Interviews
How ‘Werewolves’ Reminded Practical Effects Legend Alec Gillis of Working on ‘Aliens’ [Interview]
A supermoon triggers a latent gene, transforming anyone and everyone whose skin touches moonlight into a feral beast in Steven C. Miller’s (Silent Night) Werewolves. That premise alone highlights the scope of ambition and challenges for an independent action-horror feature: Frank Grillo fighting his way through hordes of werewolves requires a lot of stunt and creature work. Luckily, Werewolves boasts a lot of talent on screen and off in delivering just that, including SFX legend and werewolf designer/effects creator Alec Gillis of Studio Gillis.
Gillis’ expansive career has given horror fans no shortage of cherished movie monsters, from the Aliens to Predator to the eerie monster in Smile and Smile 2. Yet despite such an impressive career, Werewolves marks a major first for the artist. “Technically, it’s my first werewolf. Although,” Gillis points to a mask in his office when speaking with Bloody Disgusting via Zoom, “this character was from a movie called Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant. But he technically wasn’t a werewolf. He was a wolf man. So yeah, this is the first werewolf that I’ve done.”
Miller’s feature, which releases in theaters on December 6, had a long winding road to getting made thanks in large part to a global pandemic. But Gillis was attached nearly from the start, eager to give his spin on the classic movie monster.
“Myles Nestel, the producer, contacted me,“ Gillis explains of how he came aboard. “This was before Covid. He said, ‘Hey, we’ve got this script, and it’s pretty cool.‘ It was called Year 2 at the time. I read the script, and I thought, ‘This is really a fun take on a werewolf, and I have never done a werewolf.’ I’m always on the sidelines of the werewolf stuff because so many people have done so many great werewolves. I’ve enjoyed them and had my opinions about what a werewolf should look like, what I would do, etc.”
Gillis continues, “But then the movie was supposed to start up, and Covid and the lockdown happened. It kind of went dormant for a while, and you know how it goes. It’s hard to put a movie together, especially an independent film that is as big as this is. It’s not easy. Then Myles came back and said it’s not over. Steven C. Miller will be directing. So, I got on Zoom with Steven, got on great with him, and it was just a matter of them pulling the deal together. And then we started to build.”
Director Steven C. Miller’s WEREWOLVES, a Briarcliff Entertainment release. Credit: Courtesy of Briarcliff Entertainment © 2024 All Rights Reserved.
“One of the things I love about smaller budgeted films is that everybody is looking at the end result,“ Gillis said of his werewolf design process. “It’s not like you have to get there right. You have to get there fast. You can’t dawdle too much because as fun as design phases are, and I enjoy them, that’s where a lot of money can be eaten up. So, if there are parameters that the filmmakers already have, that, to me, is like gold. Steven had a piece of artwork that he had commissioned that gave a vibe, and I thought, well, this is what I would be doing. Because what I wanted to do was make a werewolf that is big in its frame. You know, broad shoulders, but still has a kind of sleekness about it, almost a slenderness.
“If you look at actual wolves, they’re very slender. They’re almost gangly. It’s their necks and their heads because of the mass of their fur that gives it that powerful feeling, but their limbs themselves are actually pretty long and thin. Since childhood, I’ve been looking at people like Bernie Wrightson’s drawings, which always have a muscular but lean look to them, and I just knew that I wanted to balance out the size of the head with the size of the shoulders and the hands. We weren’t too interested in doing the big dogleg thing. I’ve done that a lot on the Alien movies and probably going back to Pumpkinhead.”
Gillis elaborates, “I didn’t want to do that necessarily here because there’s so much stunt work. These things have to really be mobile, and that kind of silhouette looks great in limited action. But I thought, let’s give them monstrous feet and extend the feet sculpturally. Basically, have the guys walk on their toes, and that works out quite well. We have some arm extensions in the movie, and we have some walking on all fours. We have them upright but with arm extensions so that they have this very long reach. Then we also have normal gloved looks. I usually am okay intercutting all these different arm lengths together because I think that the editorially composite impression of what the proportions are comes through in the edit. I don’t really feel like you notice if you’ve got a long arm and it reaches out, and now it’s a gloved hand that grabs someone. It all works to build the composite of what the character should be. These are all things that I learned in the ’80s and ’90s in terms of editing and creature effects.
