Interviews
Ryan Kruger Calls ‘Street Trash’ a Standalone Sequel and Gory Love Letter to ’80s Cinema
Fried Barry director Ryan Kruger gives a new spin on the 1987 cult classic Street Trash, relocating the melt madness to Cape Town, South Africa, where the growing divide between rich and poor has changed the world as we know it. But Kruger will be the first to eschew the “remake” label, referring to his new film as a standalone sequel.
The filmmaker wrote Street Trash to be accessible for newcomers, while slyly referencing details and events from the original to make this new movie a continuation of the goopy, melty world introduced by director Jim Muro in 1987. Kruger took painstaking measures to even recapture the ’80s aesthetic, both through practical effects and shooting his reimagining on 35mm. It also helps that Kruger grew up as a massive fan of Street Trash.
“As a kid growing up in the ’80s and ’90s, Street Trash was one of those films that my friends and I would sit up watching on my little TV late at night,” Kruger tells Bloody Disgusting. “We’d either have it on VHS, or it would be on TV. I was a fan of the original, and over the years, as it got older, I went back and watched it. So, when Justin Martell and Matt Manjourides approached me to do the film after I made Fried Barry, I was like, ‘Hell yeah, that would be amazing.'”
But how do you approach Street Trash in the modern world? The director explains, “It was one of those things straightway where there’s a big fanbase for the original film; I’m a part of that fanbase. But at the same time, I really respect the original film, but I wanted to stay very far away from trying to copy the original in any way. What I loved from the original, obviously, is the prosthetics. It was the ’80s, and it was just the tone and feel of ’80s movies. We were very lucky that we actually got to shoot on 35mm, just to give it that eighties film look. And all the prosthetics, but all in all with the whole film.”
Kruger reiterates that he doesn’t consider his film a remake. “It’s in the same world as the 1987 original film. We actually mention stuff from the original film. So for me, it’s always been more of a sequel. For the original fans, it’s actually a sequel. For a new audience it can be a standalone film.“
The commitment to the ’80s meant that Kruger wanted the film’s effects to feel authentic to the period, too. “I wanted to keep it very, very ’80s, very old prosthetics when it came to anything with the blood and the goo and everything. I looked at the original. It’s such a big part of the original. It was just really coming up with those ideas. I guess it just falls under the story as well of how each of these melts happened. It was that bottle of booze that went around and these guys that were drinking it. With this, it was the government. It wasn’t in drink form in some of the film, but gas. So, it was coming up with those different ideas of the melts. And sitting there with the prosthetics people, really coming up with ideas.”
Kruger continues, “Can we do this? Can we do that? You know, is this possible? It was fun. I always say if I didn’t do directing or acting, I probably would have gone into animatronics and prosthetics. So yeah, it was a lot of fun just coming up with these different ideas and then trying to push the boundaries compared to the original. Push for more blood and the goo. It’s almost like a little bit darker, in a way, when people melt. We actually did some pickup shots, and that’s just because we wanted to push it a little bit more with prosthetics.“
In the niche subgenre of melt horror, the 1987 film stands out in part for the colorful nature of the melting. The unlucky denizens that drink tainted Tenafly Viper dissolve into vibrant colors of goo. “That’s such a big thing for the original,” Kruger agrees. “There’s a whole generation that doesn’t even know what the fuck Street Trash is. The color was a big thing. If you happen just to be watching the film and see this purple or yellow or orange goo, you’d be like, ‘What the fuck?’ This is meant to be blood, you know. We wanted to use different colors just to push it. Obviously, prosthetics are a big part of the ’80s, but it’s also the color… it’s that multicolored goo. That’s that’s what Street Trash is, you know.“
While the homeless population in the original film often splintered into factions and fought amongst themselves, the new film centers around a ragtag group of eccentric but ultimately sweet misfits. They form a tight-knit group that pushes back against a corrupt government attempting to snuff them out of existence, and its members include Shuraigh Meyer as “Pap,“ Lloyd Martinez Newkirk as “Wors, “Joe Vazas as “Chef,“ Sean Cameron Michael as “Ronald,“ Donna Cormack-Thomson as “Alex,” and Gary Green as “2-Bit.”
Ryan Kruger says of his motley bunch, “It’s very important for me, no matter what movie you make, that you have characters that you love and sympathize with. There are a lot of genre movies that get made, especially in the low-budget horror world, where there are a lot of characters that are just shit, and you don’t care for them. When writing this film, I didn’t want to just make it a gore film. It’s very easy just to make a gore film. You have to have a good story. You must have good characters, and you’ve got to be able to care for them.“
The filmmaker also voices a unique character in the film: an imaginary puppet named Sockle. Kruger explains, “It was really fun. I’ve never really done voice work before. I’m working with the character 2-Bit, played by Gary Green, who played Fried Barry. 2-Bit probably took way too much acid in his life, too many drugs, and he has this imaginary friend. Only he can see this character. It was like a support character for 2-Bit and Gary Green, too, so I could bounce off him and work very closely. Gary looks amazing, just the way he looks. He’s got such presence. But to have this character as a drug addict and have this imaginary, inappropriate, funny friend… It was just fun to bounce back and forth. Then I was also smoking. So when I was doing this voice the whole time; my voice would really hurt at the end of the day.”
The commitment to ’80s cinema extends beyond Street Trash for Ryan Kruger. The filmmaker tips us off to Easter eggs hiding in plain sight: the costume designs. “In all my films, I put in a lot of little Easter eggs. Little nods to different movies that I enjoyed growing up,” he teases. “Some people will pick this up, and some people might not pick it up, but a lot of the characters in the movie are based on them. For example, Alex’s character. If you look at her wardrobe, it’s Ripley from Aliens. 2-Bit has red overalls and yellow gloves based on Roger Rabbit and Ronald, our lead guy. He was based on Robin Williams’ The Fisher King. And then you’ve got Chef, who is Stanley Kubrick if you look at his jacket, hair, and his glasses. Then, the two guys who are part of Rat King’s men are Snake Plissken and The Duke from Escape from New York. If you look at the wardrobes, it’s all ’80s and ’90s movies with the characters.”
Street Trash releases on Digital on November 19, just in time to get melty this Thanksgiving.
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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