Interviews
[Interview] ‘My Dead Ones’ Director Diego Freitas on His Serial Killer Horror Film
Released by TMA Releasing this Halloween is the Brazilian horror-mystery My Dead Ones, in which a shy film student (Nicolas Prattes) hides an obscure past that is about to be revealed.
“David, a shy film student, loves filming people around him. He takes notice of an old and neglected lady living alone in the next building who he decides to film before putting her out of her misery. Waking up in his bed the morning after, David finds the woman cooking breakfast. She is alive and looking healthy. As David questions Maria’s presence, he will find out that Maria has a sinister mission for him.
“David will kill and share his love for killing all through the lens of his camera and the help of the darknet.”
Bloody Disgusting caught up with director Diego Freitas to chat about My Dead Ones, inspired by the many serial killer films and how they tormented their victims.
“The first idea came from an observation of the serial killer films, and how they were often tormented by their victims. So I thought: what if the spirits showed up to say ‘thank you’ and to take care of their killer? From that point and relationship, I created this serial killer story, a monster born from the consequences of his childhood.”
He continues: “My idea was to show only the protagonist’s point of view where we would not differentiate what was real from what was not. In this way, we can penetrate deeply into the secrets of a troubled mind. In addition, I wanted the script to be universal, not locating the story in a specific place – lost in time and space – just like David’s head.”
Freitas tells us the film’s biggest influences, which range from It Follows to Psycho.
“My Dead Ones has a lot of different film references, not just horror movies,” he explains. “I was very inspired by It Follows, mainly for its aesthetics. I also remember being inspired by Shutter Island, in that crazy relationship and all the flashbacks. Black Swan was very important to me at the time, and it was the first film I watched together with Nicolas Prattes, the main actor. Thanks to that film, I could show him the psychological aspect of the characters. Psycho and Nightcrawler were next. We also paid a great tribute to the famous Irreversible scene. I think we achieved a different and special kind of film with My Dead Ones.”
Looking up to Darren Aronofsky, Guillermo Del Toro, The Wachowskis, M. Night Shyamalan, Ari Aster, and Fernando Meirelles, Freitas tells us that My Dead Ones was the kind of film he needed to make at the time.
“I think you always write and imagine a movie but when it comes to shoot it and later edit it, the final result is different than what you imagined in the first place,” he explained. “It is a process of transformation, nothing is static, we are in a constant change ourselves as well. It’s part of the game, and probably today I would do it differently, but I think the end result sums up what I was at that specific period of time. It was an important film for me. It showed me the way, and it is a film I believe I needed to do.
Next up for Freitas is more horror.
“I just finished the script for my next film. A supernatural horror from the female point of view.”
My Dead Ones is now out in North America, UK, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, India, and available on iTunes, Google Play, Vimeo and Amazon Direct Video and others.
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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