Interviews
“The Boulet Brothers’ Dragula” Season 666 Winner Asia Consent Talks Horror, ‘Dead by Daylight’ and Season Drama
Last week’s finale crowned a new winner on the biggest season yet of “The Boulet Brothers’ Dragula” on Shudder – “Season 666.” The consistent season frontrunner, Asia Consent, amassed a number of challenge wins, including an impressive Dead by Daylight prize, and earned their place in Dragula history.
It’s easy to look back over the 10-episode season and see Asia’s trajectory from superfan to season winner; the drag artist delivered consistent, stunning looks and played the game more strategically than many of the contestants. While Asia’s artistry and talent did the heavy lifting, knowing the series better than any other competitor this season also gave her a leg up in the fierce competition.
“Oh my god, it was so surreal,” Asia Consent emphatically tells Bloody Disgusting of the moment she won. “Like I’ve said on the show, I’ve been auditioning for multiple years. You think you’re ready when you apply for it, and you think it’s your time. But I truly do believe that timing is everything. So, once it was announced that I was the winner, I just knew at that moment that this is exactly why I’ve been waiting for all these years. This is why. It was because Season 6 was my time, and I needed to go through certain things in my life to be able to be ready for this, so it couldn’t have happened at a more perfect time for me.”
Asia Consent has been a massive fan of “The Boulet Brothers’ Dragula” from the very beginning, and it made her more attuned to what, perhaps, series creators, judges, and hosts Dracmorda and Swanthula were looking for. Asia explains, “I feel like being a super fan really helped me because I saw what didn’t work out for other competitors, and how that maybe could have helped me. Really, I think what didn’t work out for certain competitors was just not being themselves. That’s what I take away the most from the experience, that I was rewarded the most when I was being myself and being just authentic with who I was.
She continues, “It was extremely validating, going through that experience and realizing, ‘Wow, if I’m just being Asia, that’s when I do the best. Being a super fan and seeing that through the show where people aren’t fully sure of themselves or aren’t fully confident in who they are as a person, that’s when they tripped up. Honestly, seeing that is what really motivated me to be able to be ready for Season 6.”
Watching a reality competition series is vastly different than competing in one, of course. It took some adjusting for the artist, especially when it came to watching the episodes as they aired. “Actually, I’m with Aurora right now,” Asia tells us. “I was telling her that watching the first episode, seeing yourself on TV for the 1st time. Nobody will ever be able to prepare you for that experience because it’s like, ‘Oh, wow! This is how I really am. Wow!’ I was shaking. Couldn’t breathe because I was like, ‘Oh, my god, this is so putting yourself out there for the world to see.’ It is really scary. But over time, eventually, I got more comfortable watching the episodes with my family and friends. But yeah, it’s definitely a jarring experience seeing yourself on TV. I was with my close family and friends when we first watched it. Even then, I still was shaking. Couldn’t breathe; it was crazy.”
Once past the hurdle of acclimating to appearing on TV, Asia wasn’t surprised by what she saw in terms of the competition. The performance artist was pretty attuned to what was happening, though she recounts how she surprised her fellow competitors when the episodes began airing. “I thought it was funny, though. My castmates really didn’t know about the alliance between Pi and me. I got a couple of texts from people in the cast of season 6. They were like, ‘You’re in an alliance with Pi, what the hell!’ I was sorry, but I was also playing the game, and that was part of it. I wasn’t going to spill the tea to them; I wanted to make sure that we got this going with me and Pi. Nothing really surprised me from the experience, for my castmates and everything. But I think, being a part of the show, the most surprising thing was just seeing how production ran and how you see the magic being crafted behind the scenes. It was a really special experience; I wouldn’t trade that for the world because it’s really fun making TV. It’s being a part of the drag history books, essentially.”
The competition naturally brings out some drama, but this cast is bonded for life. “We all actually love each other. And we can get crazy. We can fight and argue and everything. Usually, we’d argue, and then, like 5 minutes later, it was like, ‘Girl, do you want something to drink? Let’s hang out.’ We were able to make up pretty quickly. There was one specific moment I had with Gray Matter where they asked who we thought should not be in the competition anymore. I ended up saying his name for that, and he was very upset about that, behind the scenes and on-screen, actually very upset. But that night, we went back to the mansion, and he was just like, ‘You know I love you, Asia. I’m gonna make some eggs. Let’s have some dinner.’ It was super cute. I really love Gray, and like it was just such a sweet, tender moment, I’ll never forget that.”
The Boulet Brothers cited Filth as Asia’s strong suit when it comes to drag, but the artist nailed all the core tenets this season. “I’ve always loved like divine John Waters, like Pink Flamingos type of stuff where it’s very shocking,” Asia says of her drag style. “I want to be able to pull a reaction from the audience when I’m on stage. As a performance artist, I always want to try and shock the audience, and that’s what really inspires me. But as far as looks, I love club kid culture.
