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It's practically perfect for a horror movie location, which is precisely its use during the past couple of months for the filming of a locally made independent picture called "The Screening."

The ambiance is more than a little surreal as you wander through the cavernous Loews North Versailles late in the evening, four and one-half years after the young multiplex's demise.

The one-time 20-screen film emporium perches on the northeast side of Rt. 30 on part of the land once occupied by the five-screen Greater Pittsburgh Drive-In Theater.

Loews North Versailles opened in November 1999 and folded in June 2001, a casualty of competition from two other then-new complexes - its grander sibling, Loews Waterfront in West Homestead, and Destinta Plaza East 22 (also known as Destinta North Versailles), just three miles east on Rt. 30.

When Loews North Versailles strangled to death, one of many casualties of the over-screening of America in the late 1990s, Loews hired Ross Falvo of Cinema Consultants, a Brookline-based theater equipment company, to take a crew in and dismantle the projection equipment and sound racks and ship them to other Loews locations.

Jim Aiello, founder and president of JRA Development, the site's developer and one of the movie's executive producers, was left with an especially difficult structure to convert given its cavernous lobby, its cross-shaped configuration of corridors and its 20 various-size auditoriums with their sloped floors.

Most of the auditoriums still have screens, but the screens have been slashed - not by "The Screening" film crew but by yet another company that had been hired to remove the speakers from behind the screen. (Screens, made to order for each auditorium, are a relatively expendable part of the inventory and therefore seldom preserved or moved. At many multiplexes, they block access to the speakers.)

Some of the lobby and auditorium space is used on weekends by warehouse-outlet vendors - clothiers and whatnot, whose inventory is behind fences and locked gates - images weirdly mismatched with the structure's grandeur.

Token Christmas decorations linger near the plastic/canvas coverings that shield some dormant weekend displays.

The multiplex was put to use as a haunted house in October.

Now it's to be immortalized, if that's not too lofty an ambition, in "The Screening."

The screenplay by Waynesburg's Mike Watt involves several people being invited to a seatless theater and adjoining lounge to watch never-before-seen horror footage. While they're wandering in and about, socializing during the screening, a subhuman character named Rupert Borgia, played by local stage actor Sam Nicotero of North Versailles, goes about his bloody business.

Principal photography - about 85 percent of it in and around the multiplex - was done on high-definition video from Nov. 21-Dec. 23. For more than a week after New Year's, the crew and a few cast members, including Nicotero, returned for pickup shots - closeups, additional reaction shots and stunt work.

From mid-evening until the wee small hours, producer Chris Lombardo, director G. Cameron Romero and director of photography Melissa Burns grabs shots, as of stunt coordinator Shawn Rolly, assisted by Johnnie Sullivan, crashing through a window.

No one is breathing exhaust, but the air is nippy in the former auditoriums and especially in what used to be the sprawling projection room upstairs.

Amidst piles of debris and many yards of lighting cable strewn through the dimly lighted corridors are projection area are stacks of plastic tubing. They're transparent hoses used for artificial bloodletting.

More than two dozen crew members mill about in jackets, sweatshirts and heavy sweaters waiting for the next shot.

No one uses a clapboard, but the resonant voice of first assistant director Andrew McLean cuts through thickets of hushed conversation: "Can we clear the set, please? ... Stand by, please? ... Cell phones off, please."

"If gore is what you're looking for, this is it," says Nicotero, stepping into place for a closeup. Green blood is spattered on the front of his black vest.

In the scene being filmed, he's supposedly being attacked by Nikki McIntyre, but the shot is so tight she's not even present. Nicotero is acting only for the camera.

"How many slashes before I realize what's happening?" he asks Romero. "Oh, the FIRST one?"

Nicotero is fitted with at least a yard of plastic tubing containing blood that will saturate the front of his chest.

In a series of takes that last about half a minute each, he taunts his (non-present) attacker by laughing and bellowing.

At his feet are smeared pools of blood.

"This is so much fun," says Bill Waddell of Beaver, who's making a "making of" documentary for the eventual DVD. "All the blood-and-guts effects are really cool."

They're the handiwork of Mohawk-haired Erik Bencivenga - "Call me Benzi" - who owns BenziDream F/X Studio in Allison Park. He's doing "The Screening's" effects with assistance from Tom Savini's Special Makeup Effects Program at the Douglas Education Center in Monessen and from the Art Institute of Pittsburgh.

"We're doing mostly gore effects," Bencivenga says. "Sculpted appliances (makeup applications), makeup for the faces with gelatin and bleeding, lots of cuts and bruises, lots of blood."

He talks of six kinds of blood, in gradations from thin to thick to dry, made with a powdered pigment.

A few feet away lies a heap of plaster corpses in various stages of dismemberment. On the other side of the corridor is the only visible refreshment, a cooler of soda pop and ice.

No long smorgasbord of cold cuts and bagels tonight. Nor anything remotely resembling temperament. The feast is the filmmaking experience. Everyone has to be thinking, "This could be the credit that launches us."

Typically the honchos are demure about discussing money.

"For a small independent horror film, it has a big budget," says Lombardo.

"It started as a five-figure budget that went well into six figures," adds Jeff Battin, 45, who, along with wife Melissa Cuadra, is executive producer.

"I'm chairman of a distribution company," Battin says, referring to Communifax, a marketing strategies company based in Cranberry. "When Cameron and I met, I was a businessman looking for a new opportunity. He told me about the film. I asked what they needed to make the concept work financially."

Battin expects to release "The Screening" by midsummer, using the Internet as a nationwide marketing tool.

"Horror and action fans have a tight group active on the Internet," Lombardo says. "We hope for a theatrical release. We have people who will tell us if it can float.

"It's very likely we'll do a less gory version for cable markets. The DVD will be the full director's version."

"We will distribute it independently," says Romero, who, with his head shaved, resembles less his father than actor Kiefer Sutherland, a contemporary.

"We're avoiding digital effects," Romero adds, not mentioning that pricey special effects might even work against the primitive quality that gave his dad's "Night of the Living Dead" moments of raw authenticity.

"It's a slap in the face to your effects people if you `fix' it with digital effects," he says.

Several minutes after doing a few takes of the attack of Nicotero, Romero and the other honchos watch playbacks on a 30-inch monitor. The director speaks of "playing with the colors in post-production."

Next to the monitor is a laptop displaying dozens of color stills from the production.

Momentarily out of character, Nicotero jokes with those standing nearby and then steps back to his mark, his toes just shy of the pool of blood. Burns prepares to start her next shot with the blood and then pan upward to Nicotero.

McLean's voice pierces the crisp air.

"Quiet, please."

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