Movies
Set Report: John Landis Produced ‘Some Guy Who Kills People’!
It wasn’t fair, really. Here I was, seconds away from making my big debut in a feature film, and the snot just wouldn’t stop coming. Not to mention the fact that I was shaking like a wet dog, not only on account of the cold (which I also blame for the endless snot flow) but from sheer, unadulterated terror. At that moment I couldn’t help but wonder how exactly I’d ended up here, at this drive-in movie theater in the City of Industry (one of only two drive-ins remaining in the L.A./Orange county vicinity, in case you care), freezing my balls off and taking photos of a “dead guy” in a dumpster while a dolly-mounted movie camera captured my every move…My role? Crime scene photographer. My co-stars? Veteran actor Barry Bostwick (Mr. Brad Majors himself, for you Rocky Horror fans) playing a small-town Sheriff investigating the scene of a brutal murder, and Ahmed Best (Jar-Jar Binks!) portraying a small-town mayor. Which I guess would make me a small-town crime scene photographer. (Is that how I’ll appear in the credits? If it’s possible for me to have a name, I’d like it be Mick. Mick, the Small-Town Crime Scene Photographer. Just put it in.)
Of course, I knew damn well why I was here – I was here because I’d agreed to come (did I mention it was Superbowl Sunday?) to report on the final night of shooting on the John Landis-produced horror/comedy Some Guy Who Kills People. How I’d ended up in front of the camera wasn’t really much of a mystery either – I had a pulse, after all, and they needed a dude to play a photographer. Yet despite the fact that I could’ve been a mentally-deranged orangutan and they probably still would’ve enlisted my help, I was nevertheless somehow flattered that they asked me. Alas; the pull of Hollywood is too great for any mere mortal to resist.
“Could you try taking the photos in between the dialogue so you don’t overlap the actors’ lines?” first assistant director Cory Johnson asked me after my first take. Sure, I told him. Of course. No big deal. But inside, I felt the weight of failure already settling in. It’s not even like I had to memorize dialogue – my direction was merely to move around and take photos while trying to stay out of the actors’ way. And yet somehow, I was feeling inadequate.
A few more takes; after each one, I inevitably pivoted my head in the direction of Mr. Johnson, expecting some new note. Could you try not trailing so much snot on the next go-round?, I imagined him asking. And maybe do your best not to look like such a fucking retard next time. It’s getting awkward, really.
Ok, let’s rewind. I showed up at the drive-in around 8pm, ushered through the gates by a couple of young P.A.s presumably “locking up” the set (I’ve been there, dudes) on a freezing-cold February evening (it was probably around 40 degrees, which in L.A. terms is pretty much sub-zero). I was then led to speak with Ryan Levin, the screenwriter and producer of the project, sitting Zen-like in front of the monitor as the crew around him prepared for another take. The scene being filmed (I’m not giving anything away because it’s the first scene in the movie) involved a hapless victim, being menaced by an off-screen assailant wielding a sharp object. I’m also giving absolutely nothing away by noting that the scene featured lots of screaming, lots of frenzied motion, and lots of good-natured laughter on the part of cast and crew once the cameras finished rolling. Orchestrating it all was fast-talking director Jack Perez, best known for such direct-to-DVD critical darlings like Wild Things 2 and Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus.
Ok, so I was being sarcastic there. Sue me. In all honesty, I’ve never watched a “Jack Perez joint” – for all I know, Wild Things 2 is a lost classic just waiting to be re-discovered. Regardless, I wasn’t there to talk about Wild Things 2, or even 2006’s 666: The Child (also directed by Perez and released to capitalize on that year’s The Omen remake). I was there to talk about Some Guy Who Kills People, and like Mick – my crime scene photographer character – I was bound and determined to get to the bottom of it all. And so, after a few introductions and some small talk with Levin and his producers Michael Wormser and Micah Goldman, Levin and I took off on a moonlit stroll to the other end of the parking lot to chew the fat a little.
You’re looking incredibly dapper this evening, Mr. Eggertsen, Levin told me in my own head. Your penetrating eyes bewitch me. It is possible for a journalist to develop a crush on his subjects, after all – and Levin ain’t too shabby to look at. Short, scruffy, and handsome, I found the writer (he penned an episode of Scrubs and currently works on a Disney show called I’m in the Band) to be cordial, easygoing, and seemingly ego-free.
“I made a short film called The Fifth about 3 ½ years ago, and it’s just about a serial killer and a bunch of his friends who play poker”, Levin told me about the short SGWKP is based on (yes, I did just abbreviate the title). “And they’re always looking for another player. And we find out that the reason they’re constantly looking for another player is Ken, the serial killer, always ends up killing the new guy for whatever reason.”
The short did well for Levin, winning awards at several film festivals (including Best Short at the Fantasia Film Festival and Best Screenplay at Fantastic Fest) and gaining him some attention in the horror-movie universe. The film’s success inspired him to stretch the concept out to feature-length, during which process he radically reworked the story. “Once I started to develop it into a feature – obviously you’re talking about a different structure – everything just changed”, Levin told me. “And then it just basically became – the only thing that stayed was this lead. This main character as a serial killer.”
Without giving too much away, Some Guy Who Kills People essentially involves small-town loser Ken (played by prolific character actor Kevin Corrigan), whose big dreams of becoming a successful artist were shattered years ago by a traumatic event. After doing a stint in a mental institution, he moves back in with his mother (Karen Black!), gets a job at an ice-cream parlor with childhood friend Irv (Leo Fitzpatrick) and begins murdering the people he blames for the current sorry state of his life. The situation is inevitably complicated by the appearance of both a love interest (Shaun of the Dead‘s Lucy Davis) and the emergence of pre-teen daughter that he never actually knew existed (Ariel Gade).
Thinking of the concept of an ordinary small-town guy perpetrating a series of brutal murders, I couldn’t help but think of the infamous “BTK Killer” (nee Dennis Rader) of Wichita, Kansas, who butchered ten people in a 15-year span during which time he simultaneously functioned as a seemingly innocuous family man, regular churchgoer and Cub Scout leader. Turns out, Levin actually had used Rader as a loose template for his main character.
“It was that concept that was just like mind-boggling, that somebody could be doing that”, Levin told me. “The idea of this serial killer who is just this everyday guy, that nobody would ever suspect. That idea attracted me, but I wanted to do it in a comedic way. To me it just felt like the entry point was to play on this guy as the everyday Joe who’s got everything else in his life. Who’s got a family, who’s got friends, who’s got his hobbies. And what he does – he just happens to kill people. And some people may know about it in his life, some people may not. But that to me was this funny idea.”
After completing the script, Levin teamed up with producers Wormser and Goldman and began shopping the script around to directors. Given the project’s mix of horror and comedy, he and his partners immediately thought of John Landis, the man who essentially perfected that very combo in 1981’s An American Werewolf in London. After sending it to the directors’ agent, Levin was surprised to receive a call the very next day saying Landis was interested in setting up a meeting. “[The meeting] ended up being like this 5 ½ hour lunch”, said Levin. “And he was going to direct it. And we started working on him with the script, and developing the script further with him. He wasn’t attached to anything else at the time. It was still a very low-budget film, probably three or four million dollars.”
Just before signing on, Landis suddenly received word that Burke and Hare, a pet project he’d been trying to get made for years, would be moving forward – leaving Levin and his producers not only without a director, but without the majority of the funding they’d raised based on Landis’ attachment. Left with a much smaller budget and deflated prospects, Levin nevertheless approached Landis about staying on as an executive producer. He agreed.
Meanwhile, the search was on for a new director – albeit one who’d be willing to work on the cheap. That’s where low-budget veteran Jack Perez came in. “He sat down and he basically laid out his vision for it”, Levin told me. “And it really just lined up exactly with what I wanted. I mean, he understood the tone of it and the style of it, and the balancing of the comedy and the horror. And so we hired him, hired a casting director, and basically just hoped with everything we had that the script would sell the project to name actors.”
As you could probably tell from the above casting mentions, the script was indeed good enough to reel in some very recognizable thesps. In fact, as both Levin and Perez noted to me, they were more often than not blessed with their first choices. Perez, who has worked on more than his fair share of ultra-low-budget projects, found it refreshing to work with a stable of professional actors where the majority of his time wasn’t spent making sure they memorized their lines correctly. “You know, what I’ve been saying all along is usually with a film with this kind of budget, you usually end up with less experienced actors, not always the actors that you would like”, he told me during a short break from filming. “Usually, when you’re making a horror picture for this kind of money, it can fall into a kind of…’exploitation schlock’ world. Fortunately, the material attracted exceptionally talented actors. It’s probably the first time in my life where I’ve had this many first choices. You know, like, ‘Really? We can get him? We can get her? They’ll do it?’ So that also makes the process an easier one, because everyone’s a pro.”
To my surprise, I found out that arguably the biggest name in the cast – horror icon Karen Black – actually auditioned for her part as Ken’s mother in the film. Levin described Perez’s dismayed reaction when he learned the veteran actress was coming in to read. “I remember when Jack saw Karen Black was coming in to audition he just like lost his shit. He said, ‘I can’t believe Karen Black is actually auditioning for this movie. Like, we should be begging her to do this movie.’ But she came in, and she just gave us this performance of just this off-the-wall [energy], totally unorthodox, totally different than everybody else is giving it. And she had this sort of element of like, she could do anything at any time, she could say anything at any time. And that was a very intriguing concept.”
Probably the most entertaining part of the interview for me was hearing Levin tell stories about Ms. Black, including a bizarre behind-the-scenes interview with the actress that will likely be included on the DVD (“I [didn’t] know what [she was] saying 95 percent of the time”), and the “whacked-out energy” she brought to the production. “When it came time to shoot her scenes, she was just dead-on”, said Levin. “And then she would give you something different every take, you know? You’d be like, ‘That’s it, that’s exactly how I had it in my head. Alright, let’s do another take.’ And then she’d do something else, and you’d be like, ‘No no no, that’s so much better.’ You know, she just gave the character a lot more than was ever on the page.”
Black unfortunately wasn’t on set that day, but luckily something nearly as good – a prosthetic severed hand – was. Courtesy of makeup artist Steve Costanza, the hand was being used for a “forced perspective shot” in the opening sequence, in a gag so genius I won’t spoil it for you here. In fact, it was this setup – winning my personal “Best Performance By A Severed Body Part in a Supporting Role” award over the prosthetic head I’d witnessed being thrown at a car windshield earlier on – that made me think maybe, just maybe, we were in for something special here. It was an amazingly resourceful shot (not to mention, it looked seamless when I viewed it on the monitors) that came off as a perfect distillation of the project’s mix of horror and pitch-black comedy. Later on, I made a point of complimenting Perez on the brilliantly twisted setup.
“Oh cool, thank you”, Perez replied, before going on to explain the genesis of the idea, which proves the old adage that necessity is, indeed, the mother of invention. “On a budget like this, where you don’t have the luxury of doing as many setups as you ordinarily would, it forces you to think in very kind of…in bold strokes. So you realize that you’re not gonna have ten setups, ten different camera angles, to tell this particular moment, you’re gonna have three. And so those three better pack as much visual information, and hopefully as much visual sensation, as you would get from a succession of many other shots. So it forces you to kind of condense your design visually.”
Perez, a compact, thoughtful man who seems to be everywhere at once, was ostensibly made for this line of work. He’s at once intensely focused and warm, with eyes that seem never to rest. I couldn’t help but think that maybe this film will serve as something of a breakthrough in his directing career. Certainly, working with a script capable of attracting such well-known talent won’t hurt. Perez made a point of giving Levin’s screenplay credit for inspiring the sort of creativity I’d seen on display in the clever hand gag they’d just wrapped a few minutes before.
“It’s harder to kind of visualize something and come up with moments like that if you’re not moved by the material”, he told me. “In this case the material was just so exciting and original…[that] these ideas came forth very freely.” Perez went on to describe his fondness for the script upon first reading it, and how it had reminded him of An American Werewolf in London before he even knew Landis was attached as executive producer. “It had all the great horror elements, but then it had this amazing character development that you don’t ordinarily get in a horror movie. So the funny thing was, was that it reminded me of films that combined humor and hardcore violence – it’s a weird combination – and character. And that reminded me a lot of Am American Werewolf in London. And then when I met with these guys…I actually mentioned that, and they kind of – Michael, and Micah, and Ryan sort of looked at each other, and – I guess no one else had mentioned that comparison. And then they said, ‘Well you know, Landis is the executive producer’. So I maybe won a couple of points that way.”
Echoing the sensibility of that classic werewolf film (and simultaneously sounding like a true old-school horror movie lover) Perez also professed to me his preference for practical effects over CGI work. “If you can do something in-camera, which is something that I sort of grew up playing around with when I was making Super-8 movies, and when I was working on Hercules and Xena, those were the kind of effects that we would do”, he told me. “At the end of the day, it’s also really a satisfying thing that happens right in front of you. So that is very gratifying. I hate the idea of just shooting a plate, and then later somebody else will make it, you know? Here you get to make it, you see it, and it’s done.”
After a few more minutes of conversation (I had maybe ten minutes with him), it was back to the grind for Perez; the next camera setup was complete, and it was time to shoot the “trash dumpster” scene in which I would be making my big debut (a fact I wasn’t actually aware of until a few minutes later, when 1st A.D. Johnson approached me and sheepishly asked how much longer I’d be sticking around). A quick trip to the costume trailer, followed by a brief tutorial on the logistics of the camera, and off I went on my snot-filled adventures in Filmland (look, baby, when it’s cold outside, your nose tends to run – a lot). During this momentary foray into “acting” (what’s my motivation, Mr. Demille?), I not only began to appreciate (again) just how difficult this craft of filmmaking is, but also just how ill-suited I am to performing any acts whatsoever in front of the camera.
“I think I’ve got what I need”, I told Levin in farewell, just before hurrying off (walk, don’t run) to my soon-to-be-blazing-hot-to-overcompensate-for-freezing-my-ass-off-for-the-last-several-hours car. Looking back, I shot a fleeting glance at one of the neighboring drive-in screens, which earlier in the night had been playing the Mel Gibson vanity-vehicle Edge of Darkness. It was dark now, nearly indistinguishable from the night sky beyond it. No light. No flicker of images playing across its surface. No pain, no horror, no fantasy. No laughter. No tears, or smiles. No vision. Just the blackness, absorbing the white vinyl like a shroud. Forgetting everything else for a moment, I lamented the death of the drive-in movie theater; I was reminded then that the one in the town I grew up in is an oversized shopping center now, with a Barnes & Noble and a Starbucks. Forget the crappy sound for a second, and the inconvenient weather cancellations; there’s simply something haunting, almost spiritual, about the way a projected image plays against the night sky. That contrast conveys an almost divine magic that represents, in my mind, what the craft of making movies is all about.
And now I’m thinking of that severed hand, made with such craftsmanship and shot so beautifully, a sight as memorable as any I witnessed that night. Maybe one day it, too, will be projected up on that same piece of vinyl, under the stars. I can’t speak for the rest of the film (yet), but that image alone deserves to be viewed on a big screen.
Editorials
Five Serial Killer Horror Movies to Watch Before ‘Longlegs’
Here’s what we know about Longlegs so far. It’s coming in July of 2024, it’s directed by Osgood Perkins (The Blackcoat’s Daughter), and it features Maika Monroe (It Follows) as an FBI agent who discovers a personal connection between her and a serial killer who has ties to the occult. We know that the serial killer is going to be played by none other than Nicolas Cage and that the marketing has been nothing short of cryptic excellence up to this point.
