Interviews
‘Cobweb’ – Director Samuel Bodin and Star Woody Norman Take You Inside Their Horror Fairy Tale [Interview]
Note: This Cobweb interview was conducted prior to the current SAG-AFTRA strike.
Samuel Bodin, the creator of Netflix horror series “Marianne,” returns to the genre with Lionsgate’s horror movie Cobweb, releasing in theaters on July 21.
Cobweb, written by Chris Thomas Devlin, follows eight-year-old Peter (Woody Norman, The Last Voyage of the Demeter) as mysterious tappings from within his bedroom walls lead him to suspect his parents (Lizzy Caplan and Antony Starr) are hiding a terrible secret.
Ahead of the film’s release, Bloody Disgusting spoke with both Samuel Bodin and Woody Norman about their gateway horror fairy tale and the scares you’ll find nestled within.
Much like “Marianne,” Bodin injects Cobweb with a fairy tale quality, well-suited for the scary bedtime story-like nightmares its young protagonist endures. While the similarities end there between “Marianne” and Cobweb, it does highlight Bodin’s affinity for building backstories.
The filmmaker explains his approach, “I always try to attack a story as the story demands. But to be honest, I love to build a little universe, so it’s my way to do it. I take the story, and I say, ‘Okay. It’s not grounded in reality; it’s in that little universe. It’s that little house, that little town for Marianne.’ So, to be honest, it’s the same way. How I can create my little Cobweb universe and tell the story inside that, and for ‘Marianne,’ I did the same. Where is that witch? It’s that town, with that all. So, I built the universe around it, but it’s like Springfield for the Simpsons. It’s our place with our story, and I love that feeling, especially for a scary story. It’s my way to open the door. To jump in the story in a way.”
In other words, Bodin found a vastly different type of horror in Cobweb, despite the fairy tale leanings. The filmmaker worked closely with screenwriter Devlin on Cobweb‘s particular style of scares. Bodin explains, “It was different because for ‘Marianne’ and my other projects, usually, I am the writer or the co-writer of it. It was the first time I dove into the script of someone else. You have your overall feeling on how you want to bring people with you and scare people. But here, there was a journey more psychological. So, I really followed Chris [Thomas Devlin]. We were, both of us, swimming in that story. So, it was step-by-step, sequence by sequence, and we know where we want it to be.
“We didn’t want to have a lot of blood in it. We wanted to be only in a fairytale way, like a bad or a weird Halloween joke. So, we don’t need so much blood; it’s more colorful and weird than bloody. It was an experience with the producers, Chris and me. Because ‘Marianne’ is a little bit more bloody and weird. I love the fact that we can say, during the shoot, that it’s a horror movie for kids. I love that contradiction.”
As for Woody Norman, Cobweb marks the actor’s first-ever role in horror, though you can expect to see him again later this summer in The Last Voyage of the Demeter. It’s a hell of an introduction to the genre; Norman leads the film as a tender-hearted boy constantly torn between whether his parents love him or whether they mean him harm.
The young actor explains how he handled the balancing act: “I think the way I did it was I let myself almost find out as Peter was finding out, by stopping myself from thinking about it. So, in the beginning, I made sure I only thought about the parent characters as parent characters. But when I was doing maybe a scene of complete distrust, I wouldn’t think of the parent characters as parents. I’d think of them as villains, just to stop myself from humanizing them in a way and make me more scared of them as well.”
Cobweb isn’t just a gateway horror film for audiences, but its star too. Norman shares how his experience made him more comfortable in horror.
“There’s a bit where I had to get a harness and get thrown across a hallway. That was really fun,” Norman recalls. “I think my main takeaway is that Cobweb was the job that got me okay with screaming on set. Because before, I was really nervous about it. Sam will remember it took a few takes for me to get comfortable doing it. But now, I’m cool with it. I was having a good time with it. Because filming, for me, is what I love doing most. Making people scared is pretty fun as well. So, putting them two together really makes it a good time.”
While Bodin referred to Cobweb as a horror movie for kids, he injects notable references for the horror kid at heart. One horror master, in particular, significantly influenced Bodin for his Halloween-set feature. “John Carpenter, obviously,” he explains. “I am French, so I don’t have the same relationship with Halloween as the US. It was always a dream or a fantasy in my head, ‘Oh, one day maybe I will do a Halloween story,’ and suddenly Cobweb is here. I connect with and reference a lot of John Carpenter’s Halloween. For me, it’s one of the greatest movies of all time. Each time I see a pumpkin, I think about Haddonfield, or that house, and that pumpkin in the opening credits.
“So, Halloween is totally in reference here. I know that Tim Burton was a reference, too, because he helped us in a way to not be in reality. So, Easter eggs, there are a lot of them. You try not to do it because if you listen to yourself, you put only references everywhere. But definitely, if there is only one, it’s Halloween from John Carpenter; it’s obvious, but it’s here.”
Cobweb releases only in theaters on July 21, 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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