Interviews
[Interview] ‘Feed the Light’ Director Henrik Möller on the Influence of Lovecraft
Intervision Picture Corp. has summoned unspeakable horror from worlds beyond our own with the first ever release of Henrik Möller’s artful, award-winning exploration of Lovecraftian terror – Feed the Light.
Following a string of successful festival screenings, this underground Scandinavian riff on “The Color Out of Space” has arrived on Blu-Ray and DVD so a wider audience can finally be summoned to do its bidding. From producer/director/co-writer Henrik Möller comes a new landmark in underground Swedish horror, inspired by equal parts H.P. Lovecraft, David Lynch, and something far more disturbing:
“When her daughter is abducted by her ex-husband, a young mother will track the missing child and its father to a mysterious institution. But once inside, she will find herself trapped in a hallucinatory netherworld where reality turns amorphous, survival becomes parasitic, and an infested darkness lives – and feeds – in the light.”
Bloody Disgusting caught up with Möller to discuss this modern classic.
“I have always wanted to make a Lovecraftian film,” Möller told us in this exclusive interview. “The Color Out of Space is a film with a cosmic sensibility. The great unknown that brushes up against us and is never fully comprehended. My co-writer Martin Jirhamn and I rounded up the stories that had ingredients that we liked and could be translated to a film with a budget of 14 000 dollars. The Color Out of Space is one of his scariest because it doesn’t have tentacles och claws. It’s more like a virus or radioactive substance. We never fully learn its purpose here on earth and that makes your imagination kick into high gear. I remember The Festival and From Beyond where other stories we discussed. But eventually, we went beyond, updated it to the present time and created our own little universe with characters and detailed backstories that never had time to be explored in the finished film.”
Die-hard Lovecraft fans are an extremely passionate bunch, Möller discusses the pressure to satisfy them:
“Well, we never told anyone about the Lovecraft influence until I went over to the Lovecraft festival and thoughtlessly spilled the beans,” he explained. “I don’t think people looking at the posters will expect a faithful adaptation. But hopefully they will like it because the film has many Lovecraftian elements in it: The disturbing idea that there is an unknown world lurking just behind the invisible veil that is our reality that slowly begins to unfold before us, an unnameable entity that affects the environment in strange unhealthy ways, people worshipping the entity with high hopes of enlightenment, the finding of a book (in this case a pad) that contains information about the horror, obsession, insanity and some people don’t simply die but meet ends worse than death…”
While the film has a unique look having been shot in color with a few pops of color results in bold, striking imagery, Möller explains why it was dialed back:
“To make a long story short, due to budgetary constraints we didn’t have equipment good enough to produce the look we originally wanted,” he reveals. “So, we opted for the black and white grainy look that would emphasize the dirty concrete tunnels of the underground world we would descend into. The look of the three floors came from watching black and white TV as a child. Sometimes it could be slightly tinted blue and sometimes slightly green depending on the TV and the antennas reception. That way you couldn’t always remember if you had seen it on a color TV and your memory of it became like a distant dream.”
Aside from the obvious Lovecraft influence, he talks about some of his other inspirations.
“There were tons of literary and visual influences that gelled,” added Möller, who confirmed David Lynch and David Cronenberg were among his inspirations. “Any filmmaker with the aspirations to create a good horror film should look at the work of David Lynch. He was one of the early pioneers in using advanced sound design to create an uncanny feeling. Cronenberg is a master screenwriter of original and disturbing ideas. These two directors know that the unknown can be terrifying but that it also breeds mystery that intrigues us.”
Given the positive response Feed the Light‘ has received, Möllerd has considered going back to the Lovecraft.
“I certainly would but I would leave the literary adaptations alone,” he explained. “Although I firmly believe in updating Lovecraft, it would be fantastic to make a period piece set in Dunwich or Kingsport. Lovecraft himself encouraged others to use his creations in their own work and to add to and expand upon it. I think that is the best way to go.”
The Feed the Light Blu-ray can be purchased on Amazon or through other retailers.
Interviews
‘Rubberhead’ Director Nick Taylor on FX Maverick Steve Johnson, Practical Effects, and Seven-Year Journey
Horror journalist, producer, and podcast host Nick Taylor moves into the director’s seat for his feature debut with illuminating documentary Rubberhead: The Life & Monsters of Steve Johnson.
