Interviews
How ‘The Devil’s Bath’ Evolved From Courtroom Drama into Harrowing Psychological Period Piece
The Devil’s Bath, the latest from The Lodge and Goodnight Mommy filmmakers Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala, mines its horror from history. The psychological period film, set in 1750 Austria, follows the disturbing unraveling of a woman pushed toward evil, but it initially began life as a courtroom drama.
The Devil’s Bath is now available to stream on Shudder and stars Anja Plaschg as Agnes, a deeply religious woman embarking on a new life as a newlywed. But poor Agnes struggles to adjust to her new life. She finds herself increasingly trapped in a murky and lonely path leading to evil thoughts until the possibility of committing a shocking act of violence seems like the only way out of her inner prison.
Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala get viewers intimately acquainted with Agnes and her fragile mental state, delivering unrelenting, melancholic experiential horror. But the filmmakers originally had a very different journey in mind for Agnes’ story, loosely inspired by Ewa Lizlfellner and other 18th century women that went to extremes to deal with depressive illness then coloquially known as “the Devil’s Bath.” Instead of following Agenes’ daily life, the filmmaking duo considered setting her story within the courtroom.
Anja Plaschg in Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala’s THE DEVIL’S BATH.Photo Credit: Courtesy of Shudder. A Shudder Release.
Fiala says, “The reason why we conceived it originally as a courtroom drama is that what interested us in the first place was historical research by Kathy Stuart, who is an American historian, and she had all those trial interrogation protocols of women murdering just to be executed, which is, as you know, called suicide by proxy. We’re fascinated by those protocols because they basically give a voice to people who otherwise would’ve had none. Like in Austria, there are no recordings of, let’s say, farmers at the time because history just wasn’t interested in them. Even worse for women where many of the things that our film talks about had not been researched because there was just no interest. So, the rare opportunity of reading those protocols and having those women basically directly talk to us because they talk about the life, the fears, the sorrows, their crimes, of course. That felt really unique and touched us emotionally greatly. We felt, which may be stupid, but we felt touched by this interrogation; we’ll just have this interrogation. We basically used lots of the material and lots of the dialogue from those protocols. When we then read the first draft of the script, it was boring because it was not like somebody directly talking to you; it was like observing two people talk to each other, and it had lost this direct emotional impact.
“That’s when we asked ourselves, ‘Okay, how can we recreate this impact, and how can we externalize her inner horrors and her inner demons?’ That’s how it evolved into the film that it ended up.“
Franz adds, “Also we were interested in showing the depression of Agnes rather than just talking about it because in a courtroom drama, she would’ve told you, ‘Okay, I didn’t want to stay alive,‘ or something. But we were really interested in showing it, making the audience feel how it felt.”
While shifting Agnes’ story from the courtroom into her waking nightmare of a life shifts the film closer to horror, Franz and Fiala don’t really consider it as such. But they’re not concerned about genre labels either.
Fiala reflects, “I think as filmmakers, we often ask, ‘Is this a horror film? Is it this? Is it that?’ But those labels are put on the film by producers or distributors at the very end after everything is done, and we never think about it when we start. When we start, we’re just interested in something, and we pursue that, and it might lead us in different directions. For us, it’s not so unusual that our interests shifted, and we slowly, only slowly, found out how to tell the story, at least in our minds, most effectively. That always takes time, but it’s good time because it’s an interesting topic.”
Photo Credit: Courtesy of Shudder. A Shudder Release
The Devil’s Bath is deeply rooted in history and historical accounts, but it’s a fictionalized depiction that gave the filmmakers some creative leeway. Franz and Fiala still approached their film with the utmost care.
“We did a huge amount of research,“ Fiala explains. “There were actually three historians involved, researching different aspects of life back then. Like, let’s say, medical procedures, approach to religion, daily life, and exorcism. All of that stuff has been researched, but there are not too many sources because history was not too interested in the specifics of ordinary people and women’s history. That automatically created some leeway because there are so few sources that our historians said, ‘It could have been like that, and maybe this is just a singular event,‘ so you are free as long as it feels like we had so much information that I think we were able to judge if it felt plausible or not. If it felt plausible, that was in some cases good enough for us because there is no way of 100% saying it was like that or it was not.”
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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