One of these days, I'm going to get organizized

There are two films that made such an impression on me while in high school that I decided to pursue film making as a career. One was "A Clockwork Orange." The other was Scorsese's "Taxi Driver."

Now, growing up, I never really watched "serious" movies. I was a huge Star Wars nerd in my youth, and for some reason, my parents let my brother and I watch some darker fare like "Excalibur" and "Time Bandits." But for the most part, we got a steady diet of 80s comedy. Films like "Strange Brew" and "Johnny Dangerously" were in constant rotation. As we got a bit older, my dad would start bringing home flicks like "Big Trouble in Little China" and "RoboCop." He took my brother and I to see "Total Recall" in the theatre. While quality entertainment (and indispensable in my mind), none of these films are what most serious cinephiles would call classics. 

So when I first saw "A Clockwork Orange" and "Taxi Driver" while in high school, they hit me like a ton of bricks. I had never seen films so primal, so raw. I was instantly obsessed with tracking down films of a similar ilk, voraciously watching IFC and Turner Classics, trying to catch up on the thousands of movies that I had missed. 

I recently watched "Taxi Driver" again, and I instantly saw some parallels between that film and what I want to do with "Chupacabra." Both films, in a broad sense, have characters who are delusional, who find meaning in the creation of their own reality. Though I have a feeling that the end of "Chupacabra" will be nowhere near as violent as the conclusion of "Taxi Driver." Check it out: