Editorials
Hideous, Hungry and Loose: A Brief History of ‘Castle Freak’
Few filmmakers have announced themselves as such a powerful presence in the world of horror with their very first film than Stuart Gordon. Though he had been a successful theatre director, Re-Animator was his first movie, taking its inspirations from the works of H.P. Lovecraft, which were still only slowly becoming popular at the time. Because of the serialized nature of the short stories, Gordon and screenwriter Dennis Paoli originally envisioned their adaptation as a TV series. But limitations were much stricter on TV horror in the late ‘80s, whereas—despite the firm hand of the MPAA—it was a time when just about anything could happen on the silver screen. Keeping the tongue-in-cheek black humor of the source material intact, Re-Animator became a pioneering horror comedy, still widely regarded as one of the best of all time. It’s also one of the goriest of its time, due largely to the fact that Gordon made the decision to release it into theaters unrated (drastically reducing the number of theaters the film could play in) rather than deal with the censorship dealt out by the MPAA.
In post-production, Gordon and producer Brian Yuzna made a deal with Charles Band to offer services covering editing and distribution, offering Band a portion of the profits and giving Re-Animator a theatrical release through Band’s still-new Empire Pictures. The independent studio would go on to be a fondly remembered titan of ‘80s creature features and bizarre, low-budget offerings, beginning with 1984’s Dungeonmaster. 1985 saw their first real box-office success with Ghoulies, so when Band met Gordon and distributed Re-Animator, Empire was truly at the top of its game.
This kicked off a long-lasting relationship between Gordon and Band. After the success of Re-Animator, Gordon went on to immediately make two more films for Empire. Dolls shot first—though it would be released second—and is almost a complete turnaround from Re-Animator, catering much more to Empire’s in-house sensibilities. For one thing, it’s a much tamer movie, and for another it clearly shows off Band’s love for little creatures running around confined locations and killing people, setting the template for Band’s most long-running series, Puppet Master. In fact, Dolls even stars veteran character actor Guy Rolfe, who would go on to play the titular puppet master of that franchise no less than four times.
Immediately after filming Dolls, Gordon re-teamed with Brian Yuzna and Dennis Paoli for another H.P. Lovecraft reunion, From Beyond. It even re-teamed Re-Animator stars Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton. With so many of the exact same elements in place, it would have been so easy for From Beyond to just feel like the same movie, but in reality it could not be more different. While Re-Animator certainly has an element of body horror to it, From Beyond truly takes it to the next level. It’s much more about the relationship between the body and the mind, as well as the destruction of one at the cost of expanding the other. Combs and Crampton basically switch roles from Re-Animator.
Combs, this time, played the victim in over his head—even if he made a transformation toward the end. Crampton took over the role of the obsessive scientist who is willing to take huge risks, including the lives of herself and others, for the sake of discovery. From Beyond proved that the same team of people could work within the same genre and still produce something entirely different. That, if anything, is what paved the way for Castle Freak.
Gordon continued his creative relationship with Band even after Empire Pictures crumbled. Catering to the then-booming direct-to-video market, Band launched Full Moon Entertainment in 1989 with the release of Puppet Master. The budgets were even lower than they had been at Empire, but that didn’t sacrifice the quality of Gordon’s work, as he directed one of Full Moon’s absolute best, an adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum in 1991. That one featured Combs in a smaller supporting role with no sign of Crampton, as well as another actor who would be crucial to the success of Castle Freak: Jonathan Fuller, who we’ll get to in a minute.
Like most Full Moon features, Castle Freak began life with a title and a poster. Stuart Gordon was called into Band’s office and shown the poster, asked what the film was about and was essentially told that it was about a castle and a freak and other than that, he could pretty much do whatever he wanted. As always with Full Moon, the primary concern seemed to be that whatever it was, it got delivered on time and on budget. According to Gordon in an interview for the book It Came from the Video Aisle: Inside Charles Band’s Full Moon Entertainment Studio, Castle Freak came together incredibly quickly—which was not at all uncommon for Full Moon—and had a rushed production schedule. “The thing that was kind of amazing was that I met with Charlie about it in February and we were shooting it in June. It was very fast. And we shot the first draft of the script, which is something you never do.”
That in and of itself is amazing because Paoli’s script is genuinely one of his best. It’s a classic gothic melodrama with almost jarringly realistic characters adjusting to harsh realities even before the titular Castle Freak comes into the picture. It is also the most un-Full Moon movie that Band ever produced. It bears almost no similarities to other features from the company. No little monsters, no tongue-in-cheek, relatively light tone; and it is definitely not as tame as the likes of Trancers or Subspecies. Castle Freak is the goriest and darkest film Full Moon ever produced; it’s a blunt and even grimy movie, but rather than wallowing in filth, it simply portrays the realities of death and trauma.
The movie shot in Italy at Band’s own castle, which the producer regularly used as a cost-effective location and continues to use to this day. Full Moon’s sophomore effort, Meridian, had been among the first to shoot there, followed by the likes of Pit and the Pendulum, but Castle Freak truly makes the most out of the location. It’s a huge and empty place and living inside that ancient castle truly showcases what a purgatory the leads have made for themselves. They’re the main characters, and the castle looks so much like a haunted house, but this family is so defined by pain and tragedy and a lack of communication that it feels like they’re the ones haunting it.
In an interview with Birth.Movies.Death, Gordon related the themes of Castle Freak back to Dolls, despite their incredibly different tones. “There is a lot of love in that movie, I think. It’s a disturbing film, but the message in both Dolls and Castle Freak is how important it is to care for your children, and to raise them properly, really. The line in Dolls says, ‘Being a parent is a privilege, not a right,’ and I think that’s the message of both films.”
One of the absolute highlights of Castle Freak, without a doubt, is its casting. Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton are back, front-and-center as a married couple (John and Susan Reilly, respectively) who could not have possibly drifted further apart. They had both proven capable of expertly walking the line between horror and comedy in their previous efforts with Gordon, and Castle Freak casts all of that aside to allow them both to give extremely raw performances. This is the movie where it truly feels like Gordon had created a makeshift theatre company for himself, using the same actors in incredibly different roles. Combs’ and Crampton’s characters share nothing in common with what they had done in either Re-Animator or From Beyond. But it’s not even either of them who prove how diverse Gordon’s in-house acting troupe could be. It’s Jonathan Fuller.
In his feature film debut, Fuller had portrayed Antonio, the romantic lead desperate to save his wife from the clutches of the Spanish Inquisition in Gordon’s earlier movie, The Pit and the Pendulum. He gave a strong performance as a faithful and sympathetic hero. And then he worked again with Gordon as Giorgio, the title character of Castle Freak. Many directors have said that they usually would want to cast actors rather than stunt men as their lead monsters, not negating that—as proven by Kane Hodder and countless others—stunt men can give fine performances. But Castle Freak is almost unparalleled. It’s incredibly rare for someone to cast the romantic lead of one feature as the growling monster in the next. It’s especially rare considering Fuller had to don a full body prosthetic makeup for the film, something that hadn’t really been attempted since The Manitou in 1978.
This decision pays off in spades, though, as Fuller’s physical performance is incredibly unsettling. He writhes almost snakelike through the catacombs of the castle, incredibly animalistic at times, but it’s the human beats that truly make Giorgio terrifying. He inverts the innocence of Karloff’s Frankenstein Monster, who is destructive but removed from his trauma still has the heart and instincts of a curious child. It’s hard to imagine Giorgio throwing a girl into the water to see if she’d float. No, Giorgio’s instincts feel crueler, like a child pulling wings off a fly. He’s an incredibly voyeuristic character, spying on every woman he comes across, particularly Rebecca, the blind teenage daughter of Crampton and Combs. It’s hard to tell exactly how sexual Giorgio’s impulses even are, and not only because of his mangled and unusable nether-region. Even when he assaults and kills the sex worker that John brings back to the hotel in the movie’s most shocking scene, it’s a grotesque attempt to mimic an act he had just seen, apparently without any context or understanding of the act itself.
In an interview with Flickfeast, Gordon told a story of bringing his young daughter to the set, worried that she would be terrified by the Giorgio makeup. He was so worried that he even asked Jonathan Fuller to eat in his trailer instead of having lunch with the rest of the cast. When Gordon’s daughter noticed that Fuller was absent, she asked, having already known him. And upon hearing he was alone, went to eat with him in his trailer, completely unshaken by the makeup.
That makeup design, which is perhaps recognizable to people who haven’t even seen the movie but just walked by the cover in the video store, was created by the late John Vulich. A true talent in his field, Vulich worked on everything from Day of the Dead to The Lost Boys, designed the incredibly unsettling zombies for Tom Savini’s Night of the Living Dead, as well as the many monsters of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Among his horror work, though, Castle Freak might be the most unsettling, grotesque creature he ever created. It even directly influenced the design of Victor Crowley for Adam Green’s Hatchet.
Like Re-Animator and From Beyond, Castle Freak is often considered to be based on a story by H.P. Lovecraft, in this case, “The Outsider.” In reality, though, the story only provides direct influence for a single scene. In “The Outsider,” a nameless narrator thinks about his life of darkness and exile while navigating his way toward the light. In the end, he confronts a hideous figure staring back at him and reaches out to it, only to come into contact with the glass of a mirror. It’s hard to imagine Giorgio waxing poetic about his loneliness and his condition, but that ending of the story does make for a striking moment in the film, as Giorgio—after freeing himself from his dungeon cell—touches a mirror and confronts his own image for the first time in his life.
Throughout the early 1990s, Full Moon had distribution through Paramount, allowing a higher end (or at least higher budgeted) product than the kind of movies they would become known for later on. Band kept cranking out Full Moon features through that time, from sequels to franchises like Trancers and Puppet Master to creations like Dollman, Mandroid, Doctor Mordrid and tons more. There was a banner in the Full Moon offices that read “200 Films by the Year 2000,” and by all account that was a mission statement that Band wanted to hold himself to. Things were produced so quickly to the point that Paramount did not even know that Castle Freak was happening. They weren’t informed of the movie at all and did not even learn of its existence until they happened to be visiting the offices one day and saw the dailies of the scene in which Giorgio assaults the sex worker down in the dungeon.
As mentioned, Full Moon was known for relatively tame horror, the kind of thing kids could use as a stepping stone after they’d grown out of kiddie horror like Ernest Scared Stupid and Hocus Pocus, acting as a bridge to the classic adult horror most fans were already watching at that age anyway. Castle Freak was definitely not that and it was just rotten luck that the Paramount execs, who for the most part never cared nor paid much interest in what Full Moon was doing, happened to be visiting on that day. They were appalled by the footage they saw and it turned out to be one of many reasons why Full Moon lost their deal with Paramount, forcing them to later partner with the Kushner-Locke company to begin producing movies at a much lower cost than the (already low) number they’d made them for in the past.
Castle Freak wound up being the very first Full Moon movie not to have any distribution from Paramount whatsoever, but while the company was affected by that loss overall, it didn’t really impact the movie’s video rental success. Not only did Castle Freak prove to be a video hit, it also gained the company some rare accolades from genre critics. Fangoria in particular had never been all that kind to Full Moon, giving a lukewarm review to the original Puppet Master and mostly negative reviews (with a few exceptions, including Pit and the Pendulum) to just about everything that followed. Because of this, it truly felt like a victory when Castle Freak won the esteemed Fangoria Chainsaw Award for Best Limited Release/Direct-to-Video Film in 1995.
Even now, Castle Freak is one of the most successful—if not the most successful—Full Moon film that never spawned a franchise. In 1998, there was a Castle Freak action figure distributed at the likes of FYE, Suncoast and Spencer Gift. It featured a loincloth to hide his mangled nethers, but kept the rest of his body very much intact, and even came with a cat o’ nine tails and half-eaten cat as accessories. Since that time, there have been Castle Freak Halloween masks, as well as DVD and Blu-ray releases.
Within the past year, Castle Freak made its comic book debut in the pages of Dollman Kills the Full Moon Universe, with a solo miniseries announced at the same time. Cinestate, the company behind the Puppet Master reboot, is also currently working on a remake of Castle Freak. This reboot, directed by talented Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich FX artist Tate Steinsiek, is being produced by none other than Barbara Crampton herself and is said to be taking the basic concept in some surprising new directions, which much more of the original Lovecraft influences in play. I for one can’t wait to see how it turns out. But much more than that, I’m excited that this gross, nasty but deeply human movie that is so unlike anything Stuart Gordon, Full Moon or any of the cast had made before it continues to live on. Like Giorgio himself, it might get buried or tucked away for awhile, but it always breaks loose.
