Interviews
Director Rose Glass On the Horror Influences of ‘Saint Maud’ and Her Cockroach Muse [Interview]
It’s been quite the journey for Rose Glass‘s feature debut. After a highly successful and buzz-worthy festival run, her psychological, religious horror film was scheduled for U.S. release in April last year. Thanks to a pandemic, the release date shifted to July, then the film was pulled from the schedule entirely. Meanwhile, its October 2020 release in the U.K. only built anticipation up further, with Saint Maud (read our review) landing in the number one slot on Letterboxd’s highest-rated horror movies of 2020. Finally, one of 2020’s most talked-about horror movies arrives in limited theaters on January 29, followed by an EPIX release on February 12, 2021.
Saint Maud stars Morfydd Clark in the eponymous role. Maud is a pious nurse assigned to care for a semi-reclusive terminal patient named Amanda Kohl (Jennifer Ehle). Amanda still adores life and all its vices, however, and openly mocks Maud’s devout faith. It triggers a deep fascination in Maud that quickly turns into obsession. As Maud’s obsession spirals, the biggest question becomes whether her profound connection with God is real or imagined.
While Maud’s faith is the driving force of this ambiguous and unsettling horror movie, Glass avoids the usual religious horror tropes in large part because Maud is new to religion and collects bits of it that she likes. When speaking to Bloody Disgusting about her film, Glass shared, “I wasn’t interested in telling the story of a young woman who gets embroiled in a community of religious people. Technically yes, there are Christian building blocks, but she’s essentially created her own. It’s as much about self-care and survival and making sense of the world as about faith, I guess. The more she becomes detached from reality, the more it becomes dangerous.”
To create the atmosphere, Glass did look to other films for some inspiration, “Not too many, to be honest. For sure, in terms of visual language, tone, and style, things like Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby. The Devils by Ken Russell. And also, things like Taxi Driver, but that’s not a horror film.”
More important than the film’s visual language is its pronounced ambiguity, and Glass explains her approach in striking the perfect balance to achieve that, “The relationship between Maud and God is where the whole story originated from. Originally, you heard the voice of God more, and it was a whole fleshed out character, but I became more interested in exploring that through Maud’s perspective. I wanted her relationship with God to be tangible and relatable in a weird sort of way? I know it’s weird, but her faith is not a cerebral, psychological, theological thing. It’s an instinctual, sensual one. So, the idea of her relationship with God taking on a physical sensation made sense to me. I wanted it to appeal to people who believe in God and people who don’t, and that even if you don’t have faith, you can relate to the idea of finding happiness and, by extension, ecstasy in connecting with something bigger than yourself.”
One of the unique ways that God seems to manifest for Maud is in a cockroach that inhabits her apartment. Glass reveals that the cockroach, credited as Nancy, wound up offering serendipitous inspiration. “Nancy’s my hero; she’s my favorite cast member, outside of Morfydd maybe. No, I’m joking! Nancy wasn’t in the original script; all the scenes with her were shot later in pickups. In the main chunk of the shoot, we were filming a scene where Maud and Amanda are chatting in Amanda’s bedroom late at night, taking place early in the film. A couple of days before, I’d had this pretentious last-minute idea to have a moth fluttering around the lamp. So, my line producer said they’d see what they could do. He came back to me and said he’d found an insect wrangler, who said there are no moths this time of year, but they have cockroaches and crickets. Great! Bring her in. I selected Nancy, who was in a box with another cockroach named Sid – it was Sid and Nancy. Anyway, we tried some shots where Jennifer’s talking to Morfydd with Nancy crawling around on a pillow next to her. In the end, it didn’t work. It looked like a half-baked idea, which it was. We ended up cutting Nancy out. But later on, I realized I needed a scene where God kind of appears to Maud later on, and we had to decide what form God would take. I knew exactly who to call.”
See Nancy the cockroach in action when Saint Maud releases on January 29, 2021.
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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