Interviews
How ‘Sweet Revenge’ Director & Star Brought a New Jason and New Final Girl to the Screen [Interview]
After 16 long years, Jason Voorhees is back in Sweet Revenge — and no one is more excited than the vignette’s writer-director, Mike P. Nelson.
“When you get that offer, to start, you’re kind of like, ‘Oh man, I need to really think about this.’ Because this is not something that just comes to you whenever. It was really exciting,” Nelson tells Bloody Disgusting.
“This idea presented itself to me right away. The wheels started turning, and I was like, ‘Oh my god, I think I know where I want to go with this.’ For me, it was always about bringing back that initial feeling of those movies without just rehashing the same story.”
He continues, “I wanted to bring something new to it, but also something to give us those warm, cozy feelings that we had when we watched those first four Friday the 13th movies, which I think were groundbreaking for slashers.”
“After talking to Mike, I was so excited by his passion for the franchise,” adds Ally Ioannides, who stars in Sweet Revenge as Eve. “Getting asked to be a Friday the 13th final girl, I definitely understood the weight of that. I was in shock.”
She recalls, “I could just tell Mike really wanted Eve to be a full character, not just some final girl in a short. That got me really excited. And we had such a short time to prep for it, I didn’t have time to think about the weight of it. I was just like, ‘How can I make this hit as hard as possible?'”
Although Nelson sprinkled in Easter eggs, he was conscious not to go overboard with fan service. “You don’t want to upset the fans, but the approach to the film was to get enough of the feel, the look, take us back into the woods with the cabins by the lake and give us a really great, ferocious scene of a Jason attack.”
“When I was in the canoe getting pulled in the water, that was just so sick to be able to pay homage to literally one of the most iconic moments in any slasher movie,” Ioannides comments. “I was thinking about it all the time.”
Nelson replies, “It’s a short film. We don’t have a lot of time. It’s 13 minutes, and it just cruises. The key there was to give enough of the eye candy where you’re immersed in the world of Friday the 13th, and then just go to town and bring Jason in.”
Nelson sought to add to the legacy of Jason without altering the lore established in the movies. “We introduce this new character of Eve and see how she reacts to and deals with Jason in a very particular circumstance that happens to her,” he explains.
Ioannides, a horror fan herself, revisited the Friday the 13th movies to prepare for her part. “I definitely went back and did all my research like I was cramming for a test to make sure that I was gonna do it all justice. I wanted to give people the same feeling, even though she’s this new character.”
She continues, “Eve came from Mike and me, using my own feelings and trying to make it all as realistic as possible. I just wanted to put everything that I had into it.”
The project came together quickly. Nelson explains, “I literally came back from wrapping Silent Night, Deadly Night, and a couple weeks later, we’re suddenly in pre-production on this one. We shot it in seven days and started post-production right away. Post was done in a few weeks, and now it’s coming out.”
“It happened so fast,” Ioannides concurs. “We found out we were doing it, then tried to prep as much as possible, and then we basically shot it, like, two months ago, and now it’s coming out — so it’s truly been a whirlwind.”
“There was no time to overthink anything,” Nelson adds. “The focus was just to make this thing and bring Jason back in full force.”
Sweet Revenge was shot on Birch Island Lake in Wisconsin. “It’s the same lake that I shot my V/H/S/85 segment on, so it was the perfect place to return to,” Nelson notes. “There was familiarity. All the neighbors in the surrounding cabins that were a part of that short welcomed us back with open arms.”
Nelson describes the process as “pure indie filmmaking. We got up there and made the best of what we had. That was a fun throwback to doing it the way that we all came up doing it.
“That was something that was also very important to the people at Jason Universe and Horror Inc. They wanted to bring back that fervor of how those original movies were made. We did it just like that — a great crew, piecing things together, lots of problem solving on the fly — and I think that’s really what helped us find that vibe.”
The role of Jason is played by Schuyler White, who pulled double duty as the production’s stunt coordinator. “Schuyler is a super physical dude. I had worked with him before with him on Wrong Turn and V/H/S/85, and he’s always willing to get down on something that I’m working on,” says Nelson.
“When he came to the table as stunt coordinator, we started to talk, and he’s this incredible stuntman, he’s got all these world records, he’s, like, 6’5”. One thing that was discussed was we didn’t want to go, like, like wrestler-Jason. So we were like, ‘Schuyler just has the right vibe.’
“We dressed Schuyler up, and he just had the right size, the right demeanor, and he knew what shoes he was filling and just brought it the whole way. That was pretty exciting to see him kick into gear.”
“Schuyler, like Mike, is just such a fan and was so excited and so passionate the whole time,” says Ioannides. “Schuyler is such a fun person to have around and he’s such a hard worker. You could just tell, every single frame, every single take, he was trying to do everything that he could to give us this icon.”
“I’ve been making these kinds of movies since I was a teenager,” Nelson explains. “Jason’s always kind of been that building block for making those kinds of movies and those kinds of scares and that kind of violence on film, and so it was pretty amazing to have that moment where he walks in and you’re like, ‘Well, I’m actually doing Jason movie.’”
“I just happened to be in the makeup area when he first put on the whole getup, and it was insane,” Ioannides adds.
“We had Schuyler holed up in the cabin where we were doing all the makeup and costuming and stuff,” Nelson recalls. “Then finally, I remember coming outside and saying, ‘Alright, everybody. Let me present Jason Voorhees.’ And then he stepped out, and everybody on set clapped. It was a pretty surreal moment.”
Nelson is aware of the criticism of Jason’s new mask. “Like anything that’s new, it’s something to get used to. I understand a little bit of the pushback, because Jason has such a connection to so many people, myself included. I think when you watch the movie, you’re gonna be swept up in it, new mask or not.”
He continues, “We were just like, ‘Great, it’s a new mask, but it doesn’t matter. We’re still gonna make it look cool.’ For me, it’s all about how you shoot Jason, how you light Jason, and sometimes, honestly, what you don’t see in Jason that makes him just as formidable and fun to watch.”
Nelson would be happy to continue the story of Sweet Revenge if the opportunity presents itself. “I think it’d be fun to see what happens next between Jason and a character like Eve. That would be something that I’d be very interested in seeing and would obviously love to be a part of it.”
“Mike, you really have been training for your whole life for this without realizing it. You are the perfect person to do this,” Ioannides adds. “I love Eve, I love what we made, and I would love to continue it, for sure.”
“It creates a new tale without diverting from the original material, and that is, I think, where Jason and Friday the 13th need to go,” Nelson concludes. “It’s what would get me excited, and I feel like it’s what’s gonna get other people excited.”
Watch the full Sweet Revenge short film below.
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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