It’s a franchise that’s become permanently entrenched in pop culture and is largely analogous to modern ghost stories. They’re films that make a lot of sense in an age of rapidly evolving technology and means of surveillance. It’s a bold and brave experiment to adapt this sprawling supernatural found footage franchise into a stageplay. Horror, in theater, is a challenging feat to pull off in general, let alone with a title like Paranormal Activity that carries such expectations. 

Broadway’s Paranormal Activity doesn’t just come with the film franchise’s legacy, but its stage adaptation is being handled by an incredible creative team. Paranormal Activity is written by Levi Holloway (The Grey House) and directed by Felix Barrett, the artistic director of Punchdrunk, who was behind New York City’s acclaimed immersive theater experience, Sleep No More. They’re both storytellers who know how to play with perception and highlight the slow dissolution of reality, which are both key components of Paranormal Activity’s sinister structure.

With Paranormal Activity’s Broadway run now officially in motion, Barrett opens up about translating the stylized horror franchise to the stage, the importance of challenging set and sound design, and how to create visceral terror that feeds off the audience. 

BLOODY DISGUSTING: To start things off, what was the biggest challenge of not just adapting a horror franchise into a stage play, but one that’s so steeped in the stylistic device of found footage?

FELIX BARRETT: Great question. I jumped on this because I loved the film. I immediately said yes to adapting it before actually really thinking it through. Then, as soon as Levi [Holloway] was on board, it was a discussion about the presentation style. Found footage works very well for the medium of film, but if we’re doing something live for the stage, then we need to adapt the medium for the stage. There was actually an earlier version of the script where we started inside the theater, and we were being quite literal about everything.

Very quickly we decided that we can’t have cameras everywhere because it will remove the audience from the experience and create some distance from the thrills, tragedy, and shock of it all. So we instead went back to the element from the films that this is a real couple. They weren’t famous actors. It was shot as completely truthfully as possible. So we took that plausibility and tried to apply it to the stage. We really wanted the audience to feel like they’re the camera and voyeuristically looking into this house. Nothing is played out to the front of the stage. It needs to feel quite intimate because you, as an audience member, are essentially in the same role. 

The multi-room cross-section set design I thought was the perfect way to kind of emulate the movies’ visual design. It slowly conditions the audience to watch multiple rooms at the same time. 

FB: Exactly! I got some of that from Sleep No More, where there were like a hundred rooms in the show. There’s a lot of empty space going on in this show. I love the threat that can come from negative space. You can’t quite see everything, which is the reason why the show is so dark. If you could see inside the rooms clearly, then there’d be no mystery there. If you can’t quite make everything out, then your eyes start playing tricks on you, and you don’t know what you can trust. It felt like an exciting way to approach all this.

There was actually a really early version where we did have much more camera stuff. We thought that Jimmy would be filming things, but as soon as we put it on the screen it undermined the whole truth of it. It starts to feel stylized. 

Interesting. So there were videos that were being shot that would then be shown on screen?

FB: Yeah, and we knew we didn’t want to do some sort of abstract stylized screen-heavy piece of theater because that’s having a bit of a moment right now on Broadway. I didn’t feel like jumping in on a fad. I also think that it would break everything if it becomes this Brechtian out-of-body experience. We wanted to be in the story with that couple and worry about them, what’s going to happen next, and how they’re going to cope. Screens have an amazing way of dislocating the audience. 

There’s a Zoom call at the top of a scene where Lou is just chatting to her colleagues. We shot a lot thinking that you’d see it, and if you could turn the screen around, then you would see it. But it’s better to just see the cast. It puts you inside their heads, and it really makes it feel like you’re actually spying on them. It’s this sort of Peeping Tom thing. There was another bit where we had Jimmy filming the nursery once all the writing is up on the wall, but it just starts to feel weird. It’s derivative and a bit clichéd.

What I think makes the Paranormal Activity films so special – and something that you capture so well in this production – is that they’re these gutting human dramas that also feature supernatural elements. Travis and Cher really do incredible work in these roles that’s just as powerful as any of the horror.

