Interviews
How ‘Destroy All Neighbors’ Brings Its Characters to Life Through Comedy and Practical Effects [Interview]
Actors Alex Winter (Freaked, Lost Boys) and Jonah Ray Rodrigues (Satanic Hispanics, Pooka Lives!) face off as new neighbors in Shudder’s splatter-comedy Destroy All Neighbors, and it’s safe to say that the confrontation escalates to a lethal, gory degree.
In Destroy All Neighbors, Rodrigues stars as William Brown, a neurotic, self-absorbed musician easily distracted from his prog-rock ambitions by an apartment building full of eclectic neighbors. That includes the noisy and grotesque Vlad (Winter), who just moved in next door. When an accidental murder ensues, William’s unwitting reign of terror causes victims to pile up and become undead corpses that further derail his journey toward prog-rock Valhalla.
Contracted: Phase II’s Josh Forbes directed Destroy All Neighbors from a screenplay by Charles Pieper and Jared Logan, with story by Pieper and Mike Benner, and the splatter-comedy arrives on Shudder on January 12, 2024.
Ahead of its debut, Bloody Disgusting spoke with director Josh Forbes and stars Alex Winter and Jonah Ray Rodrigues about practical effects and bringing the lively characters to life.
Despite the emphasis on blood splatter and gore, don’t expect a straightforward horror movie. Destroy All Neighbors is a gory comedy with a warm, gooey center. When asked if finding that perfect balance between comedy, gore, and heart evolved during the development process or was there from the start, Josh Forbes explained it’s inherent to his style and tastes.
Forbes elaborates, “I think that’s just my sensibility. That’s just who I am and the stuff that I like. I always joke that it’s like I watch these Ari Aster movies, or, I don’t know, these Robert Eggers movies that are very bleak and smart and criterion-collected, and I’m like, that’s not me. Even with horror, people ask me, ‘Oh, what’s the scariest movie?’ And I’ll watch scary movies, but I watch it for the magic trick of it. Evil Dead II and Dead Alive and Basket Case and all that. That’s my corner of the video store. And to nerd out even more, Frank Henenlotter movies like Basket Case or Frankenhooker or all of those are such ridiculous premises with such goofy, ridiculous gags.
“But at the center of it is people, and heart. It’s like Belial is sad that he was separated from his brother. Or Aylmer, it’s about drug addiction, you know what I mean? I love that juxtaposition of things. I think anything I do is going to have some level of goofiness or heart or sweetness to it, even as hard as I try to be cool. It’s going to come out.”
That the filmmaker cites Henenlotter as an influence couldn’t be more perfect considering the special makeup effects legend behind Aylmer, Belial, and Frankenhooker, Gabe Bartalos, also lent his considerable talents to the undead denizens of Destroy All Neighbors.
“Well, the first writer in the movie, Charlie Pieper, he knew and worked with Gabe,” Forbes said of Bartalos’ involvement. “He had an internship with him or worked with him on some stuff. He brought him up from day one, eight years ago, or whenever we came up with this idea. So, that was always in the back of our heads, but it was definitely a movie that we designed to work with the people that we knew. I had asked Ryan Kattner very early on, ‘Hey, if we ever made this movie, would you want to do the music for it?’ He was like, ‘Oh, yeah.’ So similar to that, we started collecting all the different people that we knew who might be really excited to jump on a project like this. Gabe gets to do a bunch of stuff, but it’s probably not always in his wheelhouse. But this was like, ‘Hey, Gabe, I want the Gabe experience. What would you want to make?’ And he’s like, ‘Oh, really?’ He went hog wild with it.”
Of course, one of the most prominent aspects of Bartalos’ work on the film comes in the form of Vlad, played by an almost unrecognizable Alex Winter under all the prosthetics. Jonah Ray Rodrigues, who also produces the film, explained how the team enlisted the veteran actor for the comedic antagonist role.
“Josh approached me with the movie a while back,” Rodrigues begins. “We were tweaking the script, and we were just thinking about who would be in it and how it could go. And, of course, things like life get in the way, other shows or projects get in the way, and pandemics get in the way. But within that time, and when we first started talking, I was not friends with Alex. Then, I had become friends with Alex, and still, it never occurred to me to ask him to be there. I thought, ‘Am I going to ask the serious documentarian to do this silly movie?’ When Bill and Ted III came out, both Josh and I were like, ‘Whoa, Alex is back in prosthetics doing super big funny comedy stuff.’ So, I asked, ‘Hey man, I don’t know if you’re still doing this kind of stuff, but would you want to try?’ Alex was like, ‘I don’t know, probably not.’ And then, ‘Yeah, I think I’ll do it. Seems fun.'”
Rodrigues jokes, “I think it might have just been a pandemic decision that Alex may regret one day.”
