Interviews
David Cronenberg Talks “Slasher: Flesh & Blood” and His Pivotal Character [Interview]
“Slasher: Flesh & Blood,” the eight-episode fourth season of the horror anthology series, will unleash a brand new carnage-filled murder mystery starting this week on Shudder. Series creator Aaron Martin and showrunner Ian Carpenter have assembled a cast of new and familiar faces under the direction of Adam MacDonald (Pyewacket, Slasher: Solstice). Among those new faces is none other than horror master David Cronenberg.
Flesh & Blood centers around the dysfunctional, wealthy Galloway family gathering for a reunion on a secluded island. Bad blood and tension already exist among them, mainly when their competitive nature gets triggered. But then a masked killer begins to pick them off in gruesome ways, one by one. Cronenberg plays the Galloway patriarch, Spencer, a practical-minded businessman to the point of callousness.
How does one entice Cronenberg to be a part of a series with a reputation for fun, creatively brutal kills? It turns out, you ask and offer him a meaty role he can’t refuse. Martin and Carpenter approached him, asking if he’d play the part of the family patriarch. “As an actor, I’m always flattered when somebody is actually interested in working with me, so I read the script. I read the first episode, and I thought, yeah, I really want to do this. We did a FaceTime- Ian, Adam, and I- and we just had a quick chat. I said, ‘Look, this is a major character. He’s a pivotal character in the whole thing and a very powerful character. If you think that I could play that, given that you’ve seen stuff that I’ve done before, then I’m happy to give it a go because it’s a challenge.'”
Cronenberg is no stranger to acting in horror, but Spencer Galloway offers a part outside of the norm for the filmmaker. He explains what drew him to Spencer, “It’s not the usual scientist or a doctor that I end up playing, but rather a very passionate, powerful, difficult character who is a patriarch of a family and very demanding and critical of his children. I get to yell, I get to be angry, and things that, as an actor, I don’t often get to do, if ever. So, I was excited, and also, he’s major, major character.”
From Spencer’s very first introduction, it’s clear that much of the Galloways’ dysfunction stems from the top. Cronenberg doesn’t view him as a villainous character, though. “Naturally he doesn’t think he’s an evil or a bad guy. Yes, he’s being demanding of his children, but it’s for their own good. He feels that they have potential that perhaps they’re not living up to, so he thinks he’s helping them. And I think a lot of tyrants, both political and personal, would be surprised to hear people say that you’re evil or at least a bad person or a negative kind of presence in people’s lives. He thinks he’s a positive presence.”
As abrasive as Spencer’s introduction may be, there’s more than meets the eye to the character. We can expect to see how this pivotal character factors into the overarching murder mystery throughout the season. We can also expect that journey to get downright violent.
“Slasher: Flesh & Blood” will stream exclusively on the horror platform Shudder in the US, Australia, and New Zealand on August 12, with two episodes debuting on that day.
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.”
You must be logged in to post a comment.