“When you have a movie like this, and a director specifically like Steven C. Miller, who is all about the edit, camera placement, and the action and movement in the shot. You never have to worry. Well, very rarely do you have to worry about being way back from the action and having everything happen within the frame. That’s a more contemporary post-digital revolution, CGI preacher sort of thought where you’re going to be way back. It almost mimics the Ray Harryhausen stuff. That’s why I chuckle to myself; Ray Harryhausen would do that. He’d put you way back. You’d be in with the actors like a normal movie. Then, when the creature appears, you’re way back, and he comes walking in and does whatever he’s going to do, and I loved it as a kid. It gives you a sense of scale, but these werewolves are up close and personal. We knew we had to have practical, real things there on set.”
While there may be dozens of on-screen werewolves in the film, that certainly wasn’t the case during production. Werewolves credits three actors as the Lead Wolves and four more as Additional Wolves to account for the number of creature suits on set.
Behind the scenes of director Steven C. Miller’s WEREWOLVES, a Briarcliff Entertainment release. Credit: Todd Stefani / Briarcliff Entertainment. © 2024 All Rights Reserved.
Gillis enlisted trusted performers to bring his Lead Wolves to life. He explains, “I was very blessed on this production because I had three people that I’d worked with before: Ian Whyte, who has played the Predator multiple times that I’ve worked with. Ian Feuer, who also played one of the Predators in Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem. He’s such a go-getter and such a bulletproof performer. Then, I had my most recent addition to my stable of suit actors, Dane DiLiegro. My experience with him on Prey was so fabulous; he really brought character and emotion to the role. You could see the Predator thinking, and I’m always interested in elevating a monster beyond just a force of nature that’s tearing things apart. I want those little cocks of the head or little compound movement of the neck so it doesn’t look like I’ve built a suit that cannot move. Sometimes, psychologically, you put it on someone who’s unprepared for it, and they’re like, ‘Oh, my God! I’m trapped!‘ No, no, you’re free. You have to free up the movements, have isolated movement, and all that kind of stuff. Dane gets that. I was very fortunate to have it.”
Naturally, his leads wasted no time preparing for their physical performances. “What we did starting off, I shipped a pair of walking arms to Ian Whyte, who lives in England,“ Gillis explains. “I think he’s in Bristol, and he wanted to practice with them. So, we made a quickie pair for him, and he played with it. Then he sent the video to me and our stunt coordinator, Eddie J. Fernandez. I sent a pair of walking arm extensions to our stunt team in Puerto Rico so that they could be working with our basketball players; we had another 4 or 5 guys who were basketball players practicing with them. What I always do is give broad strokes to the performers, and then I watch how each one nuances it and what they bring to it. That’ll always determine who’s foreground, mid-ground, and background [in the shot].”
Werewolves has a retro horror spirit to it, which also proved to be the case during production. So much so that it brought Gillis back to his early career. “This movie reminds me so much of James Cameron’s Aliens,” Gillis reminisces. “It felt that way. The energy was like that on set. Everything was just energetic. It just felt like the ’80s again. On Aliens, we only had six alien warrior suits. But you look over here, and you see four aliens coming at you. You look over here, and you see six aliens coming at you, and that’s ten aliens, but it’s all the same aliens. What that meant was that we had to give up some of the individual character of each werewolf and rely on dressing and styling the hair. We’ve got the one character that’s got American red, white, and blue across his face. Things like that. I had to make all the wolves look pretty much identical so that we could reuse them again and again and again. And that’s the way you make these. That’s the way you build it out.”
Director Steven C. Miller’s WEREWOLVES, a Briarcliff Entertainment release. Credit: Todd Stefani / Briarcliff Entertainment. © 2024 All Rights Reserved.
To highlight the ways that costuming and styling gave each werewolf a more distinct identity, one of the standout werewolves is a female punk, complete with facial piercings and a vibrant mohawk. Gillis laughs, “It was in the script: ‘Punk Princess.‘ I just laugh because it’s such an ’80s idea. It’s literally the kind of character that we would have done in 1987 or ’89 or something. That was very heartwarming. And so then it’s just like, well, it’s accouterment, right? I do have to get with the costume department, and they were great. We sent them all the measurements of the guys in the suits because we were in LA, and they were pulling it together in Puerto Rico, and they did a fabulous job. But yeah, Punk Princess was really fun, and that’s Ian Whyte performing in it. It was really a blast to see, too, at 3 in the morning, in a closed-off section of the town, Ian Whyte putting a feminine touch into his wolf performance. He really did a great job.”
