BPS 432: Making Your Own Damn Movies: Inside Dave Campfield’s Troma-Fueled Filmmaking Path

When two Daves walk into a podcast, you don’t expect to stumble
upon a meditation on art, failure, persistence, and horror-comedy.
But that’s exactly what happened in this electric and delightfully
unfiltered conversation with Dave Campfield, a filmmaker, actor,
and host of the Troma Now Podcast, best known for his work in the
cult Caesar and Otto comedy-horror film series.Dave Campfield is a
fiercely independent filmmaker whose journey from a now-defunct
film college in New Mexico to directing his own cult horror satires
has been a long and winding road paved with hustle, humor, and
horror.We start in the sand-colored surrealism of Santa Fe, where
adobe buildings and the ghost of City Slickers set the stage for
Dave’s early filmmaking dreams. In the land of tumbleweeds and
tumble-down gym studios turned sound stages, Dave cut his teeth not
just on film but on the art of adaptation.

The college no longer exists, but the memories—like chalk lines
under studio lights—remain vivid in his story. “It was like going
to school on Tatooine,” he says, laughing, but behind that joke is
a bittersweet nod to the ephemeral.From there, Dave walks us
through the illusion of success—early meetings with Universal and
New Line Cinema where hopes were dangled like carrots in front of
eager young dreamers. The industry, he quickly learned, speaks its
own coded language: familiarity, marketability, and sometimes,
plain deception. One mentor told him to “say you're young, from the
streets, and have a dark comedy,” regardless of truth. Dave gave it
a shot but came away with the haunting realization that "they were
intrigued enough to keep me on leash, but not enough to make it
happen."That experience seeded his first real film, “Dark Chamber,”
a mystery-horror project which deliberately bucked slasher
formulas. It took five years to make—five years of blood, sweat,
and overdrafts. And yet, when the studios responded with, “We
wanted something more familiar,” Dave knew he was swimming
upstream. Still, he sold the film to a small distributor, endured
its repackaging as something it wasn’t, and got it onto Netflix. A
win—just not the one he envisioned.

But here’s the heart of it all: Dave didn’t stop. He pivoted, not
with bitterness, but with evolution. “I decided I wasn't going to
be one of those people waiting for opportunity. You had to make it
happen on your own.” And so, he leaned into comedy horror—a genre
he describes as “Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein, but for the
splatter generation.” Thus, Caesar and Otto were born: two absurdly
lovable doofuses bumbling their way through massacres, monsters,
and paranormal mayhem.One of Dave’s secret weapons is loyalty to
what’s real. Whether recounting how Lloyd Kaufman forgot him (then
remembered) or editing commercials for the Philadelphia Pet Expo,
he keeps a kind of grounded magic about his craft. He shares a
deeply personal new project, “Awaken the Reaper,” born from a
decade of introspection and struggle, calling it “the most personal
thing I’ve ever written.” He says, “It’s about being stuck—feeling
like every day you’re not moving forward—and finally getting out of
your own way.”All along, Dave’s been quietly building a reputation
for casting future stars before they break—Trey Byers (Empire),
Peter Scanavino (Law & Order)—and hosting a podcast that
thrives not just because of brand synergy with Troma, but because
he genuinely knows how to talk to people. “They’ve never rejected
an episode,” he remarks. “I tease Troma a lot, and they’re always
game. It’s a beautiful collaboration.”The conversation wraps not
with grandiosity, but a recognition that even the smallest cult
followings can keep a creator going. “My fanbase is small, but
intense,” Dave says with pride. “I can rattle them off on two
hands.” Maybe that’s enough. Maybe that’s everything.

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