At the very least, we can assume NEON’s upcoming film is going to be a dark, horror-fueled hunt for a serial killer. With that in mind, let’s take a look at five disturbing serial killers-versus-law-enforcement stories to get us even more jacked up for Longlegs.
MEMORIES OF MURDER (2003)
This South Korean film directed by Oscar-winning director Bong Joon-ho (Parasite) is a wild ride. The film features a handful of cops who seem like total goofs investigating a serial killer who brutally murders women who are out and wearing red on rainy evenings. The cops are tired, unorganized, and border on stoner comedy levels of idiocy. The movie at first seems to have a strange level of forgiveness for these characters as they try to pin the murders on a mentally handicapped person at one point, beating him and trying to coerce him into a confession for crimes he didn’t commit. A serious cop from the big city comes down to help with the case and is able to instill order.
But still, the killer evades and provokes not only the police but an entire country as everyone becomes more unstable and paranoid with each grizzly murder and sex crime.
I’ve never seen a film with a stranger tone than Memories of Murder. A movie that deals with such serious issues but has such fallible, seemingly nonserious people at its core. As the film rolls on and more women are murdered, you realize that a lot of these faults come from men who are hopeless and desperate to catch a killer in a country that – much like in another great serial killer story, Citizen X – is doing more harm to their plight than good.
Major spoiler warning: What makes Memories of Murder somehow more haunting is that it’s loosely based on a true story. It is a story where the real-life killer hadn’t been caught at the time of the film’s release. It ends with our main character Detective Park (Song Kang-ho), now a salesman, looking hopelessly at the audience (or judgingly) as the credits roll. Over sixteen years later the killer, Lee Choon Jae, was found using DNA evidence. He was already serving a life sentence for another murder. Choon Jae even admitted to watching the film during his court case saying, “I just watched it as a movie, I had no feeling or emotion towards the movie.”
In the end, Memories of Murder is a must-see for fans of the subgenre. The film juggles an almost slapstick tone with that of a dark murder mystery and yet, in the end, works like a charm.
CURE (1997)
If you watched 2023’s Hypnotic and thought to yourself, “A killer who hypnotizes his victims to get them to do his bidding is a pretty cool idea. I only wish it were a better movie!” Boy, do I have great news for you.
In Cure (spoilers ahead), a detective (Koji Yakusho) and forensic psychologist (Tsuyoshi Ujiki) team up to find a serial killer who’s brutally marking their victims by cutting a large “X” into their throats and chests. Not just a little “X” mind you but a big, gross, flappy one.
At each crime scene, the murderer is there and is coherent and willing to cooperate. They can remember committing the crimes but can’t remember why. Each of these murders is creepy on a cellular level because we watch the killers act out these crimes with zero emotion. They feel different than your average movie murder. Colder….meaner.
What’s going on here is that a man named Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara) is walking around and somehow manipulating people’s minds using the flame of a lighter and a strange conversational cadence to hypnotize them and convince them to murder. The detectives eventually catch him but are unable to understand the scope of what’s happening before it’s too late.
If you thought dealing with a psychopathic murderer was hard, imagine dealing with one who could convince you to go home and murder your wife. Not only is Cure amazingly filmed and edited but it has more horror elements than your average serial killer film.
MANHUNTER (1986)
In the first-ever Hannibal Lecter story brought in front of the cameras, Detective Will Graham (William Petersen) finds his serial killers by stepping into their headspace. This is how he caught Hannibal Lecter (played here by Brian Cox), but not without paying a price. Graham became so obsessed with his cases that he ended up having a mental breakdown.
In Manhunter, Graham not only has to deal with Lecter playing psychological games with him from behind bars but a new serial killer in Francis Dolarhyde (in a legendary performance by Tom Noonan). One who likes to wear pantyhose on his head and murder entire families so that he can feel “seen” and “accepted” in their dead eyes. At one point Lecter even finds a way to gift Graham’s home address to the new killer via personal ads in a newspaper.
