Filmmaker Israel Luna
Israel Luna’s newest movie, drawing from his Latino culture and his small-town childhood, is his most personal yet
TAMMYE NASH | Managing Editor
nash@dallasvoice.com
North Texas filmmaker Israel Luna is certainly no stranger to horror films; he has several to his credit, including the four-movie Ouija series (The Ouija Experiment, The Ouija Experiment 2: Theatre of Death, Ouija 3: The Charlie Charlie Challenge and Ouija: Deadly Reunion).
All of his horror movies contain at least some small sliver of Luna’s own offbeat sense of humor. And his most well-known films — 2010’s highly-controversial Ticked-Off Tr*****s With Knives and 2019’s zombie romp Dead Don’t Die in Dallas (originally Kicking Zombie Ass for Jesus) — mix that humor with a huge helping of LGBTQ culture.
But this month Luna premieres his first movie mixing horror and his signature dark humor with his own culture as a Latino who grew up in a small town in the Texas Panhandle.
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‘La Chancla De Diablo’ premiers
Filmmaker Israel Luna holds the world premier of his newest film, La Chancla Del Diablo, Friday, Jan. 19, at 9 p.m. at the Wellington Ritz Theatre, in Wellington, Texas, Luna’s hometown and the place where the movie was filmed. Tickets will be available at the theater.
The DFW premier of La Chancla Del Diablo will be held Wednesday, Jan. 24, at Studio Movie Grill on Spring Valley Road in
Richardson (just off Highway 75).
Doors open at 6:30 p.m. Tickets are $10 for adults and $5 for kids under 12, available now online at SpayseStudios.com (click the La Chancla Del Diablo logo) and, if any are still available, at the door the night of the premier. Luna and the rest of the cast and crew will be in attendance.
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La Chancla Del Diablo premieres Friday night, Jan. 19, in Wellington, Texas — the town where Luna grew up and where he filmed the movie. Then Luna is back here for the DFW premiere, happening Wednesday, Jan. 24, at 7 p.m. at Studio Movie Grill, off Highway 75 and Spring Valley Road in Richardson.
Rosa (Cynthia Santiago), right, shares a bit of “el chisme” — local gossip — with a friend.
In the Latino cultural vernacular, mothers discipline their children by spanking or threatening to spank with their chancla. Those who are really adept, it is said, can even use the chancla like a boomerang.
La Chancla Del Diablo — in English, The Devil’s Flip-Flop — is set in a small town in the Panhandle of Texas, and tells the story of a single mom who breaks her own chancla and, when she goes to replace it, buys a flip-flop at her local dollar store that is possessed by the evil spirit of a local bruja, or witch.
“The idea came to me because I wanted to take an inanimate object and make it scary,” Luna explained. “I had seen these short films everywhere about chanclas and how powerful they are — how moms can throw them around corners and can even stop Michael Myers with a chancla. I mean, kids are already afraid of chanclas, so why not make them scarier?
DVtv’s own Larry The Fairy, credited as Larry Farris, plays a macho cop.
“I was watching a behind-the-scenes video about when they were making the Pixar movie Coco, and that scene where the grandmother is chasing the little boy — they were gonna give her a wooden spoon, but there was a Latino on the set who said no, give her a chancla!” he continued. “And I remember when I was a little boy. I stayed with my aunt a lot, and if we kids were misbehaving, she would take her chancla and just put it on the table in front of her. We would just look at that chancla, and we would behave!
“It works! It can be a fancy chancla or it can be that cheap plastic one from the dollar store — whichever one, it works.”
Luna said he decided he was going to write this chancla horror movie, then he had to decide HOW to write it: “How does it move? How does it kill? I really had to challenge myself to answer those questions,” he said.
Evil bruja Cheeva (Angel Rose) reaches for a nearby chancla
The film stars Cynthia Santiago as a single mom of two boys, 8 and 10 years old. “Of course, they get in trouble,” Luna said, “and she spanks them with the chancla. But the chancla breaks, so she goes to the dollar store and buys a new pair, not knowing that one of the pair is possessed by the soul of a local witch.
“The moment she buys the chancla, her younger son kind of connects with it, because the witch needs a human body to resurrect. Meanwhile, the chancla is out killing people,” he explained. “But it only looks like a chancla at first. It starts finding ingenious ways to kill, and as it does, it changes.”
And what about including that trademark Luna dark humor? “Well,” he said, “the fact that it is a chancla makes it comedic. But I wrote it purely as horror. I mean, the people watching will scream and jump because it is scary, but then they are gonna laugh, because they are screaming at a chancla!”
Rosa (Cynthia Santiago) makes a startling discovery in La Chancla Del Diablo.
