Dis­cov­er the indie hor­ror com­e­dy that made ​‘mum­ble­gore’ happen

“Hol­ly­wood has us con­vinced that it takes 100 mil­lion dol­lars to make a qual­i­ty piece of art, and that’s a piece of crap state­ment. I think you just saw that, right?”

So says Jett Gar­ner (play­ing him­self) at the begin­ning of Bag­head, in a cocky Q&A on his no-bud­get fea­ture We Are Naked that has just screened at the Los Ange­les Under­ground Film Fes­ti­val. Shot guer­ril­la-style in his home town on his par­ents’ mini DV cam using real light and extras who did not even know they were being filmed, the film is laugh­ably bad, with awful sound qual­i­ty and a ridicu­lous script – a per­fect par­o­dy of the worst instincts of out­sider filmmaking.

Yet while its mono­chrome pre­sen­ta­tion con­trasts with the colour shots of the small audi­ence watch­ing it, even the cam­era film­ing them is obvi­ous­ly hand­held, clum­si­ly pan­ning and zoom­ing to mark Bag­head itself as being not entire­ly unlike Garner’s film-with­in-a-film in terms of its home­made, DIY sta­tus. Mark and Jay Duplass’ film not only opens in a cin­e­ma, but repeat­ed­ly engages in metacin­e­ma, as a poioumenon that wit­ti­ly tracks its own making.

In Jett’s audi­ence are Chad (Steve Zis­sis), Matt (Ross Par­tridge), Michelle (Gre­ta Ger­wig) and Cather­ine (Elise Muller) – all strug­gling, wannabe actors who open­ly laugh at how ter­ri­ble We Are Naked is, but are nonethe­less inspired by Garner’s can-do atti­tude to take off togeth­er that very night to an iso­lat­ed cab­in in Big Bear owned by Chad’s uncle, where they plan to spend the week­end brain­storm­ing a future project. Their idea is to cre­ate from scratch a script for a cheapo film in which all four of them will star, to kick­start their careers.

Asked what the film should be about, Chad declares, ​“Love, I want love to hap­pen,” although it is clear that he is talk­ing as much about his hoped-for rela­tion­ship with Michelle as about film gen­res. Even after Michelle has pushed him into the friend zone with exem­plary deft­ness (a typ­i­cal class act from Ger­wig), Chad con­tin­ues to try to make them a cou­ple at least in their screen­play, in the hope that some­how life will imi­tate art. Mean­while, Matt and Cather­ine try to nego­ti­ate whether they want to rekin­dle the flame that they once had, and how exclu­sive their non-rela­tion­ship is. The love that Chad wants in the film is also very much in the air.

After Michelle has a night­mare about a fig­ure cir­cling and stalk­ing the cab­in with a paper bag for a mask, the genre of the four friends’ screen­play – and of Bag­head itself – takes a turn from romance to hor­ror. Imme­di­ate­ly spot­ting the appeal of the slash­er genre for cash-poor film­mak­ers like them­selves, Matt insists that their script accom­mo­date a bag-head­ed killer – even as a sim­i­lar­ly clad per­son appears in Michelle’s bed­room, and the four start won­der­ing if their fic­tion might be com­ing to life, con­found­ing the bound­aries between their time togeth­er at the cab­in and the film that they are writing.

If the Duplass broth­ers’ fea­ture debut, The Puffy Chair, estab­lished their cre­den­tials in the mum­blecore scene, then Bag­head marked a shift to the even more rar­efied sub­genre of ​‘muble­gore’. For like Joe Swanberg’s lat­er, sim­i­lar­ly meta Sil­ver Bul­lets, it is set in the same indie film­mak­ing world from which it has emerged, and brings to its char­ac­ter-dri­ven dynam­ics of love and friend­ship the barest shades of hor­ror – includ­ing a direct evo­ca­tion of the escape on the back of a pick­up truck with which Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Mas­sacre famous­ly ends.

The com­bi­na­tion total­ly works, with the sense of exter­nal men­ace always com­i­cal­ly ground­ed by Chad’s essen­tial schlub­bi­ness and Michelle’s kook­i­ness. While in the end we are not entire­ly sure whether the quar­tet will ever fin­ish mak­ing their Bag­head, the Duplass­es cer­tain­ly fin­ish theirs: a charm­ing love let­ter to films made by friends for very lit­tle money.

Bag­head is released on Blu-ray on 28 Feb­ru­ary via 101 Films.

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