Palm Springs ShortFest: Horror lurks in Bombay Beach-filmed 'Smoking Kills'

Cigarette pack labels warn consumers about the dangers of smoking, but Dulcinée DeGuere's fever dream short film "Smoking Kills" will really make people think twice before lighting up.

In this creepy-crawly macabre short, a mysterious woman named Olivia (Flora Wildes) invites her Tinder date, Trey (Lío Mehiel), over one evening. The vibes seem a bit off between them from the start, but they really get intense when Trey asks Olivia to stop smoking. Fueled by addiction, a desire to dominate, wild running thoughts and the "date-rape" drug GHB, Olivia decides to show just how deadly smoking can be.

DeGuere told The Desert Sun that she drew plenty of inspiration from her own life and her relationship to smoking, although her personal journey wasn't quite as nightmarish as the one depicted in the film. The part-time Bombay Beach resident also decided to shoot her short in the once-popular getaway destination that has "developed its own trailer-chic aesthetic" since its heyday, she said. Though the setting of "Smoking Kills" is limited to the interior of a trailer home, viewers can sense the outside world's strangeness lurking in the background, like when certain moments seem a little too quiet for comfort.

"Smoking Kills" will play at the Palm Springs International ShortFest as part of the Thrills & Chills II: Back from the Dead program at 8 p.m. June 24 at the Palm Springs Cultural Center. Ahead of the festival, DeGuere shared some behind-the-scenes making of the film and why she can't imagine filming this short anywhere but Bombay Beach. (This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)

Is this your first time attending ShortFest?

DeGuere: It’s the first time I’ll be attending in person. I did have a film there last year. I didn’t get to go, but "Chaperone" played, which I edited.

I’m a desert local. I spend most of my time in Joshua Tree, but I do work for the Bombay Beach Biennale. In the winter, I live in Bombay Beach and produce an arts festival there.

You filmed "Smoking Kills" in Bombay Beach. You place us in the interior of a home, and although we never see what the outside looks like, you can still sense the area's eccentric vibes. Is that what made it the perfect shooting location?

DeGuere: Bombay Beach is a movie set no matter what part of the town or beach you’re looking at. All of the houses, all of the trailers, have such a unique aesthetic. I think Bombay Beach has developed its own trailer-chic aesthetic as artists have started to buy property there. A lot of people take the trailers that were abandoned in the ‘80s and ‘90s and refurbish them completely, so you have the bones of these trailer homes. As you can tell in "Smoking Kills," which is just one home out of many, they take on this really interesting, colorful desert aesthetic.

I set the film in Bombay Beach before I knew what the story was. As a filmmaker, I often pick my locations first and then I let the characters inhabit them. I can’t imagine filming this thing anywhere other than Bombay Beach. To your point, we don’t see Bombay Beach, and so the audience doesn’t get to really understand where they are, but I just wanted them to understand they were in some strange trailer park desert location, and I think that comes through.

How did this story come about?

DeGuere: It’s about my relationship to smoking and cigarettes, in addition to being about powerplay and kink dynamics. Ironically, my partner challenged me to quit smoking, and I told him I wouldn’t do it unless he got trained in transcendental meditation and kept it up. He actually did, and so I was writing this film as I was really pondering quitting smoking, which I had done many times. For me, it was an attempt to exorcize what is it about this extremely self-destructive behavior that I feel the need, even as I get into my late-20s, to cling onto. During the pandemic, the rates of smoking and vaping just went so crazy. Even as this lung-killing disease was taking over the world, not only for myself, but also culturally speaking, I wanted to ask the question, "Why are we still smoking?" It was a really personal exorcism, which I think in a sense worked. I don’t smoke anymore.

I also hoped for a reflection for my friends or other people who find themselves engaging in a really self-destructive behavior even 20 years after all those anti-smoking ads changed the world. It felt really salient, and I’m going to make a follow-up film that’s called "Vaping Saves." All of my friends who used to be addicted to cigarettes are addicted to vaping, so I’m going to continue that exploration in what I now see as a diptych. We’re going to shoot it in Bombay Beach in a different strange trailer.

