Interviews
[Interview] E.L. Katz On Opening the Ultraviolent “Dream Door” and Letting Pretzel Jack Loose
This past October was one of the most insane months ever for horror. It was so jam-packed that incredible content may have slipped right under your radar. One such piece of horror entertainment was the newest season of “Channel Zero”, “The Dream Door”, which was opened by Cheap Thrills director E.L. Katz.
In the must-see new season, which is available in full on Syfy and VOD, newlyweds Jillian and Tom discover a bizarre door in their basement that unlocks something horrifying – Pretzel Jack. After meeting with writer and producer Nick Antosca, Katz had the chance to read the pilot, which led to his hiring as season director.
“It’s always such a wild series that I knew I would probably respond to the material no matter what it was, and after reading the pilot, which was this insane blend of contemporary ‘Twilight Zone’, domestic drama, and violent slasher thriller, then I was really hellbent on making sure I got the opportunity to do it.”
For those who have yet to see it, “The Dream Door” is insanely bloody and offers astounding practical effects work. Even Katz is surprised as to how violent he was allowed to go, crediting Syfy and “Nick Antosca being a wizard somehow.”
He continued: “The first death in the script is incredibly violent, and I remember reading it going, ‘Sure, on television, we’ll probably only get away with a couple stabs,’ but that’s not how it turned out.” Katz suggests violence against non-human entities may have opened the door (pun not intended) to extraordinary gore. “We might have had more flexibility in other areas because lots of the violence is against non-human creatures that don’t look recognizably human when you mess them up.”
Beyond the blood-soaked mayhem that ensues, there is some insane effects work that Katz harkens back to the 80s.
“We always wanted to have the opportunity to bring something practical to set – I love old-fashioned latex monsters, and animatronic puppets – and this felt like an opportunity to go back to the late 80s, really lean into those kinds of creations.
“Francois Dagenais and his team are really gifted at putting together the huge workload that’s put on their shoulders in a lovely way. You always end up enhancing things in post, and that part of the process has become more and more invisible. But the old school way is always the most fun.”
Speaking of doing things practically, “Dream Door” introduces a horror icon for the ages: Pretzel Jack, played by contortionist Troy James.
“In the short story it wasn’t as fleshed out, and the contortion concept of Pretzel Jack came together in the writer’s room,” Katz reveals. “In many ways, in bringing him to life onscreen, we had to justify why this creature would be moving like that – he would never be contorting to freak people out, he doesn’t even think about scaring people or being menacing. His little performances are only for Jillian, he’s basically still performing for the scared and lonely little girl that he was the protector of a long time ago. But because he was designed in a way that he would be able to do that with his body, when it comes to moving around, or attacking people, his body just has less limitations, so it makes him a more dangerously flexible creature.”
But is Pretzel Jack scary?
“I always loved Pretzel Jack,” Katz told me. “He was never scary to me. He gave me the chance to create a slasher character and a Pixar character all in one.”
In regards to Pretzel Jack, Katz shares how Troy James was cast as the contortionist clown.
“I remember after reading the script just going into YouTube and typing in ‘best contortionist’ – and Troy James came up. Watching his ‘America’s Got Talent’ video made my head explode. I sent the video to Nick [Antosca], and he said that they’d used him for a quick memorable scene in ‘Butcher’s Block’, and that yeah, of course they were thinking about him.”
Digressing a bit, readers may not know, but Katz actually started as a horror journalist and even wrote Adam Wingard’s Home Sick and Pop Skull. He reflects on how he started his career with his longtime friend, who begins shooting Kong vs. Godzilla next week.
“I remember going to my job counselor at my film school, and telling him that I just wanted to work in the horror genre – and he told me that was way too specific, I needed to be much broader in my interests,” he explained. “When I graduated film school, I made the 12 hour drive so I could crash on Adam Wingard’s couch since we’d decided the day before that we were going to work on a movie together – and I remember having a groggy Waffle House breakfast with him, passing out, then getting him to drive me to the local bookstore to get a copy of the newest Fangoria. We skimmed through it and decided that we were gonna make a slasher movie that somehow fused Repo Man, The Rivers Edge, and Fulci-style gore. We’ve been working at this stuff ever since.”
Katz is finding his groove, but before taking on directorial duties with “Channel Zero” he shot the micro-indie Cheap Thrills. He learned a lot on that production.
“I learned how to shoot fast as fuck,” joked Katz. “The reality is, I’ve never worked on a leisurely schedule, so my feature experience was basically the same pace as this show. Like, with this we’re basically moving as fast as I did on Cheap Thrills. You get the chance to do two takes at most sometimes. The first step is preparation – I spent every hour that was available with the DP, Isaac Bauman, another ‘Channel Zero’ MVP, and we attempted to shotlist 6 hours of television. Every day at the end of prep, almost all weekend, we would be building this giant shotlist bible. Then once you’ve completely prepared, you need to be able to adjust very quickly when things change or fall apart….or, if you can see a way to do something better on the fly. I think being reactive is very important to the job – conditions are always changing, so it’s key to have a game plan, but you need to be able to go off book. Some scenes we’d have shotlisted like 15 shots or something, and then you look at the clock and you go, hell, this might just work out better as a weird one. You have to be willing to gamble occasionally too. You don’t always even have time to do things the safe, conventional way, with all of the coverage that you think you need. Sometimes you have to make a crazy choice and just hope it works.
“Beyond that, time is everything. Don’t waste it.”
“Channel Zero: The Dream Door” is available to stream in full now.
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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