“It’s hard for me to believe that the film is coming out, really,” says Billy Bryk. The 25-year-old started writing “Hell of a Summer” roughly six years ago with Finn Wolfhard, and premiered the film at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2023. At long last, it arrived in theaters over the weekend.
“I think anybody would be going nuts during the wait just because you put so much into it and you’re not sure when the film’s going to come out,” Bryk says. “But I truly feel like it’s the perfect time for the movie to be coming out.”
“Hell of a Summer” is a summer camp-set comedy horror starring Fred Hechinger, D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Abby Quinn, Wolfhard and Bryk as camp counselors who must outrun a masked murderer. The film is cowritten and codirected by Bryk and Wolfhard, who is 22, and was picked up by Neon almost a year after its TIFF premiere.
Wolfhard, who is best known for “Stranger Things,” and Bryk originally met on the street in Toronto; Bryk was a fan of his, and went up to introduce himself.
“I knew he was really into a lot of the same films and comedians as I was, so we just talked for a little bit,” Bryk says. About a year later Bryk, whose father is the actor Greg Bryk, decided to drop out of film school and start acting, and landed a small role in Jason Reitman’s “Ghostbusters: Afterlife,” also starring Wolfhard.
“We met again on set and really hit it off,” Bryk says.
Billy Bryk
Lexie Moreland/WWD
Both were interested in making a coming-of-age comedy, and decided to try writing one together.
“We really grew up loving these classic teen coming-of-age ensemble comedies, and we really wanted to make a film that felt like that because it felt like it had been a little while and there hadn’t been many for this generation,” he says.
Writing in their hotel surrounded by other young cast members gave them a camp-like feel, and from that idea they easily saw it as a slasher film.
Bryk is a big fan of early Wes Anderson movies including “Bottle Rocket” and “Rushmore,” and cites “Superbad” as “the ultimate comedy film for so many people that are my age.” Horror-wise, he was inspired by “Halloween” and “Scream.”
“We didn’t want our film to be too meta or to be this kind of postmodern slasher, but I think you kind of can’t make a slasher comedy without looking at a film like ‘Scream,’” he says. “The ‘Evil Dead’ films, ours isn’t too similar from those, but the ethos behind making that film was so inspiring to me,” he adds. “They made it at such a young age and with a really young crew.”
Billy Bryk
Lexie Moreland/WWD
He and Wolfhard started writing the film as teenagers, and were in their young 20s as directors; their age naturally came up when working to get the movie off the ground.
“I wanted to make films at a young age. A lot of my favorite filmmakers started out very young,” Bryk says. “We were making films at a very young age, and I’m so grateful that I was given that opportunity to do that because so few people get to make movies in their early 20s.”
Bryk was fine with them having to prove themselves to those who were skeptical about working with such young filmmakers.
“I felt as though if I couldn’t prove my worth and value as a filmmaker to people pretty quickly, then maybe I ought not to be doing it. I didn’t really mind people being apprehensive at first when I was 19 writing the script or when I was 22 directing, and I just felt like ‘I’m going to do this thing,’” Bryk says. “Anybody who seemed like they were giving us a hard time based on our age, we just tried to avoid working with them.”
Billy Bryk
Lexie Moreland/WWD