Luna acknowledges that he could probably never make “a really dark horror movie, because mine will always have an element of humor to them. Screaming and jumping and laughing — I want to see all of that. I want to hear the gasps, and I want to hear the laughs. I write with that in mind.”
Luna said he had the idea for La Chancla Del Diablo in his head for quite a few years before he actually got around to making the movie. “At the beginning of 2022, I really started writing it, then we shot it that summer.”
He actually shot two movies back-to-back in the summer 2022: Terry Adderhlt’s Incubus: New Beginnings, which starred Dee Wallace and for which Luna was a producer, and La Chancla Del Diablo. Incubus, filmed in and around Grapevine, came first, then Luna almost immediately headed to Wellington to shoot La Chancla.
Nico (Kahil Muro) finds himself strangely drawn to mom Rosa’s (Cynthia Santiago) new chancla.
Then, during the 2022 holidays, in the middle of editing Incubus, Luna got sick with a stubborn “stomach bug” that ended up landing him in the hospital in March 2023. “It wasn’t until August of last year that I really started feeling better and getting my energy back,” he said. He had handed off the editing for Incubus to someone else, so he was able to focus on editing La Chancla.
“It’s not even finished yet!” Luna declared, the Friday before the Wellington premiere. “I’m still editing! I will probably be done with it by Sunday [Jan. 14]. I hope I am done with it by Sunday! I am just doing those little things now to polish it all up.”
La Chancla marks a lot of firsts for Luna. For instance, he said, “It’s got a lot of special effects, which I have never really done before. I dabbled with it a little bit on Incubus, but this one has a lot more.”
This is also the first time that Luna has been the primary funding source for one of his movies. “I did have people from Wellington who donated,” he said.
“We raised a good $5,000 from locals and friends and family. Then I funded the rest myself.”
Nico (Kahil Muro) develops a strong connection with a dollar-store flip-flop possessed by an evil witch. Arturo Gonzalez is Officer Garcia.
The total budget, he noted, was around $30,000-$35,000.
He continued, “This movie is very different than of my other ones. It is my most personal movie yet, the one that is closest to my heart. It comes from my own childhood, and I wanted it to be a real family project.
“It is set in Wellington, and I shot it there in my hometown, around my own family,” Luna explained. “The main house in the movie is the house I grew up in. My grandmother left me the house when she died, and the whole cast and crew stayed right there in that house when we were shooting.
“And my older sister, Chayo, let us use her house, too. We filmed two death scenes in her kitchen. She walked in after, and OH MY GOD! There was blood everywhere! I told her don’t worry! We will clean it all up!”
Local business Mona’s Mexican Restaurant was also a filming location, and a lot of Luna’s family and other local residents appear as extras.
Cynthia Santiago is Rosa; Arturo Gonzalez is Officer Garcia, and Michael Ochotorena is Andres.
“That’s why I wanted to show it there, first,” he said, explaining the Wellington premiere. “It’s such a special movie, and we shot it there and everything. It’s so rare that something like this happens in such a tiny town like Wellington, and I wanted them to see it first, to watch the movie and be able to point and say, ‘Look! That’s me!’”
The cast is “mostly Latino,” Luna said. “It’s rare for me to see someone like me on film — a Latino from a small town where we speak a lot of Spanglish and listen to Norteño music.
I wanted the character in the movie to look like us and speak like us.”
But as usual with Luna’s films, the LGBTQ community is well represented.
When single mom Rosa’s trusty chancla breaks, she heads to the local dollar store for a replacement.
Luna himself wrote and directed the film, and Joseph Herrera, another LGBTQ Latino filmmaker from DFW, was the producer. Dallas trans woman Angel Rose is the bruja, and DVtv’s own Larry The Fairy, credited as Larry Farris, plays a butch cop. Taylor Summers is in the cast and Luna’s mother is the abuelita. Jayson Woods handled the lighting and provided drone shots for the production.
“We definitely do have all colors of the rainbow,” Luna declared.
Is there a distribution deal in the works for La Chancla Del Diablo? Nothing’s set in stone, Luna said, so he can’t discuss details yet. But he has talked to a company that he has worked with frequently before about the possibility, and they are definitely interested.
Right now, though, Luna is focused on his two big premier nights, in Wellington and then in DFW. And he wants everyone to turn out.
Cynthia Santiago is single mom Rosa and Nicholas Blake Nuno is her son Gilberto
“This is a family film, if you can believe it!” he declared. “I really do want parents to take their kids to see it, and I want people to keep talking about the chancla way after it’s done.”
For more information on Israel Luna’s other projects in the works, visit DallasVoice.com.