Michael Mann (Heat, Thief) directed a film that was far too stylish for its time but that fans and critics both would have loved today in the same way we appreciate movies like Nightcrawler or Drive. From the soundtrack to the visuals to the in-depth psychoanalysis of an insanely disturbed protagonist and the man trying to catch him. We watch Graham completely lose his shit and unravel as he takes us through the psyche of our killer. Which is as fascinating as it is fucked.
Manhunter is a classic case of a serial killer-versus-detective story where each side of the coin is tarnished in their own way when it’s all said and done. As Detective Park put it in Memories of Murder, “What kind of detective sleeps at night?”
INSOMNIA (2002)
Maybe it’s because of the foggy atmosphere. Maybe it’s because it’s the only film in Christopher Nolan’s filmography he didn’t write as well as direct. But for some reason, Insomnia always feels forgotten about whenever we give Nolan his flowers for whatever his latest cinematic achievement is.
Whatever the case, I know it’s no fault of the quality of the film, because Insomnia is a certified serial killer classic that adds several unique layers to the detective/killer dynamic. One way to create an extreme sense of unease with a movie villain is to cast someone you’d never expect in the role, which is exactly what Nolan did by casting the hilarious and sweet Robin Williams as a manipulative child murderer. He capped that off by casting Al Pacino as the embattled detective hunting him down.
This dynamic was fascinating as Williams was creepy and clever in the role. He was subdued in a way that was never boring but believable. On the other side of it, Al Pacino felt as if he’d walked straight off the set of 1995’s Heat and onto this one. A broken and imperfect man trying to stop a far worse one.
Aside from the stellar acting, Insomnia stands out because of its unique setting and plot. Both working against the detective. The investigation is taking place in a part of Alaska where the sun never goes down. This creates a beautiful, nightmare atmosphere where by the end of it, Pacino’s character is like a Freddy Krueger victim in the leadup to their eventual, exhausted death as he runs around town trying to catch a serial killer while dealing with the debilitating effects of insomnia. Meanwhile, he’s under an internal affairs investigation for planting evidence to catch another child killer and accidentally shoots his partner who he just found out is about to testify against him. The kicker here is that the killer knows what happened that fateful day and is using it to blackmail Pacino’s character into letting him get away with his own crimes.
If this is the kind of “what would you do?” intrigue we get with the story from Longlegs? We’ll be in for a treat. Hoo-ah.
FALLEN (1998)
Fallen may not be nearly as obscure as Memories of Murder or Cure. Hell, it boasts an all-star cast of Denzel Washington, John Goodman, Donald Sutherland, James Gandolfini, and Elias Koteas. But when you bring it up around anyone who has seen it, their ears perk up, and the word “underrated” usually follows. And when it comes to the occult tie-ins that Longlegs will allegedly have? Fallen may be the most appropriate film on this entire list.
In the movie, Detective Hobbs (Washington) catches vicious serial killer Edgar Reese (Koteas) who seems to place some sort of curse on him during Hobbs’ victory lap. After Reese is put to death via electric chair, dead bodies start popping up all over town with his M.O., eventually pointing towards Hobbs as the culprit. After all, Reese is dead. As Hobbs investigates he realizes that a fallen angel named Azazel is possessing human body after human body and using them to commit occult murders. It has its eyes fixated on him, his co-workers, and family members; wrecking their lives or flat-out murdering them one by one until the whole world is damned.
Mixing a demonic entity into a detective/serial killer story is fascinating because it puts our detective in the unsettling position of being the one who is hunted. How the hell do you stop a demon who can inhabit anyone they want with a mere touch?!
Fallen is a great mix of detective story and supernatural horror tale. Not only are we treated to Denzel Washington as the lead in a grim noir (complete with narration) as he uncovers this occult storyline, but we’re left with a pretty great “what would you do?” situation in a movie that isn’t afraid to take the story to some dark places. Especially when it comes to the way the film ends. It’s a great horror thriller in the same vein as Frailty but with a little more detective work mixed in.
Look for Longlegs in theaters on July 12, 2024.
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