WWW.JOHNNYTERRIS.COM

Before creating the independent production company Terfer Productions in 2004, filmmaker and actor Johnny Terris started out doing punk/guerilla-style underground short films in the late 80’s and early 90’s in Canada.

He started at the age of 14 and left home at 16 years of age armed with a foot high mohawk and a stolen videocamera with work that viciously delves into a blood-soaked/shock-slicked combo of complete annihilation of family values and structure.

His first directorial debuts, The Stardust Memory and The Whores were comedic and started to pick up a small following in the early 90’s with the more alternative/punk scene on the East Coast through word of mouth.

The Stardust Memory (which follows an unstable plot of a mother and daughter team who go insane after drinking contaminated tap water) as well as the trailer trash comedy The Whores, had been for a limited time, released remastered and uncut on a compilation DVD in 2007 with director's commentary.

The transgressive Room 405 was also featured on the collection and strayed away from the black comedy of his previous films and edged into much darker cinematography and tone. He shot the film Dominos next in the mid/late 90's, about a mentally unstable underground film director and his horde of backstabbing misfit actors. To this day Dominos remains incomplete (missing the last 5 minutes) and has not been released on DVD.

After a lengthy break after relocating to Maui Hawaii, in 2004 he starred in the Sidewalk Scramble Film Festival comedy, Faux Paw directed by award winning director/cinematographer Steve Ashlee, playing the indifferent boyfriend of a woman who decides to treat him like a dog to get more attention from him. The film was screened to a sold out crowd at The Sidewalk Scramble Film Festival in Alabama at The Carver Theater, located in downtown Birmingham. That same year he starred in a charity television spot for Safehouse Women's Shelter, playing an abusive husband and giving awarness to womens abuse issues.

In November of 2004 he headed off to Los Angeles with UK heavy metal legends Girlschool and filmed an unofficial video for their song A New Beginning from the album "Believe", done as a personal tribute to the bands return to America and has created/edited two full length music videos to honor friend and original Girlschool guitarist Kelly Johnson who passed away in 2007 to spinal cancer. A full length documentary on the band he was to produce and direct has been temporarily put on hold for a later date due to scheduling conflicts.

In 2005, he released his first official DVD entitled Sordid; a grotesque experimental journey through sex, death and rebirth which sold out the first 200 copies within a 24 hour period.

Sordid was first released on the DVD; Scruff, a collection of short films done for the new millennium. The title film "Scruff", (an experimental metalhead flashback to the 1980s), is combined with a horror short "Inside Inoxia"; a film loosely about the effects the chemical warfare and radiation poisoning.

The most recently released DVD is The Underground Collection; a compilation of five uncut short films that include Room 405, Sordid, Inside Inoxia, Scruff and a never-before-seen early comedy short titled Destination Disturbed.

His work is heavily influenced by and often described as an underground Dario Argento by peers in regards to his stylized imagery and cinematography, and have been compared to both Japanese and Italian/European horror cinema as well as likened and compared to both early John Waters and the Cinema of Transgression movement of the mid-80’s.

As well as an actor in a lot of his own films, he will be starring in the feature film Silent Alarm (again directed by Ashlee) as well as the Jimmy O film Bloodkin starring alongside the godfather of gore Herschell Gordon Lewis and the cast of the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre. An autobiography entitled Sinister Splendor & Broken Glass: Memoirs Of An Underground Filmmaker will be released in the middle of the year.

Upcoming directorial films include The Witch, Heathen and The Eighth Circle and early 2009 will see the long-awaited (and yet to be titled) 4-hour DVD compilation; a re-imagining of his early comedy films that slides back to his roots in midnight movie/grindhouse format.