FB: Oh my gosh, their dynamic was so critical to the production from moment one. We talked about how this is essentially a love story. You’re seeing a portrait of a marriage and a couple who are pretty tight and solid, in the amazing throes of love. All that gets forced apart by an entity. In rehearsal, we talked about how we want the audience to look at this relationship and view it as this amazing display of love that hopefully everyone gets to experience at some point in their lives. We wanted their dynamic to be really infectious, in the same way that screams are infectious when they ricochet through a crowd. It’s the same when you watch a happy couple in love. 

We really wanted to be as truthful as possible to all that. It’s haunting when you reveal that this isn’t a beautiful safe space and all that happiness gets ripped open. Travis and Cher are so incredible because they are such genuine performances. It’s very much themselves up there. There’s no artifice. The characters are woven through the fabric of their own being, rather than implanted on top. It makes it really resonate for the audience. 

I was curious how their performances would come across because there can be a real theatricality to stage performances that’s antithetical to how the Paranormal Activity films work.

FB: I appreciate that because we really tried. There’s such an amazing history to scary things on stage, particularly in this country. The Woman in Black played for 23 years here. When I saw it, it was so hokey. It’s exaggerated, theatrical, and operatic, but I didn’t find it scary at all. What’s scary is that sort of mundane part of life where something could be behind me. That’s the advantage of when something invades that safe, domestic space and gets under your skin. So I’m delighted that that worked for you. 

One of the most entertaining aspects of the Paranormal Activity films is how the sense of dread and danger progressively builds over time. Was it challenging to translate that to stage and build increasing tension with each scene?

FB: I think that’s my safe space as a director. When it comes to horror films, I’m drawn to the ones that have creeping dread. I don’t like gore. I don’t really like violence. But I love that sense of gentle unease when you feel the tendrils of doubt wrap around your body and leave you chilled. So it was actually a joy to do that in this show. We always knew it was going to have a false sense of security and then descend into the abyss. I just love all the tools as a director that you have, from light to sound, to actually thicken the atmosphere and tighten it. 

I was really blown away by the practical effects and use of visual tricks that are done here to bring the show’s scares to life. That trapdoor fall early on is so, so effective. Can you talk a little bit about workshopping these scares and figuring out the best way to bring these horror moments to life?

FB: Well, it’s interesting. We had a really early version of the draft at one point that was just Levi and I working on it. We were talking about the things that we would find the most frightening, like when someone just stops. Things that are uncanny and weird, but not schlocky. So that moment ended up in the script. We were speaking to various creative teams and trying to find the right alchemy of people. I remember a few who had said, “How the hell are you going to do that?” Well, if you’re asking that question, then you’re probably not the right person to do it.

We’re lucky to have the genius of Chris Fisher, who is the Illusions Designer, who also worked on Harry Potter & the Cursed Child and Stranger Things: The First Shadow. In Sleep No More, we had a couple of magic tricks, but the illusionist only came in like the last week before we opened. It was just like an extra cherry on the cake. For this process, we did the opposite. Before we’d even fully designed a set or had all our team members, we spent a week in London figuring out how to play with these tricks and how you can manifest a haunting. I told Chris that I don’t want to know how these things are done. We talked about all the things that we’re trying to do, but I came in as an audience member who was just blown away. Now, frustratingly, I know how some of them are done. But I knew that it could scare ourselves in the cold light of day, playing around with cardboard; then we were on to something. Chris is just a genius.

The reactions in the audience were bigger than the reactions I’ve experienced in the movie theater for the Paranormal Activity movies. It must have been so satisfying to just hear that stuff connect and know that it’s working.

FB: It’s an absolute privilege. With Sleep No More, everyone is in masks, so you don’t actually know how stuff has connected until you’re at the bar afterwards. So I’ve never experienced this where you get everyone responding as one. There are points in the show where we can gauge how raucous the crowd will be, and it’s very satisfying for the cast to experience. What I love is you get a scream, but then you also get a beat, and then you get laughter. And that’s so cathartic. We, oddly enough, talk about the show being quite joyous because of that. There are as many smiles and laughs as there are screams, which feels really important.

I was also really taken by the use of lighting and shadow in order to create even greater tension. The use of natural lighting from the flashlight and the cell phone in specific scenes is really effective. How did you approach lighting and figure out the right aesthetic there?

