Interviews
[SPOILERS] Tate Taylor Explains the Most Disgusting Scene in ‘Ma’
If you’ve seen Ma (read my review), you know all about “that” scene. The scene where Octavia Spencer does that thing, the one probably haven’t seen in a movie before. It’s disturbing and it’s grotesque… and we had to know everything about it.
Bloody-Disgusting sat down with director Tate Taylor and asked where the hell this moment came from, and you don’t want to know anything about it, or if you haven’t seen Ma yet, be warned… MAJOR SPOILERS are about to follow.
In the film, “Ma” has Ben, played by Luke Evans, strapped to her bed. He abused her in high school and he’s been threatening her now, and she always had a thing for him anyway. So although it looks for all the world like she’s going to castrate him, it’s a surprise when – instead – she makes a dog’s blood IV and pumps his veins full of it.
“Working with Scotty [Landes], the writer, I was like, I don’t want to just DO something mean. I want it to have meaning behind it, especially with all she does to the kids at the end,” Tate Taylor explained. “And Scotty goes, ‘Well, I know something. I’ve never seen someone put dog’s blood in someone’s body.’ And I go, ‘FUCK YES!'”
It turns out the original draft of Ma didn’t even go so far as the castration idea. “She didn’t even castrate him. She just killed him,” Taylor continued. “And so then I go ‘AND, on top of the dog blood, let’s do a misdirect! Where you think you’re going to cut off [his penis].’ Because that’s seemingly what Ma would do but she’s smart about it. ‘I’m not going to give the pleasure!'”
What, exactly, would pumping someone full of dog’s blood do to them? Tate Taylor knows, actually.
“They tried to do this in the 15th and 16th century. Your body has an allergic reaction to it, as one would of course imagine, and you get sick,” Taylor says. “I mean today you could treat it but that’s why she slits his wrist. It’s just symbolic. I had a line where she was like, ‘Out with the old, in with the new’ but it made it too funny.
What’s odd about the dog’s blood in Ma is that it’s not Ma’s dog, and it’s not Ben’s dog. It’s the dog belonging to Maggie (Diana Silvers) and her mother, Erica (Juliette Lewis), who was also a part of “Ma’s” trauma in high school.
“Because Louie [the dog], in my mind, represented stability for Maggie and her mother. He’s the man of the house. He’s there. I love dogs and I think they’re such a huge part of people’s lives and to use Louie bridges two of the conspirators, if you will, or the complicit person, with one unique thing. This is Maggie’s and Erica’s dog. This hurts Maggie and intimidates her, and it hurts Erica, and I’m just bringing it all full circle,” Taylor adds.
Ma is in theaters 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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