The creepy-crawly vibes are off the charts with this film. Are you drawn to the horror genre, and if so, why?

DeGuere: When someone asks me what kind of films I make, I say very strange arthouse and horror sci-fi (laughs). Everyone’s always like, "Oh…" I work as an editor, and as an editor, I tend to do everything and anything: music videos, commercials, narrative of all kinds. I get a lot of my storytelling practice as an editor, which is not limited to one genre. But when it comes to writing and directing and the films that I’m most proud of, they’re all weird horror films or sci-fi-leaning and just strange.

The films that I love and have inspired me to become a filmmaker in this writer/director capacity are always these elevated genre flicks that really seem to express intense emotions and intense views on the world that I think mirror what we’re experiencing at large. I think there’s a bifurcation right now in film. We have a lot of very happy films that are trying to create a sense of optimism, and people want nice stories that they can believe in, [so] they walk away from a theater making them feel really good. On the other hand, you have films that are expressing the rage and disappointment and confusion of being alive right now. "Smoking Kills" especially was a film completely born out of the pandemic, and though it’s not about the pandemic on a really obvious note, it’s about being confined, being in this strange place, our relationship to strangers and how we can interact post being separated for so long. These genres happen to, for me, express the most raw emotion, while also being able to be fun and strange formally speaking. My editing is very weird, it’s very nonlinear, I break all of the rules, and I think those genres support that more than something more based in realism like a drama.

The editing really stands out in this film. You have slo-mo dialogue in one moment and shots juxtaposed with each other in another. It all adds to the strangeness.

DeGuere: My director of photography, my producers and I were in the edit together at one point. I think the edit allows all of the rules to be broken. I took a lot of inspiration from the film "Mandy" that has some pretty wacky, weird crossfades and edits, and I watched "Natural Born Killers" while I was editing this film, which completely broke open my relationship to editing, which was very refreshing. The editing allows us to destabilize the audience and create dreamscapes especially as the drugs get introduced into the story. You have Trey sinking into this drug-infueled state, and then you have Olivia’s mania taking over the edit and driving it into this place of complete psychedelic … it’s a wash in a way. We had a lot of fun.

What do you hope audiences take away from your film, aside from the smell of cigarette smoke?

DeGuere: First and foremost, I hope that they are entertained and they get a good laugh. I did not intend for it to be funny, I don’t think of myself as a comedy writer, but it plays funny in the end, so it’s been a joy for me to watch a film that I wrote get laughs. I hope that they think about why Olivia is the way that she is. I felt pretty firm on not explaining to the audience who she is or why she is this way. I wanted audiences to walk away and think a little bit about is she a villain? She obviously is in some regard, but there's a little more lurking underneath the surface. There’s an easy way to watch the film and just be like, "She’s a crazy sociopath and I feel so bad for Trey," but there’s another way to walk away from the film and be like, "Why did she react like that and what is she going to do next? What is something that could have gotten through to her to help heal her from not only her hatred of herself, but also this need to then impose her hatred on the person she’s with?" I hope they also think about the powerplay, the cat and mouse exchange and how it ended.

One of my favorite things about the film also is it’s an LGBTQ film, but that’s not what the film is about. It’s not what it leads with and that’s an exciting part of the film. My queer community of filmmakers and I are really committed to making films that just showcase queer people being maimed and just like everybody else, and that it’s not just this story about that. We’re really excited to continue pushing that forward in the industry.

Ema Sasic covers entertainment and health in the Coachella Valley. Reach her at ema.sasic@desertsun.com or on Twitter @ema_sasic.

This article originally appeared on Palm Springs Desert Sun: Palm Springs ShortFest: Horror lurks in the dark in 'Smoking Kills'