“I love high glamour, and honestly, just drag in general has been really inspiring. I was doing more traditional drag when I started, and then eventually, I started leaning more into horror. Especially when Dragula season one dropped. That’s when I realized I could take my love for drag, horror movies, and horror video games and combine them. That’s when I really started flourishing and coming into my own. I’ve been a drag fan ever since I was like 12 years old. I started watching RuPaul’s Drag Race when I was 12, and then I just kind of grew up with drag and evolved from there. Also, shout out to my Portland community because they keep it weird up there. There’s a lot of weirdos. My community up there has been very inspiring as well and has been uplifting me this entire time.”
One horror video game that inspires Asia happens to be one that she’ll be immortalized in, Dead by Deadlight. “I cannot believe it because I’ve been playing Dead by Daylight for years. That’s how I connected with my friends and everything. I can’t wait to be in the game. I’ll be the first one to buy my skin for sure. I am planning on eventually streaming and making Twitch streams with video games and everything. I look forward to that. I might have some Dragula Season 6 contestants play with me as well.”
As for horror movies, Asia has a clear frontrunner for her favorite of 2024 and beyond. “One of my favorite movies of all time, I think, is The Substance. It’s such a Dragula-coded film for me because it was so glamorous, so nasty, and so horrific; the body horror in it and everything. Also, the message of, essentially, the expectations that are put on women in society. It was really beautiful to see that brought to film in such a nasty, demented way. Demi Moore gave an amazing performance. Another one I saw this year, too, is Smile 2. I was very surprised by that because the first Smile movie wasn’t my favorite, but the twists in Smile 2 were so good. I absolutely loved that one.”
Eli Roth is a formative name in the “Splat Pack” of ultraviolent filmmakers who first came to fame during the 2000s.
Roth’s Cabin Fever was a great statement piece, but he’s managed to continually top himself with gory gems like Hostel, The Green Inferno, and Thanksgiving. Roth has always been a filmmaker who strives to push boundaries and embrace a passion for genre cinema.
His latest movie, Ice Cream Man, is a project that’s been 20 years in the making. It’s a twisted take on the Pied Piper parable that’s arguably the most gruesome film from Roth’s career and an exciting turning point.
To celebrate the gory film’s summer release, Eli Roth opens up about the luxury of shooting a horror film with hundreds of enthusiastic kids, bypassing the MPAA to deliver the most outrageous kills of his career, and why he intentionally avoided Weapons before filming.
BLOODY DISGUSTING: You’ve described Ice Cream Man as “The Birds but with children” and cited Who Can Kill a Child? as a reference point. Were there other “killer kid” movies that you’re pulling from for inspiration like Children of the Corn, the French film Them, or even Weapons?
ELI ROTH: Well, Weapons I purposely didn’t watch until after I was done with my cut because I had people on the crew that went to see it because I wanted to make sure that there was no crossover. I didn’t watch it until after I was done with the film, but The Children from 1980 was a big influence. That trailer scared me as a kid, watching the kids on the bus go through the gas and then turn into killer kids. When the girl killed her mom in the original Night of the Living Dead was a big reference point. But definitely The Birds, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but also other movies like Bad News Bears and those early Amblin movies. Those coming-of-age films. There’s also a lot of references to Bird with the Crystal Plumage in there, too. It’s kind of a Pied Piper story, so that was really the starting point for it.
There must have been serious hurdles to not just filming a movie that involves so many children, but also in terms of its rating and censorship. Was there anything you shot that had to be cut or toned down?
ER: The whole reason I started The Horror Section was to completely bypass that system and go directly to the theaters. Now that Terrifier 3 kicked the door open for the rest of us and you can have an unrated movie go out in 2000 theaters, you know that fans want to go see those movies in theaters. Before, you could never release an unrated movie like this, but now after what Damien Leone did, you can. So I set up an independent studio, I went right to the theaters, I’m self-releasing it, and I didn’t even deal with the MPAA. I just made the movie the way I wanted to make it. We shot it, cut it, and we’re putting it out in the theaters raw and unfiltered.
Every movie I’ve ever made, at some point someone has said, “You have to take this out, or we’re not releasing the movie.” I just didn’t want to deal with that anymore. I’m just tired of it. I think they’re wrong. I think Terrifier 3 proved that they are all strong. In the past, I’ve been like, “I shouldn’t have taken that out. I shouldn’t have cut that down,” but you’re dealing with a corporation in a studio. That’s what they do. They’re so afraid, and it’s an abstract argument. There’s no proof that they’re right or that you’re right, but that’s where I know great horror lives. It’s got that bit of danger to it. You go, “You’re not supposed to do that,” “Should I be watching this?”
Even Evil Dead II, Faces of Death, or whatever it was when you get a tape. Whenever you’re going, “I shouldn’t watch this,” it becomes the most exciting kind of horror. Even The Ring. It’s got to be great. It’s got to be original. There has to be an incredible story that people have never seen before, but I faced no issues whatsoever other than my own budget. The whole purpose of starting my own studio is that I could take an idea like Ice Cream Man, that I’ve always wanted to do and that everyone told me I couldn’t, and just go for it.
