Interviews
[Interview] Supermassive Games CEO Pete Samuels Talks About ‘Man of Medan’, ‘Until Dawn’, Horror Anthologies, and More
It was a long day on the high seas (well, dockside in Hamburg anyway) for the Man of Medan press event. I’d played through the Man of Medan multiplayer twice in the bowels of a big boat, encountered zombies and a creepy 1940’s hostess in the engine room, and to finish off, I was interviewing Supermassive Games CEO Pete Samuels. In the interview, we discussed Man of Medan, The Dark Pictures, Until Dawn, horror anthologies, mixing sub-genres, and who Shawn Ashmore should be in a biopic so he can win an Oscar.
Bloody Disgusting: Being an anthology series, you have an overarching theme from episode to episode that ties things together, what would that be in The Dark Pictures?
Pete Samuels: It’s not necessarily an overlying theme, but it’s all tied together by the Curator, who is like a Rod Serling or Cryptkeeper type that holds it together.
BD: It’s interesting you mention Rod Serling, because the Curator does bring up a bit of a Twilight Zone vibe in terms of anthologies…
PS: Well, we use it because people are familiar with that, everybody knows it. If someone says ‘name an anthology series’ Twilight Zone is up there, as is Tales From the Crypt.
BD: It’s certainly a good reference point to have. Were there any anthology films that also came to mind?
PS: A few actually! Southbound being one of them! we actually have done a special piece of content before that features a short history of horror anthologies, which featured you guys, among others such as out friends Larry and Graham. We definitely do our research, we go heavy on tropes as everybody knows, we’re not embarrassed about it.
BD: You embrace it if anything, Until Dawn that was the whole thing of it where you are the director and you can play with those tropes to decide how this horror movie will play out, and you’ve definitely expanded on upon that with Man of Medan, it’s already feeling more nuanced, more detail-orientated than before.
PS: I’m glad to hear you got that from it.
BD: Talking with others who had played the demo build today and finding so many different paths and scenes between us was surprising considering the relatively short nature of it. Even in Movie Night mode there were new things to see. That mode is going to cause a few arguments by the way!
PS: (Laughs) We hope so!
BD: So with Until Dawn, you started to build this mini horror franchise (Until Dawn, Rush of Blood, The Inpatient). Did that give you ideas of how to go about The Dark Pictures?
PS: This has always been a different thing for us than Until Dawn, and we know people will look at the similarities more than the differences. From the outset, we wanted to have stories with deeper, more meaningful relationships, and to have people play it together online or in local co-op if they wanted to. Right from that moment, it was very different from what we’d done before.
BD: Until Dawn gained an audience in part through streaming and YouTube videos, did that have any say in how The Dark Pictures was shaped?
PS: I totally understand and appreciate that, but honestly, it hasn’t really influenced our approach to how we designed or wrote the games. We like to think its popularity through that medium because it was well done. I don’t want to misremember history, but back then I’m not sure everyone really got what we were going for with Until Dawn, whereas now people get us more, and it’s common knowledge what we do with tropes is very deliberate.
BD: With Until Dawn you had a very meta take on the slasher genre, there were comparisons to Cabin in the Woods due to the bait and switch. With Man of Medan and the future Dark Pictures titles, are you trying to subvert certain horror sub-genres again?
PS: Absolutely yeah, we’ve got a list of like 38 or so sub-genres we reference, seeing what we can put together in interesting ways, and sometimes you’ll look at them and go ‘what if we put this with this? Or ‘yeah, we can’t do that, that’s not going to work as a video game’.
BD: You can certainly see nods to a few things with Man of Medan, there’s a very Return of the Living Dead bit during the prologue, and the ghost ship angle clearly pulls inspiration from several boat-themed horrors.
PS: Yeah, and a bit of the home invasion genre in there too!
BD: Just a tad, yeah!
So a less serious question here, Rami Malek was in Until Dawn, and won an Oscar later for Bohemian Rhapsody, so for Shawn Ashmore (one of MoM’s stars), who do you think he should play in a biopic to bag himself an Oscar?
PS: [Laughs] I might have to think about that
BD: Okay, final question. Until Dawn had a tough development cycle, starting on PS3 as a Move game before ending up on PS4 years later as a different beast. I’d imagine it was difficult getting it to that point. I assume it’s gone a bit smoother this time around? Perhaps had a clearer vision of what you wanted to achieve from the start?
PS: The vision for The Dark Pictures hasn’t changed from the start. We had a very clear, very solid view of what it is we’re trying to make, so much so that the next four games in the series are already in some stage of development (The Dark Pictures is set to have eight entries) and the following three have log lines and we know what they’re gonna be.
