Interviews
“Gremlins: Secrets of the Mogwai” – Showrunner Tze Chun on Joe Dante’s Advice and Staying True to the ‘Gremlins’ Brand [Interview]
The upcoming “Gremlins: Secrets of the Mogwai” (read my review) puts an animated spin on the popular horror-comedy franchise, packed with unexpected folklore and mythology, and it’s coming to Max on May 23, 2023.
The half-hour animated series from WB Animation and Amblin TV is set in 1920s Shanghai and tells how 10-year-old Sam Wing (voiced by Izaac Wang) met the young Mogwai called Gizmo (AJ Locascio). Sam Wing, the youngest in the family, accepts the dangerous task of taking Gizmo home and embarks on a journey through the Chinese countryside. Sam and Gizmo are joined by a teenage street thief named Elle (Gabrielle Nevaeh), and together, they encounter—and sometimes battle—colorful monsters and spirits from Chinese folklore. Along their quest, they are pursued by a power-hungry industrialist and his growing army of evil Gremlins.
The prequel series was created by showrunner/executive producer Tze Chun and executive produced by Brendan Hay, who spoke with Bloody Disgusting about expanding the world of Mogwai and the advice that consulting producer/original Gremlins director Joe Dante gave in the process.
When asked what kind of input or advice Dante gave them for Gizmo and the gremlins, Chun explained, “He had read a couple of the scripts, and it was amazing. He came into the Warner Brothers Ranch, and afterward, he said, ‘I’m going to go take a walk down memory lane,’ because I think the exterior of Billy’s house is at the Warner’s Ranch. So it was amazing that he has this long history at the studio where we were making the show.
“It was incredible to get his blessing, but he has incredible stories about shooting the original Gremlins, how janky the Gizmo puppet was, and how hard it was to deal with. But the thing that he told us that was most helpful, and we certainly passed it along to all the board artists and directors in the writers’ room, was people love Gizmo because he is just a little baby. He’s like an adorable little baby. If it’s boiled down to that, it was a great place to look for humor and to make him lovable.”
Hay added, “And his one kind of comedy suggestion on Gremlins was that you can never go wrong by having a Gremlin try to act like a human, which is also true. His only other guideline was, don’t do puppets. Because he just kept us telling us all the puppet horror stories. That was Joe’s enthusiasm, like, ‘You guys are going to be in such better shape.’ He would just tell us, ‘We couldn’t show them walking. We couldn’t show them doing this. We couldn’t have Gizmo touch his face,’ all those things.”
Despite Dante’s horror stories, Chun does confirm this series was always intended to be animated.
He shares, “I was newer to animation. Brendan has worked for many years in animation. As we started talking about the show, I think we all knew what we wanted: to be able to move the camera in a really cinematic way. Things like Raiders of the Lost Ark, the opening of Goonies, and obviously Gremlins, the camera moves in such a, there’s no way to describe it except an Amblin-esque manner. And so we developed a process where the characters were CG and the backgrounds were more 2D, or it was textures draped on top of architecture. We also knew that we wanted a painterly quality to it. Something that we talked about a lot in the room were things like Spirited Away. Even on the textures of the characters, but especially the backgrounds, making sure that it felt organic. And painterly.”
“Our supervising producer, Dan Krall, had a cool idea as we started talking about that, still wanting that handmade quality that the original Gremlins has because of the puppets, anything like that. He had a cool idea of trying to emulate the look of an art of book, not of a finished CG film. That also became a guiding principle for us,” Hay adds.
The series captures the same tone and spirit of Joe Dante’s films, with that strange balance of irreverent humor and darker horror. Chun, Hay, and the writing team were conscientious about that in their approach, as they explained in our conversation.
“I think that one of the things that Brendan and I and all the writers spoke about a lot in the writers’ room was the tone of the original Gremlins movies is so unique,” Chun explained. “I mean, I certainly had never seen a movie that was funny but also scary and so weird and so idiosyncratic. It actually marries really well with Chinese mythology, and creatures and spirits and monsters from Chinese mythology because they’re also very weird, but also very funny, but also incredibly scary. It’s something we definitely talked about a lot, about how the humor makes it easier to do things that are scarier, that you can actually push it further because you can always then adjust the dial and say, ‘Okay, but then there’s this really funny gag, but also it’s really scary.’ That back and forth was something that we were always trying to tease out in the writers’ room.”
Hay shares how they were given the freedom to explore that. The executive producer explains, “That was also another place where thankfully, Amblin, Warner Brothers, and Joe Dante all had our back. We’d be like, ‘Well, this may be something of a darker or more violent or gory moment.’ They’re like, ‘No, no, just do that. Go in that direction.’ We always had their encouragement.”
Chun continues, “I think at every stage of the show and the creative process, we want to make sure that it appealed to fans of the original Gremlins movies but also brought in new fans. So, part of that is if you’ve seen the original Gremlins movies, you think, ‘Okay. Well, there’s the unique weirdo Gremlins that end up rising to the surface visually.’ We knew we wanted to do that, and we just pitched out a bunch of funny names for them, like Noggin and Gap Tooth. And who else do we have? Claw. We knew that we wanted to do a lady Gremlin in the first season that was iconic and our big bad.”
Hay likens the writers’ room for this animated series to the “Key & Peele” sketch “Gremlins 2 Brainstorm.” For those unfamiliar, check out the video below.
“I think our writers’ room at some point was like the Key & Peele sketch where it was trying to go through, ‘What do you want in the show? Okay, it’s in.’ But I remember at one point, one of our writers, Peter Chen, went off and researched 1920s Shanghai. It was basically filling a whiteboard with what are all the things that need to be funny for Gremlins to interact with or could inspire a specific type of Gremlin. So he brought the research back to the rest of the room, and then we just started pitching nonstop. Like, ‘Oh, what if we had a Gremlin who did this? What if we had a Gremlin who did that?’ Just because they’re using the technology, locations, and everything across China in that time.”
Chun jokes, “I hope Key and Peele will find out how many times we actually watched the Gremlins 2 sketch in the writers’ room because it was like dozens of times.”
“I think it was also one of the very first things we talked about with Joe Dante, who also loved the sketch, which was so nice to hear,” Hay adds.
“Gremlins: Secrets of the Mogwai” premieres Tuesday, May 23 on Max.
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.