FB: Anna Watson, our Lighting Designer, is just the best. We’re blessed with the most incredible team where everyone is a master of their field. When we first spoke with Anna, we were talking about how we didn’t want it to feel like a play. We wanted it to feel real. We were quite restrained and doing less. Typically, in a play, you’d have someone pretending to use a flashlight, and you’d have a little bit of throw light. We wanted to embrace the things and make light and shadow our best friend. 

With darkness, you want the audience to have to color in details themselves. They have to fill that space in, and therefore they become more invested in it. That’s where the real fear lies in the audience’s minds. So we knew that we wanted things to be shrouded in darkness. It’s why the top room — the nursery — doesn’t have any natural light. It’s all deliberate choices so that the house is never fully lit. It makes you paranoid that something is going to come out from somewhere.

Sound design is also such an important element in selling scares, in both theater and cinema. You do such great work with the audio in this show. How did you figure out and refine things there?

FB: Oh my gosh, you should see the amount of time that’s been spent on the tech. It’s so meticulous. Gareth Fry, our Sound Designer, is also one of the most experienced people. He’s won Tonys and everything. He’s an absolute master. If you switch the sound off and there was no sound, I don’t think that the show would work. I think it would be interesting, but it wouldn’t have any impact. The thickness, the dread, and the trouble all come from the sound. I hope it feels quite effortless, but you should see the smorgasbord of sound cues and the level of detail that’s going on there. There’s so much layering and even moments where the inflections of single words have something audio-based to support them. 

The Paranormal Activity films always do such a good job of ending on these abrupt, unsettling, chaotic notes, and this show is no exception. Was it difficult to figure out the right energy for the show’s finish and how to go out?

FB: Yes, absolutely. That was the other thing that we took from the films. We wanted to honor their restraint, the plausibility of the couple, and I knew that we had to match the ending because that’s the bit that I loved when I saw the film. Those last few seconds where everything escalates like it’s an exponential crescendo. On day one, we were like, “How the hell do you do that on stage?” It’s been hard. I’ve got to say, we’ve actually changed that ending. We’ve changed it for this version from when we first did it in the UK. It had a different ending then, but it wasn’t brutal enough. So we’ve scaled it up and made it more abrupt. It makes it feel like there’s maybe some hope, but then it’s a sucker punch to the audience. It’s our way of paying respect to Oren [Peli] and the original film. 

This show had previous runs on the West End, Chicago, and Boston. You mentioned the ending being revised, but was there anything learned from those runs that led to any changes in the Broadway production?

FB: Yeah, there are multiple things. You learn so much of that by going back to the audience and their screams. We’ve been honing and perfecting everything for this Broadway version. There’s a bunch here that wasn’t in the past versions. There’s a bit at the end of Act One which is completely new. I don’t want to say what it is to spoil it for the audience, but it’s a whole new illusion. It’s a whole new bit of stagecraft that’s baked into it. And then there are also little changes, inflections, and tweaks throughout the show. 

So much of this stuff, in both film and on stage, comes down to timing. It’s been really interesting to speak with film producers. When you’re making a horror film, you do your first cut, and then you screen test it and work out the bits that don’t land how they should, and then you go back and reshoot it or re-cut it. It’s a very similar process for us as we explore different things in different territories. If the bits don’t land like we want them to, then we amend them. Sometimes you need that beat before something lands. You attack people when they feel like they’re in a safe space. It’s been so much fun to make the screams louder or the gasps more acute on Broadway. This is the definitive version of it.

After successfully tackling a stage version of Paranormal Activity, would you be interested in adapting any other horror classics?

FB: Absolutely. This just whetted our appetite for what’s possible. As a team, we’re definitely knocking on the door of some titles because there are some things that we would love to do. We’d also love to do a thriller, too. I hope it’s just the beginning.

I think of The Blair Witch Project as this formative found footage predecessor to Paranormal Activity, which had me thinking if it’s possible to do a version of that on stage.

FB: I’d love to do Blair Witch in like a Sleep No More fashion. The scale of Sleep No More and with that much autonomy. That would be absolutely terrifying and amazing to do in a forest. But for now, on stage, there are things that we really want to do.

The post Haunting Broadway & Beyond: Director Felix Barrett On Adapting ‘Paranormal Activity’ To The Stage appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

The South Korean horror movie follows Professor Se-jeong as she is thrust into a terrifying hellscape when a mutating virus is unleashed during a biotech conference, forcing authorities to seal the facility to contain the outbreak.

