8 mm film is a motion picture film format released in 1965 by Eastman Kodak as an improvement of the older "Double" or "Regular" 8 mm home movie format....

while in his teens. Image Entertainment

Image Entertainment

Image Entertainment, Inc. is an independent licensee, producer and distributor of home entertainment programming and film & television productions in North America, with approximately 3,000 exclusive DVD titles and approximately 250 exclusive CD titles in domestic release, and approximately 450...

, a leading DVD distributor, held these films in such high regard that they gave them restoration work, followed by wide DVD releases in 2004.

Born in Forest Hills, New York, Schiff grew up in Baldwin Harbor, Long Island

Baldwin, Nassau County, New York

Baldwin is a hamlet located in the town of Hempstead in Nassau County, New York, United States. The population was 24,033 at the 2010 census.Baldwin is also a station on the Babylon Branch of the Long Island Rail Road....

where he began making films at the age of 11. Between the ages of 11 and 16, he made over 20 short films. At age 16, he embarked on his first feature, Weasels Rip My Flesh (1979), made on a $400 budget. The storyline follows a detective (John Smihula) investigating deaths caused by a giant mutated weasel

Weasel

Weasels are mammals forming the genus Mustela of the Mustelidae family. They are small, active predators, long and slender with short legs....

. The weasel is captured by a mad scientist (Fred Borges) who plans to conquer the Earth with a monster army created by using the creature's regenerative blood (actually a mix of Karo syrup

Syrup

In cooking, a syrup is a thick, viscous liquid consisting primarily of a solution of sugar in water, containing a large amount of dissolved sugars but showing little tendency to deposit crystals...

, cranberry sauce and ketchup).

In Long Island Cannibal Massacre (1980) power lawnmowers and chainsaws spew guts and grue across the suburban landscape. They Don't Cut the Grass Anymore (1985) follows two psycho hillbilly gardeners who slice up Yuppie

Yuppie

Yuppie is a term that refers to a member of the upper middle class or upper class in their 20s or 30s. It first came into use in the early-1980s and largely faded from American popular culture in the late-1980s, due to the 1987 stock market crash and the early 1990s recession...

s instead of cutting the grass. When these three films were released on DVD, film director Wes Craven

Wes Craven

Wesley Earl "Wes" Craven is an American actor, film director, writer, producer, perhaps best known as the director of many horror films, particularly slasher films, including the famed A Nightmare on Elm Street and Wes Craven's New Nightmare, featuring the iconic Freddy Krueger character, the...

commented, "Schiff knows Long Island the way Dante knew Hell."

Schiff's fourth feature (unavailable on DVD) is Vermilion Eyes (1991), about the odyssey of a self-destructive man (John Smihula) into a dreamscape of prophetic nightmares where the border between fantasy and reality has blurred. Critic Ray Young reviewed, "Unique and personal, it grieves over the loss of innocence, as if tapped directly from the id. Vermilion Eyes makes no concessions to anyone or any genre and works out of bruised, frazzled emotion. The poetic, whirling, free style of its imagery is remarkably close in spirit to James Joyce

James Joyce

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...

."

Schiff recently returned to filmmaking with the horror short Abracadaver! (2008) for British producer David McGillivray

David McGillivray (director)

David McGillivray is an actor, producer, playwright, screenwriter and film critic.Originally a critic for Monthly Film Bulletin, McGillivray wrote his first film script, Albert's Follies, for friend Ray Selfe in 1973...

. Promoted as "a gruesome tale of magic and mutilation," the film is part of McGillivray's Worst Fears series.

Long Island Cannibal Massacre and Weasels Rip My Flesh were selections of Cinefamily's 2008 Homemade Horror festival with Schiff flown to the West Coast as an invited guest of the Cinefamily film study group. The features were shown under the umbrella title, The Super-8 Gorenography of Nathan Schiff! On November 29, 2008, Schiff introduced the two films from the stage of the Silent Movie Theatre in Los Angeles. LA Weeklys Christoph Huber reviewed:

Whatever can be gleaned from the piecemeal plot about mutated monsters, a mad scientist and a macho detective would justify the even superior title Radioactive Weasels Rip My Flesh, but that’s beside the point: In true amateur filmmaking spirit, this is foremost about the giddy joy clearly felt by its maker(s), ambitious (though some might say: foolish) enough to include a lengthy scene in outer space — on a $400 budget! But within the year, Schiff (who will introduce his double feature on November 29) had traded paper rockets for atmospheric chainsaw mayhem. Long Island Cannibal Massacre (1980) shows a Super-8 amateur-auteur coming into his threadbare own: It’s as gross and assured as any $900 production has the right to be. Schiff looks like Steven Spielberg next to the mysterious Chester Novell Turner, who before vanishing (forever?), bequeathed upon this Earth two hysterical video nasties that can barely be called competent but certainly stark-raving mad.

Awards

In 2008, Abracadaver! won an award in the Best Horror Short category at the New York International Independent Film and Video Festival (NYIIFVF) which was founded in 1993.

External links

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