Editorials
Larry Cohen’s ‘It’s Alive’ Still Towers Over a 2009 Remake That Maybe Should’ve Stayed Unborn
When I write about remakes, I often bring up the word “justification.” What’s the impetus for the remake’s existence? Reinventing icons for a new generation, or benefiting from a few decades’ worth of special effects advancements? Often, there’s a reason that you can acknowledge and say, “Alright, I see what you’re going for.” That holds in Josef Rusnak’s It’s Alive, which tries to reinvent Larry Cohen’s mutant baby B-movie of the same name in what I consider the worst possible way.
I didn’t say it had to be a GOOD reason.
I’ll start with Cohen’s own reaction to Rusnak’s 2009 update: “It’s a terrible picture. It’s just beyond awful … I would advise anybody who likes my film to cross the street and avoid seeing the new enchilada.” A blunt take, but I agree. Rusnak justifies his remake by diverting drastically from Cohen’s exploitation-y flick about a newborn monster killinPreview (opens in a new tab)g Los Angeles residents, but it’s such a bafflingly weak reimagining. Cohen remains faithful to tenets of creature features while tugging at our hearts with commentaries about parents caught between morality and adoration, whereas Rusnak asks, “What if we punished a mother for trying to have an abortion?”
As Cohen says, cross the damn street.
The Approach
It’s Alive (2009) is one of those women-focused horror projects that make you scoff, derogatorily, “This was written and directed by dudes, wasn’t it?” Cohen’s original screenplay isn’t airtight, yet it does well to respect Sharon Farrell‘s “shaken mother of a monster,” Lenore Davis. Paul Sopocy and James Portolese, on the other hand, pen a screenplay that reductively focuses on Lenore protecting her bitey offspring, with a bent-out-of-shape abortion subplot thrown in. That’s not to say Cohen’s Lenore doesn’t display the same protective maternal instincts, but Rusnak plays in a sandbox of lame-duck tropes, dooming Lenore for the supposed sin of a mother’s love.
Teenage party-girl turned actress Bijou Phillips stars as Lenore Harker, a New Mexico college student who quits to live with her architect boyfriend, Frank (James Murray), and raise their incoming baby. She’s ditching pizza nights and girl talk with bestie Marnie (Ty Glaser), moving into the Albuquerque woods, where Frank has a secluded homestead with brother Chris (Raphaël Coleman), who is wheelchair dependent. Lenore goes in for a pregnancy checkup, where she learns her unborn child has doubled in size, requiring a cesarean section birth. So the surgical team opens her up and extracts “Daniel,” only to be murdered by the newborn, found resting on Lenore’s stomach, taking a post-slaughter rest.
The immediate deviation is how Daniel is found nuzzling Lenore in the hospital, and doesn’t look “freakish” at first glance. Daniel comes home with Lenore and Frank, setting up the happy lil’ family dynamic. It’s no longer a conspiratorial hunt-and-hide scenario; the “home sweet hell” take on Cohen’s original. Which, frustratingly, dissolves the core suspense that Cohen achieves. For Daniel to kill, victims have to come knocking on Lenore’s door, which becomes a repetitive cycle of visitors and hidden bodies that remove any excitement and surprises.
Does It Work?
Rusnak earns points for trying something new. Remakes have historically been less willing to put unique spins on existing stories (see: Cabin Fever). But there’s also a question of retaining the essence of the source material. Why remake a movie if you’re going to spin so far from the original that you don’t even need to use the title? It’s the Child’s Play of it all. If you wanted to make a killer AI toy movie, why use the Child’s Play legacy to do so (outside of market familiarity)?
It’s Alive doesn’t fully abandon Cohen’s ideas, but it does feel thinner than expected. There have been plenty of killer baby movies since It’s Alive—Cohen hardly has the concept trademarked. What’s fun about Cohen’s It’s Alive is how Frank chases his mutant kin around Los Angeles, eventually into the sewer system, culminating in the Los Angeles (drained) river. Rusnak directs what’s essentially a one-location thriller that minimizes the scope to meet not only its lower budget, but lesser ambitions. Where Cohen pushes farther, Rusnak pulls back, losing the idiosyncratic quirks of Cohen’s superior It’s Alive.
There’s nothing wrong with a good chamber piece, but the psychological torments Sopocy and Portolese opt for are soft as fresh-out-the-bag marshmallows. So much of the film hinges on Lenore’s cover-up tactics when she realizes her wee one is a maneater, which becomes one-note in the process. Frank wanders around, ignoring red flags, and Chris is removed from the picture for a small bit to keep the massacre going. In both films, Lenore has trouble turning against her child—but Cohen is much more thoughtful about Lenore’s state through it all. Rusnak’s direction is short-sighted, rudimentary, and flat, as it has nothing interesting to say about the fears of parenthood that drive Phillips’ Lenore to nurture the vengeful child she once wanted to terminate.
