Urban Legends: Final Cut marks the feature directorial debut of editor/composer John Ottman, the British Academy Award (BAFTA) winning editor, and accomplished composer of The Usual Suspects (1997). A graduate of the USC film school program, Ottman has spent the last few years building up a substantial resume of film and television scores in various genres, and edited director Bryan Singer's 1998 film, Apt Pupil.

Though Ottman was Singer's first choice as composer for the recent and highly successful X-Men film, Ottman's busy schedule and contractual obligations with his debut feature prevented him from taking the high-profile assignment, and though he regrets missing the plumb opportunity, Urban Legends: Final Cut offered the fledgling director new professional challenges, frustrations and creative highs - an intense learning experience that will no doubt serve him well in his next directorial venture.

A sense of humour is mandatory when you're asked to direct a slasher film - a genre that has a tradition of pushing the limits of bad taste, violence, and the patience of various censor boards. After the success of Scream in 1996, the last 4 years have shown it is possible to make a smart, funny and satirical movie with plenty of scares (in bouncy digital surround) that play on an audience's most primal fears.

For a while Ottman had been dropping hints of his directing aspirations, and his efforts finally paid off in a casual meeting with the people at Phoenix Pictures, the studio behind Apt Pupil (1998) and Lake Placid (1999). As Ottman, explains, "I just wanted them to know that down the road it would be fun to direct something, and then halfway through my sentence, they whipped out a script and said, 'How about this?'

"I was sort of caught in midstream - I didn't know how to react. I said, 'Well what is it?' They said, 'Well, it's Urban Legends 2', and I think I kind of reacted the way you do when you get some socks for Christmas from your grandmother or something. I wasn't sure how to react to it.

"At first I was sort of against the prospect of making my debut with a teen horror film, and I thought, because of the association with [The Usual Suspects]... people would be sort of aghast that's what I was doing. But then I read the script and I thought it was fun, because of the filmmaking thing, and the film school thing, and saw the value in using the genre to show that I could do different styles of filmmaking all in one film that I may not get the opportunity to do in a more independent venture."

Ottman worked closely with screenwriters Paul Harris Boardman and Scott Derrickson, and though the script went through many revisions and rewrites, the final product basically reflects a modern satire of film school life. Film students - whether housed at multi-million dollar campuses or in the basement of an aging edifice - are a curious lot, and the screenplay reflects the egos and dreams of grandeur which still motivate many to learn, produce, and hopefully eke out a future in Film.

The first Urban Legend (1988), set on a college campus, played upon classic scare stories that have become part of urban fear culture: the boyfriend who disappeared while taking a pee, while his worrying girlfriend is terrorized by a strange rapping on the roof; or the babysitter, who discovers the threatening calls she's been receiving are coming from inside the house.

The sequel begins as a handful of mature film students pitch their dream thesis to stuffy department professors, and follows their efforts to produce the career-making epic... for a student budget populated with bad actors and principle photography constantly halted because of a fetishistic murderer in a fencing mask.

Though Urban Legends goes through the obligatory body count, a major character in the movie is the film school. Shot on location at Trent University in Ontario, Canada, the campus resembles a small, isolated community, surrounded by dense, verdant hills and an eerily calm river.

Like many horror films, the first Urban Legend movie used more traditional Gothic locations, and Ottman clearly wanted to give the sequel a more institutional look. Trent University's lean, angular edifices and organic layout would give the sequel a different flavour, except a major set piece was missing - the bell tower.

"We liked the university so much that I convinced the studio that we could build the tower, and my production designer said he could build the tower for a certain amount of money because he was thrilled to shoot there."

The tower is seamlessly featured in a major sequence in which the killer chases the heroine to the top, and a few dead classmates are discovered along the way, dangling here and there.

"I tried to milk it to death, even in our short timeframe for the film. I really wanted to shoot a lot more of it, and it killed me [that] we had to cut a lot of scenes out. We had one scene with 150 extras one day, and a crane shot going down what I call the Odessa Steps - because there were these long steps that we went down - but it was just all character exposition, and the audience wants to see someone die, and you can't stack up too much exposition in your first act because someone desperately wants to see someone bite it."

The slasher genre in many ways is the most rigid and the most unforgiving: there has to be a body count, and there has to be grisly violence once in a while. Unfortunately, story and character are often sacrificed in favor of thrills, and the result can be a great rollercoaster ride, but one that fades into memory pretty fast.