Interviews
Aisling Franciosi Talks ‘Stopmotion’, Meat Puppets, and Her Relationship with Horror [Interview]
Up next from actress Aisling Franciosi (The Nightingale, Last Voyage of the Demeter) is the horror movie Stopmotion, which sees an artist fighting for her sanity with her morbid creations.
Stopmotion releases in theaters on February 23 before heading to Shudder on May 31, 2024.
Directed by Robert Morgan, the film stars Franciosi as Ella Blake, “a stop-motion animator who is struggling to control her demons after the loss of her overbearing mother. Suddenly alone in the world, she embarks upon the creation of a macabre new puppet film, which soon becomes the battleground for her sanity. As Ella’s mind starts to fracture, the characters in her animated film take on a terrifying life of their own, and the unleashed power of her imagination threatens to destroy her.”
Bloody Disgusting spoke with Aisling Franciosi about her role in Stopmotion and her relationship with the genre. What draws her to horror and the intense roles she often plays?
Franciosi answers, “I really appreciate horror, but unfortunately I’m an absolute scaredy-cat. While I do watch them, because I think that there’s a lot of exciting movie making happening in the genre, I am terrified while doing it. It’s not like I enjoy the experience. I’m not one of those people who loves the feeling of being terrified, weirdly. I actually far prefer being in them than watching them to be honest. In terms of how I came to be in these kind of intense roles, I ask myself that often because I’ve had the best time playing them. I really feel lucky with the characters I’ve been able to play.”
“But I think sometimes when you start off one category, I guess, people think of you for a certain type of role and sometimes only a certain type of role,” she continues. “I mean, I do take it as a compliment in that I think, okay, well clearly they must think that I can do this, but sometimes I think I would like to be in something that brings people joy as well, that would be fun to experience too. But that is not to say that I don’t love playing these darker roles. They’re incredibly satisfying, and I’ve gotten so much from them. And to be honest, I think it’s kind of fun because I don’t think I’m like them at all. It’s nice to step inside the shoes of these characters that live kind of to the extremes of their feelings and their emotions.”
Stopmotion spends the entire runtime with Ella as she attempts to bring her dark stop-motion animated feature to life, bringing with her a life’s worth of experience thanks to her overbearing mother. The actor playing her, however, learned more about the process from director Robert Morgan.
She explains, “I was aware of what stop-motion animation was on the most basic level. I knew how it worked, but I didn’t realize just how tiny the movements are. Rob [Morgan] let me try. He gave me some pointers and lessons, and it was actually great to be able to try because I really enjoyed it. I really enjoyed the tiny movements and how it feels like you’re not really getting anything done and then you hit play and suddenly this character starts moving. But wow, it is painstaking work, and one wrong movement by two millimeters can ruin something that you’re trying to do. I really had an appreciation just for how laser focused and how obsessed with it you have to be. But I can also see how it has a meditative quality to it and how you can get sucked into these strange time warps and not really know exactly how much time you’ve spent on it. I think it’s a really cool art form.”
Franciosi adds, “I spent a couple of hours on different occasions just doing it. I moved an armature. I did my first one with an armature, and then I did another one with one of Rob’s first ever puppets. That was fun. I did say to him, ‘Do you need physical therapy?’ Because I can imagine that if you spend weeks hunched over like this. I mean, for me, I was able to obviously take breaks, but sometimes even I would be like, I really need to stretch after this. I can’t imagine. I’m sure part of it is because I wasn’t used to it, but I can imagine how it would be physically pretty demanding. But yeah, it was great to be able to have someone obviously who knows the art form so well be able to guide me in the right direction.”
Aisling Franciosi and Caoilinn Springall in Robert Morgan’s STOPMOTION. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Samuel Dole. An IFC Films and Shudder release.
Of course, learning the ropes of stop-motion animation looks and feels a little different on a film like Stopmotion, whose puppets are eerie creatures made of meat and mortician’s wax. Franciosi reveals to Bloody Disgusting how it felt to animate them on screen, giving a peek behind the filmmaking curtain in the process.
“They don’t feel great, I have to say. But that helps with the whole, yeah. It really helps you get into the scene, I guess. I mean, they weren’t really made of meat, but they did such a good job. But she was covered in like KY Jelly, and so was The Ash Man, and he covered the man in ash. Yeah, if you’re not someone who enjoys weird tactile sensations, it was interesting, to say the least. But they look so great and creepy, and she’s kind of cute but also terrifying. And then, of course, The Ash Man was not a puppet. That was a real costume that they just put on top of the actor, James Swanton.”
Luckily, much of the stop-motion animation was shot on a matching set and composited onto the live-action scenes, giving Franciosi a bit of a reprieve from the meat puppets tormenting her character. She explains, “I had the puppets there in front of me whenever I was doing the animation work on screen. The only time I remember really where they weren’t there was in the bedroom scene where she’s having a nightmare. Then my reactions are to just an eyeline that I was imagining. But yeah, they did some animation at the same time at the same stage. Then afterward, after the shoot, Rob did six weeks of hardcore animation.”
Photo Credit: Courtesy of Samuel Dole. An IFC Films and Shudder release.
While Franciosi fully committed to studying the technical aspects of her character’s vocation, she also brings the emotional intensity in spades. Ella’s journey took Franciosi to some wild places psychologically, with one key scene that’s sure to leave viewers in as much shock as it left the actor.
She shares, “I would say there’s a moment at the climax of the movie when I was like, ‘What am I doing? What are we doing?’ And again, when you’re shooting, I’ve said this before, but it sounds completely disingenuous, but I promise you it is true. When I’m working, especially if it’s so back to back, I kind of forget that it’s going to be done and dusted, and then people are going to see it at one point, and then when I finish, I’m kind of tortured by the thoughts of what I could have done differently because I don’t think about how the audience is going to perceive it while I’m working. Then once I wrap, I’m like, ‘Oh no, maybe I should have done this differently, or maybe I should’ve done that differently, and what’s the audience going to think here?’ But obviously, on that day on set, that’s what we had to do. We had to get the job done, and it was pretty queasy-inducing, I’m sure. But I didn’t kind of register that until I saw it on screen with other people, and I was like, yeah, this is pretty weird.
“That was the real moment where I was like, wow. Yeah, she’s a character.”
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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