On that note, there are so many amazing kills in this movie. What’s your favorite and which was the most challenging to pull off?
ER: There are a few, yeah. My original idea was the mother waking up and seeing her daughter just standing over her; she picks up a hacksaw and just cuts her head off. The dad wakes up, looks over, and the daughter is just smiling and cutting the head off and like, “Hi, Daddy.” Then the kid bashes his face in. So actually doing all that was extremely satisfying. There were a couple other ones that I don’t want to give away that really turned out great. I was just really lucky. I sat down with Steve Newburn at Applied Arts FX Studio. They’re incredible. I told them, “I want to do more kills. I want to basically beat every kill I’ve ever done and do more kills in this movie than all my other movies combined.” Adrian Moreau was incredibly genius. We did Thanksgiving together, and she did some very specific effects for me on this one. She won the Oscar for The Whale, so we had an incredibly talented team and just went for it. The kids in the movie, their parents are all horror movie fans, so we talked to them about everything.
Once you put the kids in the gore and in the makeup, they go right into it. They get it. They understand that this is like Halloween and pretend. There’s the bit where they’re pulling apart a body — they call it a “taffy pull” — we did this fake trailer, “The Piano Killer,” with Hailey Kittle. I also worked with her in Trick VR Treat, and she was in Thanksgiving. I said, “I’m going to drop a piano on you,” so we had her fake body and thought, “Let’s kill Hailey, and then we can use the body from “The Piano Killer” and pull it apart in Ice Cream Man. I recycled the same body parts.
It was unreal doing it all with the kids, though. You can’t believe what you’re watching, and the kids were having a great time. It was Christmas morning for them. Justin Harding, who was my Second Unit Director, his son Bowen is a baseball player. So it made sense to give Bowen the axe so that he could really give a good swing to cut Hailey in half. He is so good and so athletic, so he could really go for it. He’s just gleefully swinging the bat, and we’re just on the ground pumping blood at him. The kids were just laughing and having the time of their lives.
The main actors are so good, too. I really didn’t want “kid acting.” I wanted the same acting as when you’re watching Stranger Things or the ’70s Bad News Bears. These kids are real kids, and I didn’t want it to feel like movie dialogue. I wanted the kids to swear and talk the way that real 12-year-olds talk to each other and the way that bullies talked to me in the ’80s. I verified it with all the kids to know that this is exactly what the bullying in schools sounds like. This is how they’d talk and what they say when the adults, parents, and teachers aren’t around. I wanted it to feel naturalistic, and like you’ve just been dropped into this small town that has all this drama. Then you’re just with these kids, trying to survive this “kidpocalypse,” and trying to figure out why this is happening and how to get out of it.
I’m a huge fan of the Clint Howard Ice Cream Man from 1995. There’s also a great Tales from the Crypt episode with Bill Pullman and Brad Dourif that plays in this space. Why do you think there’s this ongoing connection between ice cream men and horror?
ER: It’s interesting; I’ve never seen the Clint Howard film. I’m certainly aware of it. But this all came about from just watching this ice cream man handing out ice cream. It was during the Cabin Fever press tour in 2003. I was just watching this ice cream man and thinking, “We just trust them.” It could be a serial killer, you know? What if they just rolled into town and poisoned the kids? I thought that might be too fucked up, but then I thought of it as if it’s the Pied Piper. There’s something with the music. Kids just want to run out into the street and buy ice cream when they hear that ice cream man music. It’s such deep programming. So what if that was used to turn the kids against their parents?
Having a new daughter myself — having a baby — all you want to do is protect them. And you know that no matter what you do, you can’t. The outside world is going to get to them somehow. You can prepare them, but you can’t fully protect them. Some evil force will get into their head, and so what if that was turned against you? This thing that you loved and put everything into now wants to kill you. It’s the most horrible thought as a parent. After 20 years, it was kind of great to go in and re-approach it from that direction.
But I think ice cream men just have this inherent trust behind them. You see them, and you trust them. They come into the neighborhood, feed the kids, and then they leave, and you have no idea who they really were. Sure, they were an ice cream man, but what were they like? They were wearing a white hat, and they drove an ice cream truck, but anyone can do that. It was such a perverse, sick thought. Like, “What if you turn Thanksgiving into something awful?”, “What if backpacking in Europe became a nightmare?”
That’s where great horror lives. It’s when you take something that’s seemingly innocent and then make it dark. “What if the kids are playing jump rope, but then they get turned, and they’re playing jump rope with guts?” At the beginning of the film, they’re playing “Pin the Tail on the Donkey,” but then it’s “Pin the Knife in the Teacher.” Or you’re playing little league baseball, but now you’re bashing your dad’s head in with the bat. It’s taking all the fun, innocent things from childhood and then twisting them with a horror spin.
Ice Cream Man is in theaters on August 7.
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