VelociPastor 2 Director Jesse Gouldsbury On Continuing the Legacy of a Cult Classic

Last week, the filmmakers behind the viral cult hit The VelociPastor took to Kickstarter in the hopes of funding a sequel. Velocipastor 2 is bigger in scope, taking the characters to Italy to face off against a slasher aiming to kill as many virgins as they can at a fertility festival. Brendan Steere, who wrote and directed the first film, wrote the new one with producer Jesse Gouldsbury, who will direct the sequel while Steere produces. That process was as simple as Steere deciding at one point that he wanted to focus on writing, while Gouldsbury was trying to get some directing work under his belt.

The film reunites original stars Greg Cohan and Alyssa Kempinski, but Gouldsbury told ComicBook.com that there will be opportunities to bring in other members of The VelociPastor cast — even some whose characters died in the original film. Exactly what those ways are? Well, you’ll have to wait and see.

The announcement teaser for VelociPastor 2 didn’t give fans a ton to go on about the story, although there’s some more (as well as some concept art) at the Kickstarter campaign page. One thing they said for sure? The cheap-looking dinosaur — his name is Boone, by the way — will be back. The video even joked about the unthinkable nature of using CGI dinosaurs in a VelociPastor sequel.

“We’re not doing CG,” Gouldsbury told ComicBook.com. “I have no qualms with, or anything really against CGI. There’s so much skill that goes into making something look hyper-realistic, or even getting to do a stylized thing. It’s such a cool medium. I’m not good at CGI. I’ve opened up Blender a few times to do some stuff for 3D printing, but I really respect what they’re doing. It’s just not where my skills lie. My skills lie in practical effects, and miniatures, and carving, stuff like that. It’s like, “Cool. I want to lean into that, then.” When I see something that’s super-realistic in a Marvel movie or something, I’m like “That’s cool, that looks real,” but I’m not wowed by it. If I see something that’s super stylized and takes a lot of liberties – like, artificial realism – I’m like, ‘This is cool. This feels like someone has a vision for it.’”

The original film was released in 2019, after a couple of years on the festival circuit, and was based on a short film that Steere made. Of course, Gouldsbury knows that there’s an inherent challenge to making a sequel — which is that so many fans clicked on the original movie because they couldn’t believe the absurd premise — a priest who transforms into a dinosaur to fight ninjas — was actually made into a real film.

“There’s something about embracing the fun of, ‘This is a movie, and none of it is real, therefore it doesn’t have to abide by any specific rules,’” Gouldsbury said. “It’s like, why is this happening? Because the script says so. If you’re trying to make a Christopher Nolan movie, that mindset doesn’t really take you very far, but when you’re having fun, you can do whatever with it, and that’s the beautiful thing about film is that it’s not real; you can keep doing things because it’s fun. There’s a Ty West quote about why he was working in horror for so long. He was like, ‘Horror is one of the only genres, if not the only one, where you can do anything, and the audience accepts it.’ The rules go out the window, and it’s hard to even explain why it’s like that. But that quote has stuck with me for like a decade or something at this point.”

As far as getting those casual viewers to look at it? Well, he knows it’s harder when there’s no element of surprise, but he thinks that the film — which has become a cult classic in the years since its release — created a world that the sequel can expand on in a fun way. 

“Hopefully people watch this movie!” Gouldsbury said with a laugh. “But we’re not trying to do VelociPastor again. The joke of it being a low-budget, see-the-strings-on-the-back-of-their-clothing thing…we did that joke already. What we’re trying for this, is to be like, ‘Here’s a new experience.’ We have some different stunts planned for it. We’re trying to leverage…what is it like when we have a little more money, and everybody is firing on more cylinders? It’s very much that early Peter Jackson style of, we’re just trying to make a really entertaining movie. There’s a little higher stakes in this one, too, that I think will get some of the wider audience into it. There’s no one-size-fits-all, and this is still for a midnight crowd. Some people were like ‘I don’t know, this looks too low-budget for me,’ and this is like, ‘Challenge accepted.’”

The movie’s two main characters are Doug Jones, the VelociPastor, who renounced his priesthood at the end of the first movie; and his love interest, Carol, a former prostitute who is now a lawyer and also in medical school. Each of the two have quite a lot going on in the new film, with Doug struggling to find his place in the world without the Catholic Church behind him, and Carol doing her medical residency in Italy when the movie starts.

“Doug is leaving the church, but I don’t think that has impacted his beliefs and his moral standings,” Gouldsbury explained. “Now, he’s exploring what other religions are, so he’s like ‘Qait a minute, who’s Yahweh? Tiime to figure that one out!’ He’s taking information from all the different religions, to figure out ‘Where do I stand?’ So there’s a lot of soul-searching for Doug in this one…. [Carol] is in medical school in Italy. She completed her lawyer exams in lawyer college, so we explore a little bit of, who is Carol? We saw Doug doing his professional arc of  being part of the church and then leaving it, and now we’re seeing, “Oh, what is Carol doing in Italy, getting her residency in medical school and stuff? I’m really excited for what Carol is going to be doing in this film. We might even learn a little bit in this one, how she became so hyper-competent, and why she’s cool as hell.”

And then, there’s the slasher. In the first film, Doug squared off against an army of ninjas, led by a man who was later revealed to be Doug’s own jealous brother. This time out, it’s a creepy, masked killer.

“I am so excited about the slasher,” Gouldsbury said. “The slasher definitely takes a lot of inspiration from giallo films like Torso, and those black glove, masked killer films. There’s definitely a mystery around them. Something we think about a lot is, what is the silhouette of this character? I don’t want to do just a ski mask kind of thing. We want to make someone who’s really cool. We have some of the concept art on our Kickstarter page. One of the things you’ll see is that the knife is carved from bone. That is one of the big things, and it’s like, what kind of bone can it be carved from? Perhaps it’s a dinosaur bone! How could this tie together with the Velocipastor? And playing with some fun lore things on that side.”

That said, with Boone still serving as the main dinosaur, Gouldsbury promises that in the event the sequel were to introduce another dinosaur or dinosaurs, they wouldn’t upstage the classic.

“If there were ever to be more dinosaurs added, they will be in that style, don’t you worry,” he promised. “Nothing will look too good in this film.”

You can support VelociPastor 2 on Kickstarter for the next few weeks at the link above. The film is expected to go into production in early to mid-2023.