While Winter’s turn as Vlad winds up one of the more raucously funny highlights of the film, it took a little tweaking to ensure the comedy came through.
An amused Forbes shares, “The first time that we shot with Alex in that makeup, the Vlad face was so intimidating. We did a shot, and then I moved on really quickly, and then later Alex was looking at the dailies, and he is like, ‘Hey, dude, we only did one take of that.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, you looked so mad.'”
“Yeah, that’s Vlad’s resting face, yes,” Winter quips.
Winter also walks us through the process of Vlad’s creation and design, “Well, you build a character no matter what you’re doing. You build character if you’re doing totally grounded drama. The fun thing about playing someone who is so unlike you physically is you can do anything you want. So, I just started building this guy in terms of where he was from, how he talked, what his back history was, how did that impact. Those are things that are not so much for the acting as much as they are for the build. It determines does he have tattoos? What kind of body does he have? What kind of hair does he have? How does he walk? How does he talk? Gabe and I started talking about that stuff.”
Winter continues, “We brought him on pretty early on in the prep process, as Josh had known him before. Then I started talking to Bill Corso and even other makeup effects people that I know about what’s doable, not in terms of instructing Gabe. He didn’t need any instruction. He had a whole idea in his mind, and I wanted to follow that. It is a very collaborative thing to do. I’m like, Vlad is part me, part Gabe, part Bill Corso, part Josh. It’s like all this stuff, kind of bolted together. But I definitely had an idea for how I wanted him to be, and largely, that was practical. I think it was something I said to Jonah from the beginning was, ‘You want to build someone that looks like me to an extent in terms of, it can’t be so far for me that I’m just a guy in a paper mache suit because then what’s the point?’
“So we had to build someone that was intimidating in a way but also just fricking nuts so that he would be annoying enough. Jonah is like seven feet tall and I’m like four feet tall. Not really, but sort of. Something that Josh and I had talked about was, ‘Do you put him on risers?’ And Josh said, ‘No, I think it would be just as scary not on risers. Look at Joe Pesci in Goodfellas.’ I think it’s true. I think that’s figuring out a way to make him more like me but with Gabe’s design and Bill’s paint.’
Rodrigues has the tough task of playing a much more grounded character reacting to these larger-than-life undead characters and wild situations. The actor, who comes from a strong comedic background, demonstrates that sometimes it’s the quieter character moments and jokes that induce the biggest laughs.
“Yeah, that’s kind of always been a bit of my wheelhouse,” Rodrigues says of his straight man character type. “I’ve been doing comedy a long time, like sketch and TV and stuff like that. I’ve always really liked playing the straight man, too. I had a show called Hidden America, which was a fake travel show parody thing. But what I liked about it was that I was the roaming straight man of like, oh, I could just facilitate these ideas I have, not necessarily playing the character, but being able to showcase the character. I’m more Carl Reiner to Mel Brooks’ 2000 Year Old Man, where in this, Alex is the 2000-year-old man, and I really like facilitating and feeding that stuff. So it’s been super fun and stuff I’ve done since I started.
“When I did a show with Kumail Nanjiani, it’s like Kumail’s one of the funniest guys in the world. So, just being able to help facilitate him being funny or being the straight man between Tom Servo and Crow T. Robot on MST. It’s something that I’ve always enjoyed within comedy, facilitating the scene as best I can.”
See how Rodrigues and Winter riff off each other when Shudder unleashes Destroy All Neighbors on January 12.
Interviews
Paul Tremblay on Fighting AI with Horror in New Novel ‘Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep’
Paul Tremblay didn’t start his writing career believing he’d be battling machines over the sanctity of his job, but like so many writers of his generation, the battle found him. In the years since Large Language Models (LLMs) and neural networks started gaining traction as an advertised shortcut to creativity, Tremblay has been active in lawsuits to prevent the use of his works in training AI models, and he’s found that, with each new project, he has to consider the possibility that some LLM, somewhere, is going to latch on to what he’s creating.
“Now I feel like I’m thinking about, ‘Man, how am I going to write things that would be really hard or impossible for an AI to replicate?’,” Tremblay told me, speaking by Zoom from his home in Massachusetts. “Maybe some of that is ego. I’m sure every writer thinks, ‘Oh, an AI could never write what I write.’ Yes, I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t part of the thought process.”
While that’s something Tremblay might consider with any new work at this point in his career, the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of A Head Full of Ghosts, The Cabin at the End of the World, and many other novels and short stories tackled it in a more direct way with his latest book. Inspired by Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, and the quirky humor of the Coen Brothers, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is Tremblay’s attempt at a sci-fi-horror mash-up that’s both darkly funny and existentially nightmarish. It’s also, in his own words, a screed against the movement by AI companies to supplant human artists.