Like George A. Romero, Yeon Sang-ho wields his zombies as a means of exploring contemporary fears and social issues, and Colony sets a target on mounting anxieties tied to artificial intelligence.

“When I’m thinking of, or imagining these films, I always think about what parts of society do I want to see reflected in this film? I think every work that I’ve ever done has some reflection of society in one way or another,” Yeon Sang-ho tells Bloody Disgusting of his approach to zombies and horror.

“The series Hellbound, for example, there are monsters,” he continues. “They deal with monsters from hell, but also, it’s a reflection of human society. The series I did, Human Vapor, also has very specific societal elements that are reflected in the series. The reason that I feel that it’s important to find some resemblance of society in these zombie genre films is because I feel like that is a way to make the fear and the horror feel much more visceral and palpable when it is closer to our society and actually does point to a facet of our society. Also, not just from a societal perspective, but I also feel like from an entertainment perspective, that is also something very important.”

“In this film particularly, I wanted to really hone in on the contrast between zombies versus humans, namely in the zombie group: they start out primitive, but as they evolve, they achieve more and more collective intelligence.”

He continues, “Whereas the humans begin as this civilized group, but over the course of the film, they descend more and more into barbaric and primitive inclinations due to their selfishness.”

How does AI factor into the zombie equation?

The filmmaker explains, “The thing that I focused on was the way that AI develops or evolves. Sometimes, AI almost feels so human and so human-like, but then there are mistakes or glitches that they would make that a human being would never make. I wanted to focus on that aspect, to come up with the way that these zombies developed as well.”

Those glitches led to inspiration for the way these zombies moved and evolved: “What I thought of was, I thought it would be good to incorporate modern dance elements into the movement of these zombies. This is sort of an abstract concept, but I wanted the zombies to learn in a way that is different from the learning process of humans. I felt that modern dance choreographers have quite a bit of experience turning abstract concepts into physical form or physical movement. I worked with a lot of modern dance choreographers to come up with a lot of these signature movements.”

That approach pays off in Colony, with some truly impressive choreographed zombie sequences.

So much so it even surprised the director, “One scene that I will say that I was very surprised by was there is a moment where one of the zombies is doing an internet search, and the choreographers really worked their choreo into that scene in a way that was quite surprising and satisfying.”

Discover it for yourself when Colony arrives in theaters this week.

The post ‘Train to Busan’ Director Yeon Sang-ho Explains How AI Inspired the Zombies in ‘Colony’ appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

For the past decade, Wingard’s been working with other people’s franchises, playing in the realms of Blair Witch, Death Note, and, of course, Legendary’s MonsterVerse. With his latest film, an action-horror assault set in the same world as You’re Next and The Guest, Wingard re-teamed with longtime collaborator Simon Barrett to create a gnarly, relentless, well, onslaught on the senses.

Set in a desert trailer park, the movie follows Celeste (Adria Arjona), a single mom still nursing wartime trauma from her time in the military, who faces down the fight of her life when a group of super-soldiers developed by a third-generation Nazi scientist (Dan Stevens) happen upon her home, her daughter, and her friends. What follows is an all-out battle for survival, complete with gnarly kills, connections to past Wingard/Barrett productions, and more.

So, how did this movie come together? What did the MonsterVerse teach Wingard about filmmaking? What’s the secret to a good chainsaw kill? Bloody Disgusting sat down with Wingard after a special screening of the film in August to talk about all of that and more.

Bloody Disgusting: In terms of story, how far back does Onslaught go with you and [co-writer Simon Barrett]? How far back are you knocking this idea around?

Adam Wingard: Well, it’s interesting because Simon and I have developed a lot of scripts over the years that we haven’t made yet. There’s been a lot of other potential successors or even potential trilogy toppers that we just haven’t been able to make for whatever reason. This film, actually, it really started in the middle of the production of the last Godzilla film. I’ve been doing franchise IP stuff for the last 10 years, at least. The hardest thing about doing franchise things is you’re playing by somebody else’s rules or preexisting style rules and all that kind of stuff.

