This is part of our series of interviews with people in the Horror Movie and Haunted Attraction Industry. This week's interview is with Matt Thompson (Producer/Editor/Sound Designer/Composer) and Tony Quinn (Writer/Director/Editor) about their new horror movie Lycanthrope.

What is your background?
MT: I'm a musician and have been in the music business for years playing, touring, and building my own studio. The transition to becoming a film producer/editor/sound designer was natural, based on my music background and recording knowledge, and my day job writing software gave me the technical background to handle the production work.

TQ: Well, I have been an artist for as long as I can remember, drawing, painting, sketching. I attended The Art Institute Of Dallas and have a degree in computer animation. I favor traditional 2D animation and had plans of working for Disney. Luckily (now) I procrastinated moving to LA to follow that dream, since Disney has pretty much unemployed all their 2D artists. The Institute taught me a little about movies, and I learned a lot on my own. Making movies is a love/hate passion play — you gotta love it to do it. This is my 3rd film and I love doing it.

Why a horror movie?
MT: It was Tony's suggestion, and I loved his script because it was less about blatant gore (though we also put a lot of our budget into non-CGI SFX) and more about character depth and letting the viewer's mind take over. Plus, rock songs go better with horror movies, in my opinion, and one of my roles was to organize, write, and develop the soundtrack for our project.

TQ: I love horror movies...there's just something about being scared and yet knowing it's not real that does it for me. The problem is, I was seeing a lot of movies that just weren't scary to me. I laugh at Jason and Freddy flicks — they let you know when something is about to happen. I like movies where the "scares" are unpredictable. So rather than complain, I decided to try my hand at doing a scary movie and making it as scary as I can.

What's special about your script?
TQ: It's a basic horror movie. Kinda old school, because instead of shocking with a lot of gore, I want the audience to get into the characters and the story. We still have gore, though.

Where did you get funding to shoot the film?
MT/TQ: Almost completely out of our own pockets, with one investor we call "the lifesaver." Without that investor, we couldn't have made this movie. That investment provided the capital we needed for effects work.

What's the name of your movie and what's it about?
TQ: It's called The Lycanthrope and it's a werewolf movie. I just like the sound of the word, but many people don't know what it means. That was a plus as far as I was concerned, because if I don't know what something means and I'm interested, I find out. I figured if someone will go to that trouble to find out what our title means, maybe they will want to see it. "Lycanthrope" means a person that believes they are a werewolf and "lycanthropy" is the condition or disease.