Q&A with Detroit native Adam Karell, on the movie Killer Party


Killer Party, now available for streaming, features Adam Karell, a Commerce Township (Detroit area) native, who moved to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career after graduating from Kalamazoo College.

The movie found distribution because Adam and the director, Alex Drummond, came to Detroit to screen the movie at Motor City Nightmares (the long-running genre festival), where it caught the attention of Bub Smith, founder of the Slack Jaws Punk podcast. Bob recommended the movie to Patrick Ewald, from Epic Pictures, and Killer Party was able to find distribution.


The movie is KILLER PARTY. So what's it about? 
Adam Karell: It's a horror-comedy about a group of friends who get trapped at a baby shower when an outbreak starts turning people into homicidal maniacs.


This is an independent movie and how it came together is pretty interesting. You made Killer Party with your friends. 
AK: My day, or night, job in L.A. has been working at restaurants, and while I was working at Gulfstream in Century City, we had a great group of people, all really talented and supportive, and we were getting acting jobs here and there, but we decided to go big and make a movie. So the writer-director, Alex Drummond, wrote parts for all of us, we banded together, raised money and went out and made Killer Party.


I can imagine that there are a lot of challenges in making an independent movie, but Killer Party faced a pretty unique challenge... 
AK: It did. The movie takes place at a baby shower, because Rachael Drummond, Alex's wife, the female lead, was pregnant at the time. So we were shooting in August and the baby was due in mid-September, but one morning when Rachael got up out of the makeup chair, her water broke. So we had to stop production, Alex and Rachael went to the hospital and had a baby girl. A few days later, I went off and got married. So we took a break from filming, I went on my honeymoon and then we went back and finished the movie.


One of the challenges for any independent movie is finding an audience through distribution, how did it work for Killer Party? 
AK: There's actually a Detroit connection. Alex and I came here to show the movie at Motor City Nightmares in Novi which is this big, crazy horror convention and we had a great screening, packed the house with hard core horror fans and some family and friends. One of the people there that day was Bub Smith, who does a podcast called Slack Jaw Punks, and he really liked the movie and recommended it to Epic Pictures Group, who's our distributor and is doing a great job of helping get our little movie out there.


Where can we see Killer Party?
AK: It's available on iTunes, DIRECTV, VUDU, Amazon, Dish, Playstation, XBOX and many other VOD platforms. You can go to our website www.killerpartymovie.com for more information.


So are you a big horror movie fan? 
AK: Absolutely not. I'm afraid. I like action movies. And romantic comedies.


How does a kid from Detroit find his way out to Hollywood? 
AK: I caught the acting bug in college at Kalamazoo, doing theater, and after I graduated I moved out to L.A. and stayed on a friend's couch, worked some odd jobs and just kept going. Detroit work ethic.

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