It chronicles the wild life and career of SFX maverick Steve Johnson, based on the multi-volume book series Rubberhead: Sex, Drugs and Special FX, and those familiar likely already know Rubberhead isn’t your standard horror documentary.
Johnson is responsible for so many memorable movie monsters, having worked on Fright Night, Poltergeist II, An American Werewolf in London, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master and Night of the Demons, to name a few. He’s also extremely candid in ways that feel atypical in this industry, open about his failures as much as his successes.
“It was a natural progression for sure,” Nick Taylor tells Bloody Disgusting of his transition into filmmaking ahead of Rubberhead‘s world premiere next week at the Fantasia Film Festival on July 23. “I think with my podcast, I got adept at interviewing people and pulling creative lessons out of them, which was the point of my podcast. I wanted this movie to be sort of a creativity pill for artists where if they’re starting a project or feel creatively stuck, they could watch this movie and be inspired and get actual practical creative lessons.”
Taylor’s background in PR and marketing also organically led him down this path.
He charts the course from book promo to documentary director: “But also Bloody Disgusting had a lot to do with this movie because in the very beginning when I first met Steve, I was helping him promote his book and I said, ‘Hey, I got a marketing background and a journalism background. Let me help you promote this book. I’ll just pitch stories from your life to the media, and we’ll see what happens.’ And John Squires wrote an article about Steve making Slimer under the influence of tons and tons of cocaine, and that went fairly viral.”
“For a week, it was story time with Steve,” Taylor continues. “He would tell me a story from his life, and every story was about a major movie, a major director, lots of drugs and alcohol and insanity. I would write them up, and I think John published about three or four of them. So huge shout out to John Squires because that was really great. So yeah, there were definitely a lot of outgrowths of my journalism background that definitely contributed to this movie.”
Rubberhead condenses the multi-book series into a cohesive feature film with a breezy runtime, sparking the obvious question as to how Taylor approached condensing Johnson’s life down to an under 2-hour documentary film.
“That was one of the more difficult parts of all of this, because we had enough for a series or an epically long six-hour fan documentary,” he answers. “But from day one, I did not want to make a fan documentary. I love them. They’re a lot of fun, but I did want the movie to stand on its own two feet as a character-driven portrait of an artist and a time period and a technology, that being practical effects. I did want to be objective. I didn’t want to make this too long. I wanted to make it re-watchable. So I think we just really had to focus on what the narratives were that we wanted to tell. So there were some basically almost cliché archetypical mythic narratives present in Steve’s life. We could have made this way longer, but we wanted to keep it short. But luckily that’s why you have special features.”
Johnson quickly proves to be an engaging subject thanks to his self-effacing wit and frank self-reflections; expect no shortage of stories about how drugs factored into the height of his career or the failures it wrought.
That rare quality was an asset for Rubberhead, Taylor confirms. “He does not shy away from anything about the drugs, the addiction, the bridges burned, the mistakes made, the lessons learned. He just is honest about all of it. He’s had a lot of time for reflection, and he’s done a lot of reflection, so he doesn’t shy away from any of it, which is huge because it’s very refreshing. I don’t think a lot of people are that way, at least in this industry from what I can see. So I think it was hugely beneficial. We wanted to lean into that, and we wanted to make this sort of a gonzo Hunter S. Thompson sort of wild tale through Steve’s overall life.“
Condensing his life into this doc was a slow and steady process for Taylor, too. “It’s been almost seven years. It’s been a labor of love. We’ve been as indie as it gets. We would shoot what we could when we could, and then we would edit when we could. Then after a while it all came together.”
In a way, making Rubberhead brings Taylor’s horror fandom full circle. It turns out that the very film that sparked his interest in the genre and practical effects also comes with an amusing Steve Johnson anecdote.
Taylor explains, “My gateway for sure was Beetlejuice. I saw that at a very young age; I think I was four or five. I felt somebody had shown me, my soul. I get a little emotional thinking about it. There was something about that movie that felt so strange and unusual, but also felt so familiar. It was spooky, but it was fun, and it was lighthearted, and it had humor, but it also had this macabre celebration to it that I just really got into as a kid. I felt somebody had shown me my own soul. And funny story, Steve got fired from Beetlejuice because Tim Burton gave him his hand-drawn designs and Steve’s like, ‘Oh my God, these look like kids did them. This is not what you want. I know what you want. I’m going to redesign these for you.’ And Tim Burton was like, ‘Yeah, no, you’re not.’ So yeah, funny story.”
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