Night Sirens: Director Diego Meza-Valdes Talks Immigration Horror Short

All too rare is quality socially conscious horror; funny, as the genre’s transgressive, taboo-breaking history seems particularly appropriate for such. Hopefully, that’s changing. UK filmmaker Melanie Light has recently completed short horror The Herd, which boasts strong feminist and vegan themes, and filmmakers Diego Meza-Valdes, Andres Meza-Valdes & Eric Mainade are about to premiere their immigration-focused Night Sirens at Miami’s Borscht Film Festival.

Together with the Borscht Corp., the Meza Brothers made quite an impression with 2011’s Play Dead, in which a pack of dogs toughed it out during a zombie apocalypse. Play Dead went on to screen and take honors at a host of international film festivals and recently arrived online via the esteemed “Short of the Week” slot on Vimeo. Since, the Miami-based filmmakers linked with co-director Eric Mainade and again with Borscht—a Miami arts collaborative dedicated to changing popular media’s perception of the city—on the aforementioned Sirens, a film focused on an illegal migrant worker who decides it’s time to move on from picking crops and find a better job. Unfortunately, supernatural forces have a different plan.

Speaking to Shock before Night Sirens’ December 20^th world premiere, Diego Meza-Valdes says, “My brother Andres and I have always been into horror. Some our earliest memories were walking over to the local Blockbuster and looking at cover arts of movies we weren’t allowed to rent.  We got to the point of where we started shooting shitty Chucky movies on our own and just kept shooting and writing ‘fan films’ in our backyard.”

He continues, “Our favorite horror movie was Dawn of the Dead and a good part of the reason was social commentary hidden in its entertainment. We got into different kinds of horror flicks and ran into the work of Larry Fessenden, who had similar ideas of using societal truths in genre scenarios.”

Night Sirens then, tackles one of today’s most pressing issues, the lives of countless illegal workers living in the U.S. It was a subject that came up in trying to collaborate with Mainade. “We met our co-director Eric Mainade on another short we directed, Play Dead, and hit it off after seeing we had similar taste,” says Meza-Valdes. “He’s a professional stuntman and a passionate filmmaker and we knew we wanted to work on something with him. Being a farmer, he would invite us to his land in unincorporated Dade County to draw up some concepts. This place was in the middle of nowhere, with practically no contact to the rest of the world. It’s basically a lawless, wild west of farmland and thousands of faceless workers who work along the vast fields all day.”

“There, we quickly figured out we wanted to base the story on all these undocumented workers, but didn’t want to exploit or marginalize their experience. A lot of them worked on the film, their very first experience doing so, and they were awesome. All of us being Hispanic—sons and grandsons of immigrants ourselves—it just felt right from the beginning.”

Night Sirens plays the Borscht Film Festival, running December 17^th-December 21^st, alongside Adan Jodorowsky’s The Voice Thief and many more. Find the film’s trailer, as well as a gallery of images below. For complete info, visit Borscht Corp.