BD: So definitely much clearer! Well I think that’s the end of my questions now…
PS: Who would you have Shawn Ashmore play?
BD: The name escapes me, I remember someone suggested a UFC fighter, but the name I’m thinking of has escaped me.
PS: Why not have him play Rami Malek?
BD: Shawn Ashmore winning an Oscar for playing Rami Malek in the story of how he got an Oscar for playing Freddie Mercury?
PS: [Laughs] Yeah, why not!
BD: Oh, the one I was thinking of was to have him in a biopic for people he gets mistaken for, like Dominic Monoghan…
PS: Or his brother! (Aaron Ashmore is Shawn’s twin who has starred in Smallville and the horror Fear Island)
BD: That’d probably be perfect.
Doubly so because Rami Malek also has a twin.
Man of Medan is out on August 30 for PS4, Xbox One, and PC.
Eli Roth is a formative name in the “Splat Pack” of ultraviolent filmmakers who first came to fame during the 2000s.
Roth’s Cabin Fever was a great statement piece, but he’s managed to continually top himself with gory gems like Hostel, The Green Inferno, and Thanksgiving. Roth has always been a filmmaker who strives to push boundaries and embrace a passion for genre cinema.
His latest movie, Ice Cream Man, is a project that’s been 20 years in the making. It’s a twisted take on the Pied Piper parable that’s arguably the most gruesome film from Roth’s career and an exciting turning point.
To celebrate the gory film’s summer release, Eli Roth opens up about the luxury of shooting a horror film with hundreds of enthusiastic kids, bypassing the MPAA to deliver the most outrageous kills of his career, and why he intentionally avoided Weapons before filming.
BLOODY DISGUSTING: You’ve described Ice Cream Man as “The Birds but with children” and cited Who Can Kill a Child? as a reference point. Were there other “killer kid” movies that you’re pulling from for inspiration like Children of the Corn, the French film Them, or even Weapons?
ELI ROTH: Well, Weapons I purposely didn’t watch until after I was done with my cut because I had people on the crew that went to see it because I wanted to make sure that there was no crossover. I didn’t watch it until after I was done with the film, but The Children from 1980 was a big influence. That trailer scared me as a kid, watching the kids on the bus go through the gas and then turn into killer kids. When the girl killed her mom in the original Night of the Living Dead was a big reference point. But definitely The Birds, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but also other movies like Bad News Bears and those early Amblin movies. Those coming-of-age films. There’s also a lot of references to Bird with the Crystal Plumage in there, too. It’s kind of a Pied Piper story, so that was really the starting point for it.
There must have been serious hurdles to not just filming a movie that involves so many children, but also in terms of its rating and censorship. Was there anything you shot that had to be cut or toned down?
ER: The whole reason I started The Horror Section was to completely bypass that system and go directly to the theaters. Now that Terrifier 3 kicked the door open for the rest of us and you can have an unrated movie go out in 2000 theaters, you know that fans want to go see those movies in theaters. Before, you could never release an unrated movie like this, but now after what Damien Leone did, you can. So I set up an independent studio, I went right to the theaters, I’m self-releasing it, and I didn’t even deal with the MPAA. I just made the movie the way I wanted to make it. We shot it, cut it, and we’re putting it out in the theaters raw and unfiltered.
Every movie I’ve ever made, at some point someone has said, “You have to take this out, or we’re not releasing the movie.” I just didn’t want to deal with that anymore. I’m just tired of it. I think they’re wrong. I think Terrifier 3 proved that they are all strong. In the past, I’ve been like, “I shouldn’t have taken that out. I shouldn’t have cut that down,” but you’re dealing with a corporation in a studio. That’s what they do. They’re so afraid, and it’s an abstract argument. There’s no proof that they’re right or that you’re right, but that’s where I know great horror lives. It’s got that bit of danger to it. You go, “You’re not supposed to do that,” “Should I be watching this?”
Even Evil Dead II, Faces of Death, or whatever it was when you get a tape. Whenever you’re going, “I shouldn’t watch this,” it becomes the most exciting kind of horror. Even The Ring. It’s got to be great. It’s got to be original. There has to be an incredible story that people have never seen before, but I faced no issues whatsoever other than my own budget. The whole purpose of starting my own studio is that I could take an idea like Ice Cream Man, that I’ve always wanted to do and that everyone told me I couldn’t, and just go for it.
On that note, there are so many amazing kills in this movie. What’s your favorite and which was the most challenging to pull off?
