Interviews
How Rick Baker Inspired the ‘V/H/S/Halloween’ Segment Pitched as an R-Rated ‘Goosebumps’ Episode
The popular found footage franchise V/H/S brings the holiday spirit with its latest entry, V/H/S/Halloween, featuring six segments of Halloween horror carnage and mayhem.
“Home Haunt,” the segment written and directed by filmmaking duo Micheline Pitt-Norman & R.H. Norman, comes closest to capturing the classic Halloween aesthetic with a story centered around a home haunt gone wrong when a cursed record, featuring music provided by Joseph Bishara, transforms the decor and animatronics into murderous denizens.
Speaking with Bloody Disgusting ahead of the film’s debut on Shudder today, the filmmakers revealed that they conceived multiple ideas for their segment in the latest V/H/S, but their logline for “Home Haunt” was too good to resist. “They asked us for different pitches, and we’re like, well, this one is Peter Jackson directing an R-rated Goosebumps episode,” Pitt-Norman says.
Further helping sell the concept is that the Normans enlisted a family friend to appear in their segment: retired SFX legend and Oscar winner Rick Baker (An American Werewolf in London, The Wolfman, Men in Black). Baker did, after all, inspire “Home Haunt.”
Photo Credit: Charlotte Townsend
R.H. Norman explains, “Have you ever seen his big Halloween thing he does? He’s actually the inspiration for this; he does this big thing every Halloween. We’re very fortunate to be good friends with Rick and his wonderful family. They’re very close to us, and we try to go as often as we can whenever we’re in town to go to his big Halloween thing. You see kids lined up for a mile in Toluca Lake, and he always has his makeup effects that are crazy, but he also will have some kind of stage show with walls built and everything.
“We were thinking, well, ‘What if Rick killed all of Toluca Lake with his maze? We were over at his house for dinner one night, and I’m telling him, ‘I’m working on this thing, it might sound familiar to you. This guy who makes this home haunt maze in LA, and it kills half the neighborhood.’ He’s looking at me, and his wife just goes, ‘Well, you gotta put him in it.‘ I was like, done. We love Rick dearly, and that was the best part of this whole thing for us. It was like a full-circle moment, because I got to work on his last project before he retired, and then he got to work on our first feature film.”
It’s a killer concept, but one that’s incredibly ambitious. The practical effects and technical demands of “Home Haunt” presented unique challenges for the filmmakers, who are also working on the body horror movie Cosmetic with James Wan. Considering the sheer variety of classic Halloween monsters included in the segment, and not a huge budget to build them, Pitt-Norman and team got creative with the makeups.
“Home Haunt” Gore SFX. Photo Credit: Charlotte Townsend
Pitt-Norman explains, “What’s interesting about our makeups is we actually did something called kit bashing. When you have very little money to work with, and you are as ambitious as we are, you can’t really do custom creatures, because that’s $10,000 to $20,000 and up. Then you’re talking about full suits, you’re in the six figures at that point. So, we went to a company called RBFX, which has pre-made, high-quality industry prosthetics. And so these are pieces that he had, and we kitbashed, which means we cut things up, took pieces from other pieces, put everything together to create unique and new characters. He also did our lenses for our ghouls, because we didn’t have enough money to have contacts; we ran out of money, so he and I problem-solved with plastic dome lens. I’ll also say Carleigh Herbert, our makeup artist, is brilliant. She’s the one who applied everything, collaborated with us on the designs, and honestly, we couldn’t have successfully kit bashed makeups like this without someone as talented as Carleigh and her entire team.”
Bringing the monsters to life on screen wasn’t the most intimidating aspect of helming “Home Haunt.” For R.H. Norman, the most stressful part of production was tackling the challenging final sequence that unleashes a wicked green witch as she zips around on her broom to slaughter.
If you pay attention to the credits, note the actor portraying this quintessential Halloween icon, the Flying Witch, in this technically ambitious sequence: “Witcheline.”
“Home Haunt” behind the scenes. Photo Credit: Charlotte Townsend
That’s co-director Micheline Pitt-Norman herself, who breaks down how daunting this sequence was to tackle. “At the end sequence, where the witch steals the camera and starts killing kids, and trust me, we would have killed more kids if we had more time and money. We’re both really nervous, because they said it’d be on a moving rig that was not being pushed by a person, but the Rickshaw, a three-wheel, go-kart kind of thing. It had to be whoever was gonna be the witch you saw, forearm forward, and they had to hit all these different marks. You have a cameraman, you’ve got another operator, you’ve got someone running the blood tank. You’ve got a child’s body attached to it; they have to rip their head off, and we’re just both sitting there, thinking this is insane, what we’re trying to achieve in one take, one shot, no cutaways. I think I should do it. Because then our line of communication and what we’re trying to achieve, I feel like no one’s gonna take this as seriously as me, and I feel like I could do it.”
Norman adds, “We had to hit 15 marks for that on a moving thing. There were three people on this Rickshaw. There was a guy on a skateboard with a blood pump, and there was a dummy, and there was a dummy hanging off the side. The blood had to pump from the skateboard at the right time that the dummy was taken off, and the girl had to cross over at exactly the right second. Micheline had to pull it off, keep the head in the frame of the camera, and hit the right mark with throwing it.
“We should not have tried that. They were all having fun, and I’m just sitting here going, ‘oh my god, this doesn’t work, and this is a whole day, and they’re gonna eat us alive.’ I was watching it from the sidelines, terrified, and they were laughing gleefully.”
See the tricky camera and stunt work in action; V/H/S/Halloween is now streaming on Shudder!
Lize Johnston as the Witch in “Home Haunt” behind the scenes. Photo Credit: Charlotte Townsend
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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