One other noticeable distinction with Gillis’s wolves is the more sporadic fur on their bodies. He details, “This is something that’s afflicting people. It’s like a virus, right? Steven decided he wanted to make them look a little less densely furred than I was initially going to go. Normally, in werewolf movies, you have long hair. It looks like primate hair, which kind of makes sense because it is human beings that have transferred. But you rarely see it where it really looks like dense wolf fur, shorter but thicker. I was starting to go in that direction. Then Steven explained about the disease thing, and that’s a great point. These are still former human beings. But where does all this hair also generate from so quickly? We backed off on that and punched more hair on the root, but we left a lot of the skin exposed as well. That’s also where we came up with that very glossy, wet look. The idea is that their metabolisms are running really hot. They’re sweating, shiny, and kind of more demonic.”
It wasn’t just the wolves that made Gillis’ experience such a blast on set, but the liberal use of gore. “One of my favorite moments was when one of the wolves is over Frank Grillo; he’s impaled it, and it’s just barfing blood on him. That was a blast,” Gillis fondly recalls. “Because you never know how that’s going to go like, ‘Hello, Frank! Hi! We’re about to puke blood.‘ We have 5 gallons of blood here. I don’t know how much the director is going to want to use, and I feel like he used all of it. And multiple camera angles, too. And Grillo, that guy was down for it. He’s like, ‘Do you need another [take]?‘ Steven was just howling and laughing during the whole thing. So I think that was my favorite thing to shoot.”
(L to R) Frank Grillo as Wesley Marshall and Katrina Law as Dr. Amy Chen in director Steven C. Miller’s WEREWOLVES, a Briarcliff Entertainment release. Credit: Todd Stefani / Briarcliff Entertainment. © 2024 All Rights Reserved.
The lifelong monster fan and artist is also keenly aware of what horror fans want in a werewolf movie: a memorable transformation sequence. Budgetary and time constraints meant that Werewolves’ brief transformations are digital, not practical, and Gillis walked us through the decision process. More importantly, Gillis wants fans to know that he’s hungry to dial up the practical effects work even further in a sequel. He’s ready for more werewolf mayhem.
“I should also say that initially, in this movie, I was talking to Myles and Steven about exclusively creating transformation sequences. As we got into it and started budgeting things, we realized that there was so much need for practical werewolf suits that we should probably flip that,“ Gillis says of the choice to emphasize the actual wolves over their transformation. “We should probably put that money into the practical suits, which meant that we’re having digital transformations, right? I know that a lot of fans are really jonesing to have full, practical transformations in a werewolf movie. I’m with you on that, by the way, which is why it’s very important for us to make this movie a success so that there is a sequel. I’m already banging on that door, and in addition to doing practical suits, I’ve also got to do some parts and pieces. It’ll be a blend of digital and practical. But I think we could do some really cool stuff.”
“Anyway, that’s not to say anyone should be disappointed, because I went to my friend, my old friend, Scott E. Anderson,” Gillis notes. “I was nominated along with Scott Anderson on Starship Troopers. Scott’s a very artistic guy. I thought, if we’re going to do digital transformations, you’ve got to go with Scott Anderson because he has a foot in practical. He came up old school. We worked on Hollow Man together. He did these transformations based on my end result, and I’m really happy with what I’ve seen. I think everybody’s gonna really dig the transformations as well because he really went the extra mile to make it feel like a practical, real thing.”
He adds, “What I really want to do is I want to work with Scott on the sequel and really figure out some cool transformation stuff because I think what we’re missing in movies right now is we’re missing that tight within the frame overlap of practical pieces and digital extension and enhancement and transformation. I think we could do something that’s so cool looking that it stops the viewer from worrying about how it was done, and you can just enjoy it. I know that that’s in this movie as well because I’ve seen it, and Scott’s work is fabulous. But I just want you to know I’m greedy. I want to be part of it all.”
Werewolves howls its way into theaters nationwide on December 6, 2024. Enter to win a custom head by Gillis himself!
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Of all the places to find a coven of witches, the attic above a Christian youth camp is probably the last place you’d think to look. But that’s just what we find in Camp, a surrealist nightmare of feminist empowerment from Canadian filmmaker Avalon Fast.