ER: There are a few, yeah. My original idea was the mother waking up and seeing her daughter just standing over her; she picks up a hacksaw and just cuts her head off. The dad wakes up, looks over, and the daughter is just smiling and cutting the head off and like, “Hi, Daddy.” Then the kid bashes his face in. So actually doing all that was extremely satisfying. There were a couple other ones that I don’t want to give away that really turned out great. I was just really lucky. I sat down with Steve Newburn at Applied Arts FX Studio. They’re incredible. I told them, “I want to do more kills. I want to basically beat every kill I’ve ever done and do more kills in this movie than all my other movies combined.” Adrian Moreau was incredibly genius. We did Thanksgiving together, and she did some very specific effects for me on this one. She won the Oscar for The Whale, so we had an incredibly talented team and just went for it. The kids in the movie, their parents are all horror movie fans, so we talked to them about everything.
Once you put the kids in the gore and in the makeup, they go right into it. They get it. They understand that this is like Halloween and pretend. There’s the bit where they’re pulling apart a body — they call it a “taffy pull” — we did this fake trailer, “The Piano Killer,” with Hailey Kittle. I also worked with her in Trick VR Treat, and she was in Thanksgiving. I said, “I’m going to drop a piano on you,” so we had her fake body and thought, “Let’s kill Hailey, and then we can use the body from “The Piano Killer” and pull it apart in Ice Cream Man. I recycled the same body parts.
It was unreal doing it all with the kids, though. You can’t believe what you’re watching, and the kids were having a great time. It was Christmas morning for them. Justin Harding, who was my Second Unit Director, his son Bowen is a baseball player. So it made sense to give Bowen the axe so that he could really give a good swing to cut Hailey in half. He is so good and so athletic, so he could really go for it. He’s just gleefully swinging the bat, and we’re just on the ground pumping blood at him. The kids were just laughing and having the time of their lives.
The main actors are so good, too. I really didn’t want “kid acting.” I wanted the same acting as when you’re watching Stranger Things or the ’70s Bad News Bears. These kids are real kids, and I didn’t want it to feel like movie dialogue. I wanted the kids to swear and talk the way that real 12-year-olds talk to each other and the way that bullies talked to me in the ’80s. I verified it with all the kids to know that this is exactly what the bullying in schools sounds like. This is how they’d talk and what they say when the adults, parents, and teachers aren’t around. I wanted it to feel naturalistic, and like you’ve just been dropped into this small town that has all this drama. Then you’re just with these kids, trying to survive this “kidpocalypse,” and trying to figure out why this is happening and how to get out of it.
I’m a huge fan of the Clint Howard Ice Cream Man from 1995. There’s also a great Tales from the Crypt episode with Bill Pullman and Brad Dourif that plays in this space. Why do you think there’s this ongoing connection between ice cream men and horror?
ER: It’s interesting; I’ve never seen the Clint Howard film. I’m certainly aware of it. But this all came about from just watching this ice cream man handing out ice cream. It was during the Cabin Fever press tour in 2003. I was just watching this ice cream man and thinking, “We just trust them.” It could be a serial killer, you know? What if they just rolled into town and poisoned the kids? I thought that might be too fucked up, but then I thought of it as if it’s the Pied Piper. There’s something with the music. Kids just want to run out into the street and buy ice cream when they hear that ice cream man music. It’s such deep programming. So what if that was used to turn the kids against their parents?
Having a new daughter myself — having a baby — all you want to do is protect them. And you know that no matter what you do, you can’t. The outside world is going to get to them somehow. You can prepare them, but you can’t fully protect them. Some evil force will get into their head, and so what if that was turned against you? This thing that you loved and put everything into now wants to kill you. It’s the most horrible thought as a parent. After 20 years, it was kind of great to go in and re-approach it from that direction.
But I think ice cream men just have this inherent trust behind them. You see them, and you trust them. They come into the neighborhood, feed the kids, and then they leave, and you have no idea who they really were. Sure, they were an ice cream man, but what were they like? They were wearing a white hat, and they drove an ice cream truck, but anyone can do that. It was such a perverse, sick thought. Like, “What if you turn Thanksgiving into something awful?”, “What if backpacking in Europe became a nightmare?”
That’s where great horror lives. It’s when you take something that’s seemingly innocent and then make it dark. “What if the kids are playing jump rope, but then they get turned, and they’re playing jump rope with guts?” At the beginning of the film, they’re playing “Pin the Tail on the Donkey,” but then it’s “Pin the Knife in the Teacher.” Or you’re playing little league baseball, but now you’re bashing your dad’s head in with the bat. It’s taking all the fun, innocent things from childhood and then twisting them with a horror spin.
Ice Cream Man is in theaters on August 7.
You must be logged in to post a comment.