Even on top of that, there are so many politics and the compromises that go along with that. Halfway through the last Godzilla movie, I was just sort of like, ‘You know what? I don’t want to do another studio picture just yet,’ even though I had a couple lined up. Face/Off 2 was almost one. My initial thought was, well, I’ll just spend $300,000 of my own money, do it old school, go out, utilize the fact that I know people like Rebecca [Hall] and Dan [Stevens], and maybe tailor a small movie around them. I started kicking this idea around.

I knew I wanted to do a movie about a parent. I started thinking about this idea of more of a paranoid conspiracy thriller that takes place in a trailer park. I kicked that idea around on my own for a little while. Then suddenly, it hit me one day that this idea would work better as an action movie and [it could be] a little bit bigger. I talked to Simon, and he and I started kicking around the idea, and it just kept getting bigger and bigger.

I think what’s cool about that is that the genesis of it really was very much in the exact same vein of how we would have developed movies back in the day. When you’re doing smaller stuff, especially when you’re coming up, you’re designing a film around the resources that you have and that you know that you can pull off or maximize. Because this started off in that sort of way, it was interesting because we were able to expand it in a bigger movie way, but the heart of it still had the same heart that we would have had even back then.

BD: You said you really wanted to tell a story about a parent. What was the attraction to that concept?

AW: When I look at this as a trilogy, especially because You’re Next and The Guest were at a completely different phase of my career, those films have this youthfulness to it. There’s a giddiness of the naivety of what’s to come. Having lived all these experiences in the studio [world], and just being a person, it’s matured me in a way. It’s like I still wanted to bring the same irresponsible B-movie thing. I like to call this an A-plus B movie because that’s how I see it. Deliver on all the things that you want to satisfy for a B movie, but do it with the A polish that I’ve learned over the years.

I’m a parent now. I have an almost four-year-old daughter. That’s the thing that changed. It’s like when I had a kid, it opened up all these things, and I felt unprepared to be a parent in a lot of ways. It unlocked all these new fears. Suddenly, there was my personal story. I think when you’re doing the franchise IP thing, you’re trying to channel your creativity into a box that exists. At a certain point, you can only bring so much of yourself.

I think maybe in some ways for the last 10 years, I didn’t really have another story to tell yet. I think it was really being a parent is what gave me that new story and gave me something to frame all the fun stuff around, but I needed it to be grounded in something real. I have a feeling like the next couple of movies will probably also deal with that in one form or another as that evolves.

BD: You mentioned bringing all the polish from your studio work to this movie. What do you think you learned from doing two Godzilla movies that you can really see on screen in Onslaught?

AW: There’s just a confidence. Once you’ve done the biggest movies like the Godzillas and all that kind of stuff, you’ve touched on all the different facets of filmmaking at that point. You’ve done huge special effects, VFX. You’ve done helicopters. You’ve done explosions. You’ve checked all the boxes. You have this familiarity.

You’ve led massive armies of people all over the world and had to coordinate all that stuff. Ultimately, some of that stuff is the confidence that it builds you, but you have to throw that all out a little bit when you’re going back to a smaller movie because what the difference is really is smaller movies are, you have to be purely just crafty all the time. You have to be able to fly by the seat of your pants. You have to do that in the big movies too, but you have a lot more time to do it. Time management is the hardest thing about moviemaking.

I will say, also, probably one of the best things about going from big movies to small movies or back again is that you are able to meet lots of the most talented people. You’re able to bring them back with you because really at the end of the day, a lot of what that big money is buying is the ability, the access to talent, because people who have a lot of talent, they cost a lot of money. Those same people will be willing to step down with you because they believe in you, because they work with you, and you have a rapport. You’re able to bring these big movie resources down to a smaller one.

BD: With that in mind,what’s it like when you go to Dan Stevens and tell him ‘I’ve got a character for you, and you get to do an accent?’

AW: [Laughs] We designed the character for him. Right out of the gate, we knew we wanted to have this sort of evil third-generation Paperclip Nazi character. We specifically wrote it for Dan because Dan, he’s actually starred in a German movie. He speaks fluent German, and he likes to do it. We just tailored that for him, and it was because he could really.

BD: His character is a big part of the larger military industrial conspiracy at work in the movie. How long has that been a bug in your head? Is that a lifelong [love] of crazy military, industrial conspiracy theories?

AW: Yes. It’s funny. It all started for me … really, you could say in some ways it was started with 9/11 because that was the first time I remember being really exposed to a lot of conspiracies, because I was fascinated just with all the craziest things. That opened my mind to conspiracies as something that I was fascinated by. I don’t necessarily believe everything I hear, but I like to learn about them.

