Blowing up laboratories with Cellar Dwellar

There were a couple times in the late fall when Kade Weinmann struggled to keep the blood splatters hidden from the public.

One instance occurred when he realized en route to his job working with kids that he hadn’t fully cleaned the red speckles from his shirt collar, so he kept his jacket zipped throughout the day, ducking to the bathroom between lessons in an attempt to scrub away the residual mess. 

The other occasion, however, involved the police and left the Cellar Dwellar frontman with little time or notice to do away with the evidence.

“I was parked in the wrong spot by my house when a cop rolled by,” said Weinmann, who at the time was filming a particularly grisly scene for the band’s new, Ian Callahan-directed short film, which involved zombies and fake guts crafted from pantyhose stuffed with cotton and saturated in copious amounts of fake blood. “And I came out with fake blood all over me, like, ‘I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m gonna move. We’re making a movie. I can show you pictures.’ And somehow, he believed me.”

Months later, the musician is finally prepared to join his bandmates in premiering the horror-short that emerged from those scenes of carnage, which doubles as a music video for the Cellar Dwellar track “Alecto,” off of the 2024 album In the Shape of a Swan. 

“I came into [the project] with a rough draft of an idea, wanting to do an homage to Jack Parsons, who was this famous occultist and also a rocket scientist,” said Weinmann, who will screen the video as part of a mini short film series that will take part during a masquerade ball hosted by the band at WitchLab on Saturday, Dec. 13. (The event, which kicks off at 7 p.m., also features tarot card readings and musical performances from Shop the Pig and Between the Trees and Me.) “And whenever the band would talk about [‘Alecto’], we would imagine the song having this mad scientist feel.”

Wanting to keep the short at least partially grounded in real events, Weinmann began researching Parsons more deeply about a year ago, listening to podcasts and revisiting Sex and Rockets, a biography that delves into everything from Parsons’ founding of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and his connection to L. Ron Hubbard to his 1952 death in a home lab explosion at age 37 – a scene that features in the climax of Cellar Dwellar’s new video.

Set within the early 1950s, the “Alecto” short arrives complete with era-appropriate costumes chosen by Weinmann’s girlfriend, Bella Reed, a makeup artist and budding special effects whiz who grew up under the tutelage of her father, Steam-Powered SFX Productions founder Todd Reed, who also provided his technical know-how for one of the film’s more complex scenes. “I’m a grandma’s kid, and I grew up watching MeTV, so I’ve always very much admired that era,” said Bella Reed, who handled cast and special effects makeup, in addition to the wardrobes and pinpointing distinctive accessories that added dimension to the outfits worn onscreen.

The greatest challenge, however, proved to be scouting a location for the primary shoot, with Weinmann and Callahan pivoting from their initial plan to utilize an old church and embarking on a weeks-long search that eventually led the crew to a residential home on Bryden Road in Olde Towne East. 

“We originally planned for a five-hour day, and it turned into 12 hours. … And the entire time I was stressed out of my mind, worried we were stepping on toes by being on location way longer than we planned,” said Weinmann, whose stresses carried over to the editing stage, during which the filmmakers found themselves studying footage to make sure nothing appeared in frame that wouldn’t have existed in the early ’50s. “It was going through to check every frame, making sure there wasn’t a computer router or water bottle [in the shot], which ended up being an issue because everyone had water bottles around the set. … And then it wasn’t just the props and the setting, but we wanted the editing style, the way we color treated it, and the way were doing the lighting to fit those old, Universal monster movies like ‘Bride of Frankenstein’ or ‘Dracula.’”

The explicitly DIY nature of the production meant some hiccups were unavoidable, including the blood-splattered workday Weinmann spent surrounded by children, along with the challenges the crew faced in hand-cutting sheet metal for a key post-explosion shot. “We were cutting this sheet metal with regular, everyday scissors and no gloves, just scrambling and getting small cuts all over our hands,” Weinmann said. “And then we had no idea how heavy it would be, and we had to find a way to attach it to me.”

Of course, none of these miscues are evident within the finished film, which stands alone as a work of art while still maintaining ties to Cellar Dwellar’s deeply inventive musical world. “Both deal with themes of high strangeness,” said Weinmann, who has a different perspective on In the Shape of a Swan now than he did in the immediate aftermath of its creation. “Whenever I listen to that album, I’m not thinking of those high concepts and the theatrics of it. I’m more seeing who I was when I wrote it. … I have new friends now who weren’t a part of that history, and there are people who worked on that record who I don’t really speak to anymore, or who I’ve grown apart from. … And my relationship, my emotional connection to it has definitely changed based on the people who are a part of that record. And I feel like it’s that way for everyone in the band.”