Interviews
‘Oddity’ Filmmaker Reveals How Ending Evolved and Confirms One Character’s Fate [Interview]
Oddity, the latest by writer/director Damian McCarthy, out now in theaters, offers a chill-inducing tale of supernatural revenge with one creepy mannequin at the center. One intense murder incites a feature-length trap of ghostly karma and justice.
The film stars Carolyn Bracken (You Are Not My Mother) as twin sisters Dani and Darcy. When Dani is brutally murdered at the remote country house that she’s renovating with her husband Ted (Gwilym Lee), the suspect dies soon after. But Darcy, a blind medium and oddity shop owner, arrives at Ted’s home a year later under the conviction that there’s more to Dani’s death than meets the eye, and she’s brought a creepy wooden mannequin with her to get meticulously crafted retribution.
Bloody Disgusting recently spoke with Damian McCarthy about his approach to horror and the importance of humor for the sake of entertainment. The humor is at its most apparent and whimsical in the film’s closing moments.
Warning: Plot spoilers ahead.
Darcy has a unique ability to see the truth, thanks to her psychic gift of touch. It’s through touch that she realizes that the orderly from Ted’s employment isn’t the only one responsible for her sister’s murder and prompts her to find the primary culprit. Armed with a Wooden Man, Darcy eventually uncovers the ultimate killer: Dani’s husband, Ted. But Ted springs his own trap to cover his tracks, with Darcy falling to her death.
Courtesy of Colm Hogan. An IFC Films and Shudder Release.
Darcy gets the last laugh from beyond the grave, sending Ted the same haunted bell that he noticed when visiting her oddity shop at the beginning of the film. A bell that comes attached with a vengeful bellboy’s spirit who kills whoever dares to ring it. Oddity’s closing moments see Ted ring the bell in amusement, unaware that the ghostly bellboy lurks behind him, waiting.
It’s a whimsical final punchline to Darcy’s elaborate scheme for justice.
While Ted’s fate was sealed, the ending did evolve from its initial concept. McCarthy originally planned to wrap Oddity on a much more chilling note in the form of a jump scare. But that serendipitously shifted during production.
McCarthy tells us of the ending, “It was always going to be the same, but the closing shot of the movie was going to be Gwylim standing up and turning, and he’s face to face with the bellboy. So, he’s going to be rising, and bang, he’s there. But we’ve seen that a lot where you end up on this scary face. During setups, Gwylim was sitting down, and the actor playing the bellboy, Shane Whisker, couldn’t see anything because of his contacts. He was just standing very still like this, and I went, ‘Oh, that actually looks really nice. That’s a really cool shot.‘ And the idea of using Little Willie Johns‘ ‘Now You Know,‘ using that song at the start was always there, but I said, ‘Oh, let’s get that. That’s way funnier.‘
“We obviously shot the other stuff where it ends in more of a horror closeup and this face, but this just seems just like a much better wide shot that just lets the audience – and I’ve seen it at SXSW when we watch with the audience- it gets a laugh, and it gets the imagination going. They’re like, ‘I wonder what’s going to happen to him once we hit the credits.‘ So yeah, the idea was always there; it just changed slightly. As you make these things, better ideas come to you, so that’s how it evolved.“
Courtesy of Colm Hogan. An IFC Films and Shudder Release.
That Darcy already warned that ringing the bell seals your inescapable doom, but the abrupt fade to black means viewers don’t see it happen. Considering that the Caveat bunny makes a brief appearance here, could that be an open thread to explore in a future film from McCarthy?
“I mean, we’ve talked about ourselves,“ McCarthy confesses. “Ted’s such a horrible smug character that for all we know, he became friends with the bellboy. But a girl did message me that she had seen it at SXSW, and she said she hated the character so much. She said, ‘I’d just like to hear that he does get killed, that that bellboy gets him killed.‘ I said, “Oh, yeah. Because Darcy does tell him, ‘Oh, be careful because everybody else that’s rang that bell has was found dead,‘ So it’s pretty obvious the next day Ted was probably found dead in this house, so rest assured justice has served him.”
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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