“I didn’t want to make it too didactic, but no, I playfully described this book as an anti-AI screed,” he said. “This book, in particular, was driven by anger and frustration, for sure. Not every book is going to be driven that way.“
Despite the emotions that fueled it, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep does not read like a screed. Instead, wielding offbeat humor and tech concepts that feel both lived-in and frighteningly tactile, the book lays out tandem narratives all building to the same conclusion, each of them exploring our relationship to machine learning in a different way. One of these narratives belongs to Julia, a former gaming streamer looking for a new challenge in life, who gets a call from a California tech company with an interesting offer.
Paul Tremblay in documentary series “First Word on Horror”
The company has, it seems, implanted some new technology in a brain-dead middle-aged man which will, in theory, allow them to pilot the man’s body through a rudimentary, still-developing system of controls. Julia, with her gaming background, would be the pilot, in her own way just as much a test subject as the human vegetable she’s controlling.
Julia is a Gen Z streamer with an omnivorous pop culture appetite, inspired by Tremblay’s own adult children, who riffs on The Big Lebowski constantly and calls her strange new meat puppet “Bernie” in reference to Weekend at Bernie’s. Her wide frame of reference, and her interest in art and stories far beyond video games, is in part informed by Tremblay’s own experiences with Gen Z, and in part a response to AI companies who scrape art and culture as a means of consuming it for reference without really experiencing a story.
“I know that one of the arguments that OpenAI and other tech companies are trying to make is like, ‘Hey, you writers, you artists, you take pop culture, you take your influences, and you create something. That’s just the same thing that the bots are doing.’ And it’s just not,” Tremblay said. “I wanted to have Julia have her outlook informed by all this pop culture, and I wanted to make that feel really human as a way to show how inhuman the AI is.”
The other side of the story belongs to “Bernie,” who’s addressed in his point-of-view chapters as “You.” In these chapters, the technology in Bernie’s body starts to flicker images through his seemingly dead brain, delivering half-remembered imagery and perspective in a nod to the “hallucinations” of an AI model groping for understanding it can never reach. These chapters in particular show off Tremblay’s flair for formalist shake-ups, and echo the kind of hyperstimulated writing that Dick and Ellison made so influential.
“I think it was more just the general Philip K. Dick feeling of ‘The world is so strange,'” Tremblay said. “He’s a lot funnier, I think, than maybe a lot of people credit him. That’s definitely what I was thinking of when writing the book.“
Bernie’s chapters embody the strangeness of Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep, presenting imagery that’s at times puzzling, at times eerily filmic, and always unnerving. They also mirror Julia’s own journey in fascinating ways as the odd couple – the Gen Z gamer and the middle-aged vegetable – traverse the United States, and the tech in Bernie’s body wakes up to the possibilities of using his flesh for its own purposes. It’s a compelling narrative technique, but it presented some new writing challenges for Tremblay.
“I quickly realized I couldn’t write this book the same way I have in the past,” he said. “By that, I mean all my other novels I had written in the order in which it was presented, even things that are nonlinear, which is most of them. I knew I couldn’t do that in this book. It’s not a spoiler, but hopefully the readers figure out pretty early that the Bernie chapters are a little bit of a preview of the next chapter from Julia, what’s actually happening with Julia. It’s all refracted from him.”
Mary Roach’s Stiff
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep began with a simple image, inspired by Tremblay’s reading of Mary Roach‘s book chronicling the history of our treatment of corpses, Stiff. As he read, Tremblay imagined a body sitting on an airplane, remote-controlled by someone else. At the time, it was a “silly what-if” concept, filed away in his head. Years later, when he became an author suing a tech company to keep AI from scraping his work for ideas, it started to feel frighteningly plausible, taking the “silly what-if” into the territory of a high-concept horror show about what happens when we try to exploit and commodify uniquely human aspects of consciousness.
“It stuck with me,” Tremblay said of that what-if imagery. “And then a few years later, when I was a part of the case suing OpenAI on behalf of writers, that what-if suddenly didn’t seem as silly. The more I learned about how that corporation operates and without really any sort of ethical thought to anything, I was like, ‘Oh, I’m going to play with that. That’s actually happening.”
So, what if someone actually in favor of generative AI picks up Tremblay’s self-described “anti-AI screed?” He hopes that, at the very least, he’s made the ride enjoyable in a distinctly human way that might begin to reshape the conversation.
“I think that was another reason why I wanted to have the humor,” Tremblay said. “If people are reading this book who aren’t on the side of like, ‘Hey, LLMs taking authors’ books is bad,’ maybe if they read something that’s cut with some humor, that maybe they’ll be more easily swayed.”
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is now in bookstores everywhere.
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