From 'Scooby-Doo' to 'Vermin': How an ASU alum became a horror movie filmmaker
ASU online graduate Kristen Semedo (right) on the set of her horror film "Vermin." Courtesy photo
Kristen Semedo was about 5 years old, she thinks, when she first became a fan of horror films.
Her aunt had a VHS copy of "13 Ghosts," a supernatural horror film in which, according to Wikipedia, “ghost hunter Cyrus Kriticos and his psychic assistant Dennis Rafkin lead a team on a mission to capture a spirit called the Juggernaut.”
“I wore that tape out," said Semedo, a 2024 online graduate from Arizona State University’s film and media studies program in the Department of English. “I watched it so much (my aunt) had to get a new VHS tape.”
Semedo watched cartoons too, like "Scooby-Doo," and Halloween episodes were always her favorites. Even when she was working with children, her nature gravitated to the dark side.
“The only way I could get them to like literacy activities was getting them to listen to scary audiobooks,” Semedo said. “And the literacy coordinator was like, ‘Kristen, sometimes you’re just a little too dark.’”
Semedo’s fascination with the horror genre never faded, but now, in addition to watching movies, she’s creating them.
She recently wrapped filming on her short film, "Vermin," and hopes it will be released later this year. Another screenplay she wrote, "Deadlock," was recently named an official Filmquest ’24 Short Screenplay selection and finalist. Filmquest celebrates filmmaking the realms of fantasy, horror and science fiction.
“There’s something about fear that I think is really personal,” Semedo said. “You can tell a lot about somebody based on what scares them. I don’t know. I just find it really fascinating.”
Ironically, it was the Writers Guild strike of 2023 that led Semedo to writing "Vermin." She had been working on various movies in the prop or set departments, but when filming was shut down because of the strike, she realized she was more interested in writing than being a prop master. She also thought she could improve on some of the screenplays she had read.
“I thought, ‘I could write better. I’m just going to write,’” she said.
She finished writing "Vermin" while pursuing her online degree at ASU. The film is written from a feminist perspective. A common archetype in horror films, Semedo said, is that the girl who survives — the “final girl” — is smart and doesn’t do things like drugs or alcohol while girls who engage in promiscuous activities die.
Semedo wanted to turn that trope on its head and write a film that treated the male lead the way women are often treated in the horror genre.
The male lead in "Vermin" is in the middle of a messy divorce, can’t pay his bills, is drinking himself to death and has, in the house, a black widow spider trapped in a jar.
“The title refers to men who trap and treat women that way,” Semedo said. “I was really influenced by a feminist film theory I was reading.
"When we look back on any kind of wave of feminism we see in horror films, we realize maybe there were some problems with the perspective. 'Scream' (1996) made fun of this idea that the women in horror films, if they are at all sexually active or do anything deemed bad by society, they get killed. I think there’s a study on 'Friday the 13th' (1980) that shows the kill scenes for women are twice as long as the kill scenes for men, and twice as brutal.
“I’m not trying to reinvent the chessboard. I’m just planning the moves differently.”
Related story: ASU instructor on how horror films mirror our moral panics, cultural fears
Semedo crowdfunded the entire cost of the film shoot and shot the movie in a single night in the Toluca Lake neighborhood in Los Angeles. Her goal is to premiere the film at an East Los Angeles theater and then submit it to film festivals.
She’s also working on turning "Deadlock" into a feature-length script and movie. "Deadlock" reimagines an event that occurred in Semedo’s life, when she was working as a tour guide in Salem, Massachusetts, and a tourist said he would pay her extra money if she stayed behind and met him in a building at 1 a.m.
“It’s something really, really scary that happened to me, and I was thinking of women who have taken risks that could have gotten them killed,” she said.
Now that Semedo’s career is taking off, she looks back on all those evenings watching scary television as a child and laughs.
Who knew Scooby-Doo could be so inspiring?
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