Tom Schroeder

A dreamlike aesthetic and dark themes investigated through stop-motion animation of 2- and 3-D elements have often earned Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña’s The Wolf House comparisons to Jodorowsky, Svankmajer, and the Quay Brothers. But in a new interview León reveals a working process for the film that conjures an unlikely comparison: to Lars von Trier, whose 10-point Dogme manifesto for filmmaking echos León and Cociña’s 10 rules for creating The Wolf House.

“We walked, old white tourists from another era, through the dust and smoke from grills, observing the wildly heterogeneous audience that had never been included in the fantasy of first-generation-immigrant Lake Wobegon. The Vali-Hi had reinvented itself for the future in the same fashion that Fast and Furious had updated the car racing film; inclusiveness in the mainstream narrative makes good financial sense.” Minneapolis-based filmmaker Tom Schroeder concludes his three-part series on the social life of drive-ins.

“These sounds and images were my native element, the pop cultural, amniotic fluid in which my awareness of the world was formed. I was merely the sum of the environmental influences into which I had been accidentally born; my identity was made of the 1970s.” Continuing his series of reflections on the social life of drive-ins, filmmaker Tom Schroeder goes to the Cottage View—and back into his past.

The drive-in theater of his youth—the St. Croix Hilltop, near the small town of Amery, Wisconsin—was “a shadow world of dangerous impulses,” recalls Minneapolis-based filmmaker Tom Schroeder. Launching a three-part series on the social life of drive-ins, he recounts a night when “the rules of daily life were suspended” as audiences wielding tire irons and two-by-fours descended on a projectionist frantically working to splice a broken print of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

“I would call it more of an ordeal than a viewing,” recalls Tom Schroeder of his first exposure, in 1987, to the Quay Brothers. That first experience with Street of Crocodiles, as he recounts here, involved crying, shortness of breath, and, ultimately, the discovery of a secret doorway to a new career as an animator with a clear vision.