Emily (Zola Grimmer) is still reckoning with her involvement in a horrific tragedy when she accidentally contributes to the death of her best friend, Charlie (Giselle Morison). Unable to move on, the traumatized teen takes a job at a rural summer camp, hoping to forget her own sorrows by looking after at-risk kids. She quickly connects with a counselor named Clara (Alice Wordsworth) and finds comfort in her close-knit group of female friends. But a mysterious whisper from deep in the woods warns that they may be leading her down a darker path.
Fast burst onto the scene in 2022 with Honeycomb, a psychological horror film that follows a burgeoning matriarchy. Known for their focus on “Girl Horror” stories, the talented young filmmaker tackles similar themes in Camp as Emily leaves the modern world behind to embrace a dark vision of self-discovery through magic.
Ahead of the film’s U.S. release on June 26, Bloody Disgusting sat down with Fast to chat about the nebulous nature of good vs. evil and the intoxicating power of female-driven horror.
Bloody Disgusting: What inspired this unique story? Did you go to religious summer camps when you were young?
Avalon Fast: I did. I went to lots of different summer camps, but all of them were primarily Bible camps. The memory I have of camp is kind of strange. I was very homesick as a kid, and I didn’t necessarily enjoy all my time there. I definitely remember meeting some interesting girls at camp and having that presence of religion hovering around the whole experience.
BD: I really love the film’s gorgeous natural setting. Camp is the kind of surrealist nightmare that you don’t just watch. You feel it too. How did you approach creating this world?
AF: Well, a huge part of it was working with my cinematographer Eily Sprungman, who’s a very close friend. We spent years prepping, shot listing, storyboarding, and mood boarding. She’d had a similar experience to mine. We grew up around the same place, and so we understood each other’s visions from the get-go. But there are so many other pieces that came together. The costuming, the art, and the animated sequences were done by Sofiya Iurkevych. One of our producers, Taylor Nodrick, was obsessed with shooting on Super 8 film. I’ve always wanted to as well, so all the memory sequences were shot on Super 8. It was just a lot of people with an understanding and a vision for what this project was. I’m really happy with the way it turned out.
To the extent that you’re comfortable sharing, what’s your relationship to witchcraft, and what does Camp have to say about modern witches?
Well, that’s the question of Camp. It’s not that I don’t resonate with any of these things, but I specifically wanted Camp to be a little bit ambiguous around what witchcraft looks like. Is this witchcraft? Are these girls witches? Emily explicitly asks if that’s what’s happening here, and the answer isn’t yes. The film isn’t going to answer that question for you. My relationship to magic and witchcraft? It’s tough. I feel like there’s so much magic, connection, and spirituality that comes from these friendships, the closeness of these women, and what’s happening around them. A lot of what Camp is trying to say or show is just that magic can come out of friendship.
I loved watching these female friendships develop. And you’re right. No one ever says the word “coven,” but you can feel that connection, and you can see a change in Emily as those relationships grow. I’m also really fascinated with the way Camp plays with the idea of good and evil. At one point, Clara says, “Maybe God drew us to the devil,” which stopped me in my tracks. How do you view witchcraft or the magic these girls are experiencing in regard to good and evil?
That was such a huge part of the script’s construction. The story is really trying to keep a balance between those two things. I like asking people if they think these girls are good or bad, because I feel like a lot of people come out of the film thinking one or the other. They’ll say things like “thank God Emily found her people” or “God, I really wish she’d gone home.” I just don’t think there’s ever an answer. I wanted to explore the idea of going down the wrong path, especially coming out of grief. What makes you a bad person, and does healing mean you’re looking to become a better person? I don’t have an answer, but I do feel like that’s a huge part of what Camp is asking. What is good? What is bad? Why did God bring me to the devil?
Yes, because this is all happening at “God camp” in Emily’s words. So how can both of those things exist at the same time? Along those lines, I’m also fascinated by the voice Emily hears in the woods. Without spoiling too much, what is this voice asking, and what is required in return?
Emily comes to camp with a shout into the void, asking can anyone hear me? Does anyone want to? And it’s answered so clearly by these girls, specifically responding only with love, care, support, and trust. It’s like her prayers were answered. It doesn’t mean that everything is going to be alright, but Emily is looking for peace. She’s looking for a moment where she feels pure good. And I think, even at its surface level, she does get that experience.
