Filmmaker Addison Heimann has been very open about his own struggles with mental illness. He excels at storytelling that is personal and relatable, with the perfect dose of humor, and proves that it’s possible to work through difficult aspects of your life through the creation of art.
His first feature film, the horror comedy Hypochondriac (2022), revolves around a young man who descends into madness and begins exhibiting troubling physical symptoms, as well as hallucinations of two wolves, as the physical manifestation of his past trauma.
Heimann’s new film, Touch Me, is hilarious, horny, and deeply personal, and features lots of tentacles. Written and directed by Heimann, the film tells the story of Joey, played by Olivia Taylor Dudley (Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension, Crawlspace), and Craig, played by Jordan Gavaris (Orphan Black, The Lake), roommates who are both damaged, codependent, and carry around a lot of unresolved trauma. Joey is recovering from a brief, but intense relationship with an alien named Brian, played by Lou Taylor Pucci (Evil Dead, Spring), who has the cosmic ability to erase anxiety or depression by having what he calls “interspecies intercourse,” which translates to neon-drenched tentacle sex.
When Brian invites Joey and Craig to spend a weekend at his enormous compound, they can’t resist and are forced to decide between his addictive alien magnetism and endless bliss or self-reflection and the importance of their friendship. The team behind Rustic Films (The Endless, Synchronic), David Lawson, Jr., Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead serve as executive producers on Touch Me.
During a recent press day, Bloody Disgusting had the pleasure of talking with Addison Heimann about his personal inspiration for Touch Me, creating Brian’s outrageous alien aesthetic, and the extraordinary practical effects.
Bloody Disgusting: I’m a big fan of your first film Hypochondriac, which was very personal for you because you used humor to tell the story of your own struggles with mental health issues in a way that is relatable. How personal is Touch Me, which deals with anxiety, depression, and trauma, and what was your inspiration for writing this story?
Addison Heimann: On the surface, it might not look like it’s just as personal as Hypochondriac, but it is. It’s weird to say that because you have all these jokes. I think Hypochondriac ends with this hopeful tone of, it’s hard and you’ll always be with the wolf, but if you can learn to love it and embrace it, it will turn into a child again and you’ve just got to nurture it. I was like, “Hell yeah, look at me overcoming this thing!” And then of course, I immediately get back into another spiral, and I was like, “This is unfair.”
I had gone through a really terrible friendship breakup, which was kind of the initial aspect of this, and I was kind of looking for anything and everything to numb the mental illness that was just completely blowing me in the face. I finally got the diagnosis of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and I decided to essentially create the story examining this friendship that was so meaningful to me and how I fucked up in it and also use this weird and wacky tone to kind of emulate what it’s like to live with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.
So, it’s like if Hypochondriac is what it’s like to live with a breakdown, Touch Me is about what it’s like to live with OCD. And kind of learning once again that despite the fact that you may have gone through something once and survived, there is no quick fix and ultimately, once again, it’s still a journey and it’s a long one.
BD: Lou Taylor Pucci is so good and so funny as Brian, who is an alien who dresses in track suits, has a man bun, and likes to dance to hip hop. How did you come up with his whole aesthetic?
AH: To me, Brian comes down and he’s a little worm, he infects a human and he wakes up and turns on YouTube and absorbs the things he likes. I guess it’s like MTV from the eighties and Japanese culture and then, weirdly, mafia velour track suit style. He’s basically an amalgamation of culture that he finds interesting because he’s an alien and he’s a child. So, that’s how he comes up with his titular look; it’s just what he finds interesting as a person, who generally is just attracted to shiny things. So, the shinier, the better, right? The velour track suits are shiny, Joey is shiny, Craig is shiny, and dancing feelsshiny. It’s like that thing where Ididn’t expect what everybody thought to be the best joke of the movie where he’s like, “I guess I’m like five years old,” and seeing their reaction to it. When I was talking to Lou, I was like, “This is how you approach the character.” Because you read it and you can do it 1800 different ways.
The thing I love about Lou is his simplicity and his naturalness. Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead are producers on this film, so that’s how we got the connection to Lou. He worked with an acting coach, he did hip hop, and he worked out. He wanted to dye his hair black because he didn’t just want to look like Jesus and I was like, “I get it.” Now he just looks like Jared Leto, which was not intentional [laughs]! I have no comment on anything to do with other celebrities. I was thinking goth Jesus, but Lord knows, the internet is going to speculate.
BD: Oh my God, now I can’t unsee Jared Leto! [laughs]
AH: That’s the top comment on Reddit and the top comment on Twitter and I’m like, “I cannot categorically confirm or deny any sort of biopic as it were.”
BD: This movie has such a great cast. Brian is very manipulative; he’s almost like a cult leader. Olivia Taylor Dudley and Jordan Gavaris play Joey and Craig, who are both very needy people, but I love their dynamic. Are any of these characters based on real people in your life?
AH: Brian is less based on a person and more of an idea, of idealized hero. Did I have a narcissist in my life who I took inspiration from? Haven’t we all. But Joey and Craig are directly based off of real people and Craig obviously is me [laughs]. But I swear I’m better now. I’m a better person [laughs]. Laura is just a pure nonsense creation, so she’s not a real person, but Joey and Craig very much are. Brian is more like the metaphor of what it would be like to be addicted to essentially heroin or any kind of drug of choice.
BD: Touch Me features tentacle sex and lots of blood and goo. Can you talk a little bit about the creature effects?
AH: Russell FX, Josh and Sierra Russell, are just the bee’s knees. They did David Bruckner’s Hellraiser. They do big projects, they do small projects, and they, like me, really like tentacles. So, I was very grateful that they were able to get onboard with us. Everything you see in the movie is practical, of course aided with a smattering of VFX to clean up certain things. But everything you see, all the tentacles, is practical. The monster reveal at the end is a two-foot puppet in water, puppeteered, both inside and outside. We have giant tentacles from the POV, we have heads exploding, we have real blood, that totaled my car because we all forgot to put mats down on the vents, but that’s okay.
That was a very fun thing to explain to my mechanic where he was like, “I think an animal died in here,” and I said, “Oh no, I’m a just a horror movie director.” Thankfully, it’s Los Angeles, but I was coming back and I thought, “Are the cops just going to show up because they think I murdered someone?” [laughs] Those are the best days. Josh and Sierra and their whole team are so on it, and it was such a genuine joy to work with actual practical effects. I think my whole goal with this movie, not only am I homaging pink films from the sixties and seventies in Japan, which have this kind of theatrical storytelling, but there is something that is so beautifully tangible about practical effects. It’s not about looking real, it’s about creating the essence of tactileness and that to me is what makes or breaks a movie like this, because we don’t have millions of dollars to create the most perfect, shiny VFX. Instead, going lo-fi and going practical in fact, makes it feel sexier and more real and more deliberate.
Yellow Veil Pictures will release Touch Me exclusively in NY on March 20, limited theatrical release March 27, and on demand and digital April 7.