Sometimes they’re just great thought exercises. I think Flat Earth is a great thought exercise. I definitely don’t think the world’s flat. I love watching Flat Earth videos. [laughs] Really, this film, I would say, and the behind-the-scenes of the military thing, it weirdly started with when I saw that movie Downfall with Bruno Ganz as Hitler. That was one of these things where it was like, ‘Oh, these super evil Nazi guys were people at one point, and they didn’t necessarily see themselves as evil. That was a reality that existed.’

I think that started this real interest in the ultimate supervillains as Nazis. Then once you dive into that, you start learning about all the weird programs they did. Then you start learning about how we brought them over here. Then pretty much every conspiracy that’s existed since can be tied back to Operation Paperclip. The moon landing conspiracy, MKUltra, all the big stuff.

Hell, if you believe the 9/11 [conspiracy] stuff, it can all connect back to that moment where we made a pact with the Devil, and we brought these guys over. I’ve been fascinated with that. I wanted to see, if these guys came over then, how has that been developing behind the scenes? How can we play that up in almost like, mad scientist, tropey sort of way?

BD: You talked at the screening about how badass Adria Arjona was from the beginning of this movie, but what did she bring on an emotional level to this movie that you maybe didn’t expect? 

AW: I think that she was willing to bring a messiness to the character that I wasn’t expecting an actor to actually embrace. It’s something I wanted, but it’s hard to find somebody who can really do that because most actors aren’t willing to risk being unlikable. There’s just certain things that you just know. There’s just certain misogynistic things where some guys are just not going to like an actress if she yells at a guy. I was like, “Well, this is what this character is.”

Adria immediately was just, that was the first conversation we had, that she really wanted to embrace that, because her character’s a mess. She’s got PTSD. She’s a hermit. She’s not emotionally available for her daughter because she hasn’t dealt with her past trauma, and so her life is on hold. I like that that’s a messy character. I like seeing somebody like that have to deal with things.

BD: I wanted to ask about kills, because you have some fun ones in this movie. How much of that is there in the writing between you and Simon, and how much of it is getting there on the day and figuring it out?

AW: It’s funny because a lot of the kills in this one, because it’s a military-themed slasher, we tried to ground them much more than we would have in the past. What was fun about it is skirting that line, because the second you bring gun violence into a movie, it’s going to turn some people off; it’s going to be disturbing to others and everything else in between. That’s by design. It’s interesting that cutting somebody’s head off and torturing somebody with a knife is somehow less disturbing than just shooting them dead.

I think it’s the relatability. It’s so easy to shoot somebody and that kind of thing. Obviously, in this film, we still have a lot of fun with stuff. There’s a great chainsaw gag in this movie. I guess there are two. It’s interesting because initially, we started setting up– and this is one of those things actually that comes with experience, having done a lot of special effects. When it comes to the gore and blood, I fucking hate CGI stuff. I try to avoid that like the plague. I remember there’s a scene where a character falls on a chainsaw. 

Initially, the plan was like: We’ll superimpose this character with a chainsaw, and we’ll put these elements together. I remember we were starting to set it up, and it was taking forever. I just made one of those decisions where I was like, “You know what? If we commit to this right now, we’re going to be here two hours over time. Everybody’s going to be flipping out over that shit. We’re not going to get it, and we’re going to have to dump VFX on this, and it’s going to look like shit. Who gives a fuck?” Then I was like, “Let’s cut early today. We’re going to come in tomorrow, and we’re going to come up with a plan, a different plan.”

Really, the plan was the simplest thing. Like, have somebody sit on a chainsaw and spray blood. Luckily, with those chainsaws, it’s fascinating. The special effects guy [Brandon K. McLaughlin] worked on some of the Texas Chainsaw reboots and remakes and stuff. He had a lot of experience with that. It’s cool because you can use real chainsaws. You just take the blades off, and you can make contact with them, and it doesn’t hurt. It looks like it would still hurt you, but it doesn’t. It was just simple, old-school. If the blood is spraying, it’s gonna be exciting, and you can just at least let that do its magic.

BD: You talked about doing more small movies. This movie leaves open the possibility of more stories in this world. Do you think you’ll ever go back for more?