The Result
In It’s Alive (1974), Cohen makes a point of referencing Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, as John P. Ryan’s Frank recalls having the epiphany that Dr. Frankenstein is the villain, not his creation. It’s what drives Cohen’s screenplay, as we learn how the doctors tried to kill the original baby, since its deformities made it look like a melon-headed, fang-toothed freakshow. There’s none of that in Rusnak’s remake, which diminishes the creature’s origins and motives to anger. It’s an uninteresting modification because the point of Cohen’s picture is to question what makes a monster, and how its creators process their hand in the chaos. Rusnak’s not interested in such explorations, except when the screenplay shoehorns what foolishly appears as an anti-abortion undertone when we learn about Lenore’s sketchy internet baby-be-gone pills.
Even worse, the technical merits of Rusnak’s It’s Alive are unfortunate. Credit to the original’s cast, because Ryan and Farrell bring dramatic acting chops that accentuate their film’s tragedy; a legitimate heartbreaker. None of Rusnak’s cast are hitting on such a high caliber of talent, especially since there’s nothing meaty about Sopocy and Portolese’s character designs. It’s very Horror 101: ignore the obvious, act gobsmacked when the obvious happens, and bring it home. Phillips has been better in films like Bully and Hostel: Part II (maybe even The Wizard of Gore), while Murray is your average 2000s straight-to-video throwaway boyfriend. The rest of the supporting cast, sadly, barely even register.
There’s a charm to Cohen’s monster SFX, whipped up by Rick Baker—but also an opportunity. Cohen decided to use this three-mirror-blur vision, seeing through the baby’s eyes to show the beast as little as possible. If Rusnak wanted to make a stronger impact, he could have gone all-in on Daniel’s appearance to say, “Hey, at least we developed a rad creature!” But, alas, Rusnak might show even less of Daniel. When he does appear in the basement, or leap out of a trash can in the film’s climactic finale, it’s CG augmentation that distorts a puppet reportedly crafted by SFX superstar Tony Gardner. Cohen accomplishes infinitely more by putting his then-girlfriend Elaine Parkyn in a full-head monster mask, a pair of pointed gloves, and a partial body suit that benefit from optical tricks—because practical always wins.
The Lesson
It’s not hard to wonder why Millennium Films lost faith in Rusnak’s It’s Alive and opted for no theatrical release. In a time when horror remakes were all the rage, Millennium buried It’s Alive so deep that it’s not even watchable or rentable on streaming (ain’t even worth Tubi). No hyperbole, this remake stinks with the stinkiest of ’em. It’s slight on innovation, filled with awful genre generics, and is a slap in the face to what Cohen accomplished. There’s something so fresh about a killer baby flick that focuses on the suit-and-tie-wearing father, who is forced to challenge the stern, macho gender roles of the 70s, and something so disappointing about a 2000s horror movie that falls right back into outdated mindsets.
So what did we learn?
- Yes, for the hundredth time, some of those 2000s horror remakes are as bad as the haters made them all out to be.
- Ex-David Lee Roth, Ozzy Osbourne, and Alice Cooper bassist Todd Jensen plays Lenore’s doctor for some reason (which I wouldn’t have known without the internet).
- You can appreciate a remake for trying something different, but you can also detest a remake for how poorly it does something different.
- Why does Daniel look like a baby shark (doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo)?
Watching both It’s Alive flicks back-to-back gave me whiplash. When John P. Ryan (as Frank) confronts his cowering, terrified child-monster in the bowels of Los Angeles, I nearly shed a tear. That whole scene really, as Ryan realizes he’s become the Dr. Frankenstein of sorts, and his miserable, deformed boy craves his father’s affection in a time of need. Then you have Rusnak’s film, which brutally kills the pro-abortion character, insinuates Lenore is being punished for trying to abort Daniel early in the pregnancy, and deserves to die with her demon spawn engulfed by the worst CG flames this side of Birdemic: Shock and Terror. I just … kudos to Cohen for richly developing a sci-fi curio with a tremendous sense of emotional understanding, and nothing but thumbs down for Rusnak’s remake, which comes off as plenty boneheaded and hella halfhearted in the process.
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