Where the Dead Go to Die

The film mostly follows Tommy, Ralph and Sophia, a group of children living on the same block. A demon begins to stalk them in the form of a talking, black, red-eyed dog named Labby. The dog-like demon takes them on a hellish ride through dimensions and time periods.

After high school, Jimmy ScreamerClauz began working and teaching himself basic animation, filmmaking, and electronic music. He stated that he was fascinated with horror films but had no formal training in animation and instead learned by using the 3D graphics program Maya and watching tutorials on YouTube. This led him to complete his first film called Reality Bleed-Through, which he said was frustrating to make but had a big influence on the segment Tainted Milk.[2][3]

Tainted Milk was originally written as a black comedy parody of Lassie, which originated as a short comic book with the title The Night Labby Came Home, centering around a boy named Tommy, alongside other kids, who each fall into a well where a lady lives and tells them to do bad acts. After finishing half of the comic, ScreamerClauz instead decided to make a 3D animation and bought models from Cinema 4D's Interposer plugin to animate scenes on his computer and edit them with Adobe Premiere. He re-wrote the script a number of times and hired actress Ruby LaRocca and actors Joshua Michael Greene, Victor Bonacore, and Joey Smack. He told them to act 'over the top', and included a laugh track and other sound effects.[3] After the first edit, he realized how off-putting the models and animation were and changed the score and dialogue, leaving it with "some weird bio-polar balance".[2] The animation was to be released as a web-series.

After its completion, he began work on two more segments but tried to treat them like serious horror films with less comedic elements. Liquid Memories, originally called The Lovening, recast the actors from Tainted Milk, with the addition of Brandon Slagle as "The Man".[3] It was written as a dark horror, with religious themes about a man losing his soul after experiencing the intense memories of a street prostitute.[2] After completing the second segment, which took a year to make, ScreamerClauz sent footage to a number of film festivals, all of whom rejected it except for the Dark Carnival Film Festival.[3] He also sent it to the founder of Unearthed Films, Stephen Biro, who asked for more, leading ScreamerClauz to create the segment The Masks That The Monsters Wear, intended as a love story between abused children living in a dark world.[2] ScreamerClauz utilized motion capture for the segment by using an Xbox 360 Kinect, and decided to title the full "anthology-style feature film" as Where the Dead Go to Die.[3]

ScreamerClauz credited his daily use of marijuana and previous psilocybin mushroom and LSD experiences for the film's visuals. He also found inspiration with alien conspiracy theories, "religious scare films", and a dream about the devil, which was induced by an overdose of melatonin. In the commentary, he said that much of the film's content was included because it was "weird, funny, or fucked up".[2][4] ScreamerClauz tried to not make the film's morals feel forced but instead tried to leave its message up to the audience. The film altogether took three years to make, as ScreamerClauz would stop animating for months at a time before starting again.[2]

The film was released on DVD and Blu-ray on February 21, 2012. It was also released in a limited release of 100 copies on VHS. Unearthed Films handled the home video distribution. The film is on streaming via Vimeo.

It was positively reviewed in publications such as Rue Morgue,[5] DVDtalk,[6] and horrornews.[7] Critics praised the animation and story, but generally disliked the voice acting.

• Where the Dead Go to Die at IMDb
• Where the Dead Go to Die at Rotten Tomatoes