AW: We have a couple different approaches that we could do. You just have to always be like, “Okay, well, how is this movie going to be received, and who are we going to be as people and filmmakers by the time we get around to doing it?” It’s funny because we put out this vinyl of The Guest 2 a couple years back, which, by the way, we used some of that music in this movie. Actually, major themes we ended up recycling by the same composer, [Matthew Pusti].

It’s funny because that vinyl is actually based on what we would have done as a sequel to The Guest if we had made it within a couple years of that movie happening. I don’t think we would ever make that version. I think, personally, where I would go with all this stuff and what I like about it is that I think we’re creating a little bit more of our View Askewniverse, Jay and Silent Bob thing, where it’s like, I like that those characters can walk into different movies.

I think what we’re doing right now is almost creating a collection of characters. Maybe we’re not finishing their story, but maybe those characters are going to walk into somebody else’s story. We’ll see where it takes us. I think it’s exciting, and I really like the idea of being able to expand these worlds and live in them and see these characters go into different environments. 

Sometimes, just even the world that we’ve created, it’s almost enough. It’s like you can feel David’s out there from The Guest. You feel like that Sharni [Vinson]’s character from You’re Next is somewhere out there as well. Maybe eventually, they’ll just end up in the same movie together, and they don’t even have to talk about the last movie they’re in. They’re in a new experience.

BD: Your departure from the MonsterVerse was amicable. Do you ever see yourself going back to that world?

AW: I don’t know. I thought about that. I feel like it’d be way more in the future if I was going to do another monster film. Those specific monster movies, who knows if I find a script or something that I like. Never say never. I felt a lot of ownership on those films. It was really hard to walk away from it because they had a timeframe that they had to hit.

I had to make a Sophie’s Choice kind of thing where it was like, OK, I can spend another couple years making a Monsterverse film, or I can take the plunge and do this movie. It had to be one or the other. I’m really happy this is the decision I made, but it was hard because I felt like I knew exactly where I was going to take that. I felt like the best movie was still ahead of me. But I’ll trade 10 studio pictures for an Onslaught any day, honestly.

The post Adam Wingard Delivers An ‘Onslaught’: “If The Blood Is Spraying, It’s Gonna Be Exciting” [Interview] appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

“There were definitely times when I was like, ‘The reality in which we live is maybe worse than the one I’m portraying where the demons feel like better people,'” Wendig told Bloody Disgusting from his home in Pennsylvania. “At least they know what they’re up to. They’re aware of the bargains they’re making, and it feels like we’re being run by not only evil people, but also very foolish people, and at least the demons aren’t foolish.”

A hefty tome that launches a two-book series dubbed The Fiends, The Calamities follows the scion of a powerful demonic family – humans with demonic blood, not full-on demons – who rank among the world’s most powerful and influential. Mourning Mayne, son of the powerful Fiend Hadrian Mayne, would rather spend his days partying and blotting out the darkness and intrigue of family life amid a vast demonic hierarchy. But then his father calls him home, setting in motion a chain of events that’s part conspiracy thriller, part horror epic. 

New readers of Wendig’s work will find a vast new world of souls and the people who bargain for them, complete with Succession-style drama, Game of Thrones-style worldbuilding, and a modern sensibility that plays heavily on the metaphor of demons essentially running the global economy. For longtime readers, though, The Calamities is something else, a payoff for a series of worldbuilding Easter eggs that litter his past work, including recent horror hits like The Book of Accidents and Black River Orchard. 

“I wanted to culminate some of those things together,” Wendig said. “Not in a way that required you reading these other books to understand what was happening here, but I’ve been planting all these weird little seeds, and it was time to see that garden grow.”

Mourning’s return to the Mayne family’s estate might start the story of The Calamities, but it really kicks into high gear when a disappearance sets in motion a search for answers, bringing Mourning back into contact with an old flame, a soul-hunting friend from the Pacific Northwest, a eunuch enforcer from a smaller demonic family, and a young nonbinary person troubled by impossible visions. Together they form a motley crew of mayhem, and if it seems like they’re figuring out the depth of their demonic world as they’re going along, that’s because Wendig was figuring it out, too. 

