Last night was the first night of the FEARnyc film festival in New York City, and along with screening several classic and new horror films, it also hosted the world premiere of Shawn Burkett’s Don’t Fuck in the Woods.

The vulgarly, but appropriately titled 90-minute film is like Slumber Party Massacre meets Creature from the Black Lagoon, and is definitely an homage to the creature-feature and 80s slasher subgenres.

After the premiere at Cinema Village theater at NYC’s Greenwich Village, fans took part in a Q&A with the film’s writer-director Shawn Burkett, stars Nadia White and Brittany Blanton, and producer Chris Gierowski. Earlier in the day, I had the chance to sit down with Shawn Burkett and Chris Gierowski to talk about the film, as well as a puppet horror-comedy film called Head that Gierowski worked on that’s also playing at FEARnyc this week.

This piece is going to discuss Head, the only theatrical film by the famous 1960s pop group The Monkees. But, in order to do that, I need to put a little bit of the flavor and attitude of the times that led to such a colorful, wild and loose project, into proper perspective, if I may.

If the 1960s were indicative of anything, it was risk. Obviously it’s impossible to condense such a turbulent, vivid, alive decade as the 1960s into one bite-size word, but if one was challenged to do so, the word “risk” would certainly be a top contender.

We all know about the main iconic images of the 1960s in terms of that risk factor: a young president in John F. Kennedy, who came in a whirlwind election and was blown away just as fast that Dallas afternoon in November 1963, the same with his brother Robert, and Martin Luther King in 1968; Vietnam and Civil unrest, bombings and riots, globally, it seemed the 1960s were submerged in a water tank, with its inhabitants barely coming up for air.