Interviews
‘The Boogeyman’ Actor Chris Messina on Bringing Stephen King’s Short Story to Life [Interview]
The Boogeyman, directed by Rob Savage (Host) with a screenplay by Scott Beck & Bryan Woods (A Quiet Place, 65) and Mark Heyman (Black Swan), draws from Stephen King‘s 1973 short story of the same title.
Stephen King’s short takes place in a psychiatrist’s office and sees Dr. Harper engaged with patient Lester Billings in a haunting session that unpacks the mysterious deaths of Lester’s three children. Feature film The Boogeyman uses the short story as the inciting event that brings the malevolent entity that plagued Billings’ home into Dr. Harper’s.
In the film, Chris Messina (Birds of Prey, Devil) assumes the role of Dr. Will Harper, a psychiatrist struggling to help his family through their collective grief, when Lester Billings (David Dastmalchian) arrives at his home office for aid. This pivotal introductory scene establishes Will Harper, the lore, and its ties to King’s source material.
Ahead of the film’s release, Bloody Disgusting spoke with The Boogeyman star Chris Messina about the juggling act of this early scene and what drew him to the production.
“That was such a super important scene because it’s the short story, and there was a lot of pressure in wanting to get it right,” Messina explains. “I remember thinking doing that scene, well, one, how great David was and how haunted he was. But I wanted it not to be so unbelievable that this guy, me, would let this stranger into his office that was clearly distraught. The only way I could get around that was almost seeing myself in him, seeing grief in him. He’s a therapist, and his job is to help people. The combo of that; I hoped the audience would get behind letting this stranger into his house.”
David Dastmalchian as Lester in 20th Century Studios’ THE BOOGEYMAN. Photo by Patti Perret. © 2023 20th Century Studios. All Rights Reserved.
Messina’s character attempts to shield his daughters from his own grief, which meant the actor had the task of portraying a character who internalizes his emotions.
Messina explains how he prepared, “Rob and I talked about the movie Ordinary People in our first conversation, which is obviously a fantastic film. I watched it again and again, and I read the book. In a way, Will is a combo of all those three characters, the mom, the dad, and Timothy Hutton’s character, in the fact that he’s pushing through it, trying to pretend he’s okay. He’s collapsing at the same time, not being able to move forward. And then, like Timothy Hutton, almost completely stuck. I would take aspects of those three characters and find ways to steal and bring them into this movie.
“It was interesting to play a therapist that is pretty good at his job but wasn’t able to bring that into his own life. I questioned that, but then found from other therapists that they say that’s very common; that we can be good with other people’s problems but not our own.”
The actor shared what about this project drew him in and, when asked if he’s a horror fan, cited a need for humanity in his horror.
“Initially Stephen King, and to be a part of that kind of legacy was a great honor,” Messina stated of his interest in The Boogeyman. “Then, ultimately, Rob saying you can’t have jump scares without the caring of the people, the humanity. Those two things combined felt like this was the right one to try. I like psychological horror. I don’t like a bloodbath. It’s not where I tend to want to go at the end of the day to see, but I appreciate the genre and the craftsmanship in all of that. It’s just as an audience member, as much as I loved Dracula, the Werewolf, and monsters as a kid, I like to know that the characters and their humanity are often what’s in their way.”
The Boogeyman releases in theaters on June 2, 2023.
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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