Personally, I don’t really think people are good or bad. I think we all exist somewhere in the middle. Camp centers traditionally villainized characters, but that’s where Emily seems to find her peace, however you choose to define it.
I also wanted to show the experience of having decided that you are a bad person, you’ve made mistakes, and you feel cursed. Then when you meet other people who have done things that you would consider worse, you can actually feel good in their presence. You feel like less of a bad person. I think that’s a huge part of the story as well. Emily’s finding her version of other fucked up people, and she feels less fucked up around them. I’ve found that in my own life. It’s a cool thing. I don’t think it’s bad.
I don’t think it’s bad either. It’s finding your home, your people. We meet Emily in the aftermath of unthinkable trauma. Is this a story about mental health and healing?
Witnessing it myself. witnessing other people experience tragedy and then move through grief, you hear a lot of talk about healing or coming out the other side. There’s so much conversation around what that looks like, with self-care and showing up for yourself. I always felt really averse to it. It annoyed me. I think the beginning of the film speaks to that. The therapeutic version of what getting help looks like is obviously very different from what Camp is showing. And again, I don’t have an answer for what you’re supposed to do. But I think that’s another question I was asking: how do you heal? Do you heal at all? Is that the end goal, or are we just trying to get better? It’s something I experienced in my own grief. And the answer, for me, at least now, is just that I’m not looking to get better. So I felt like I hadn’t. I found it hard to find people to have those conversations with. And I think that’s what I ultimately wanted to make a film about.
I love that unanswered question. In my own experience, I’ve had to reframe what healing actually looks like. There’s not really an endpoint. It’s just finding a way to keep going. There’s also an element of sacrifice in this story, particularly regarding another counselor named Jo (Sophie Bawks-Smith). What role does she play in Emily’s journey?
For me, Jo is this human embodiment of Charlie, Emily’s friend. As Jo, she had a life at this camp before meeting Emily, and then was kind of taken over by Charlie’s spirit. I think a lot of people view Emily’s final choice as horrendous and tragic. In a way it is, but for me, if Jo becomes her angel, it’s almost like a self-sacrifice. Jo knows that by sacrificing herself, she’ll be giving Emily power to move forward. In the original script, the girls were supposed to bring out another counselor, JB (Aidan Laudersmith), and burn his body. But I just thought, there’s no way sacrificing this guy could give the girls enough power. There’s just no way, right? Logically, that just didn’t line up for me.
I’m glad you mentioned JB, because he has his own tragic arc. How do men factor into the world of Camp?
The way men factor into my world is so bizarre. I have such little respect for them in my films, which is something I’ve been called on. I think I have to challenge myself in the future to make a movie about a boy because, these boys … It’s not that the men in my films aren’t redeemable, but there’s no depth to these characters. They’re just treated with such disrespect. I don’t know why I do that, actually. That’s something for me to look into. It was the same with Honeycomb. They’re just such peripheral characters. I’ve had people ask about Kayne (Henri Gillespi), the scary guy at the fire, what happens to him? I just think, I don’t know. I don’t care. That’s not the point of the story.
Well, I can say after a lifetime of watching women on the periphery of the story, the course correction feels nice. In a similar vein, I’m in love with your homepage, avalonfast.com. There’s an image of girls on a film set and then a still from Honeycomb in which a blood-covered girl is screaming at the sky. And in the middle, it just says Girl Horror. It’s a really powerful statement that gives me chills. How do you define Girl Horror, and what draws you to these types of stories?
I was obsessed with the term when I started making my movies. It was something I’d come up with to kind of brand myself and describe what I was doing. Then I went through a period where I felt like it was a bit gender exclusive and didn’t interest me as much. But now I’ve come full circle on the term. I think it’s a bit of a commentary on youth and the horror of growing up female. But I think everybody can relate to that experience. I don’t want it to feel like this exclusive thing, that I make movies exclusively for girls, because I don’t think I do. I’m interested in exploring what Girl Horror means. Originally, it was just a title, something I came up with, and now it’s become something that resonates with people. You said it gave you chills. That’s cool for me to hear because there’s obviously some depth there.
Are you working on anything new?
Yes. I am actually making a movie about a boy. That’s the next thing.
That’s exciting! The more I think about feminism, the more I end up coming back to men and boys, because they have a place in the world of Girl Horror too.
Absolutely. It’s all just part of being human.
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