“I built the architecture [of the world] around these characters as I wanted to see it,” he explained. ” I’m hesitant about pre-building a lot of world-building architecture because I think when you do that, you run the risk of being like, ‘I’ve built this beautiful palace, now let’s just run through it,’ but it’s just an empty museum; it’s not really a story.

“The story is really the characters, and ultimately, at the end of the day, the world-building is—I don’t want to say nonessential to the story—but it’s like, even if you don’t understand it all, what is going on with these characters should still be enough to pull you through the piece.”

Once Wendig understood the architecture of his world, though, he leaned into it, introducing readers to demonic broods running Europe, to strange minor families lingering on the periphery, and even to the entire mythology of the Fiends (his name for the demon-blooded humans), complete with quotes from esoteric tomes that don’t exist. These quotes, which open each chapter, stand side-by-side with real quotes from real thinkers, songwriters, and more, adding a layer of verisimilitude that also keeps readers guessing. 

The deeper Wendig got into the story of the Fiends, the bigger The Calamities became, until it was clear that one book would indeed need to expand into two, with plenty of room for other stories set in the same world down the line.

“When we sold the book I had this story in mind, but then it was clear that I couldn’t do it in one,” Wendig said. “There’s just no way. It was definitely ‘Split it in half and make it a twofer.’ The question then is, if these are things that people really like, the world is something I could revisit if it becomes interesting to them and interesting to me, but I don’t know that that’s on the table as yet.”

The Calamities, even as a standalone book, is expansive, thanks in part to Wendig’s preference for writing multiple character perspectives interwoven throughout. But the book also grows thematically as it continues, challenging the reader to root for characters who aren’t necessarily good, and who might yet become less good as the story goes on. Demons run the world, yes, but it’s never as simple as good vs. evil. 

“It’s also just about the levers of power and what happens when people get it and what it does to you and how you start to view other people as just resources and just something to be used and discarded as opposed to another person, and how families lever that power against their own members,” Wendig said. “Then [I was] really trying to get a little squishy with it and not just have it be like ‘Power Bad.’ What are all of these sort of axes and angles going into and what does that do to these people? ‘Nothing good,’ is the answer,” I think.”

The Calamities concludes with a major new revelation for its characters and its world that will set the second book on a different path, with new threats, new thematic concerns, and new horrors for readers. Wendig can’t say much about the second novel yet, of course, but he did offer that, if you like the morally grey darkness of the first book, you’ll probably be into what he has planned next.

“Someone asked me, ‘I’m dying to see how the characters are going to change. Will they get better?’ Well, the one thing I can tell you is I think the book doesn’t immediately go to obvious places, and it leaves the characters in a place more of descent than climbing out of the hole,” Wendig said. “I think the book starts with them digging deeper. These are horror protagonists who are doing horror things more than they are doing hero things.”

The Calamities is available now wherever books are sold.   

The post Chuck Wendig on ‘The Calamities,’ Demons Running the World, and Why Reality Feels Scarier appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

What he didn’t know was the direction the fourth book would take, at least until he found himself on Craig’s set in the fall of 2023, watching his characters walk off the page and into live-action for the first time. 

“I think there would be a fourth book. I don’t think it would be what it is [without the movie],” Cesare told Bloody Disgusting. “It was basically standing in fake Kettle Springs outside Winnipeg and being like, ‘I should write a book about this!’ [laughs]” 

The result is Lights! Camera! Frendo!, which takes the action back to Kettle Springs, Missouri, with a twist: This time, the new wave of Frendo the Clown killings is focused on a feature film production based on the crimes committed in the first book. It was a chance for Cesare to dig into his own experiences of seeing his creation come to life, but it was also a chance to go back to Kettle Springs with an entirely different lens. 

“I wanted to find a way to thread the needle of not betraying that core ideology of the books, but still make it be about film production and making a movie and the ups and downs,” Cesare said. “It’s not a full satire. I have books that are like that, and I love that genre. I like poking fun at film and film thought and film people, but I don’t think this book does that. I think this book is a different kind of thing.”

With Cesare’s original Final Girl, Quinn Maybrook, out of the picture, the new book focuses instead on the young woman playing Quinn for the movie: Sabrina Alvarez, a virtual unknown handpicked to lead a potential new horror franchise. That makes her a fish out of water who offers a fresh perspective not just on the production of the movie, but on Kettle Springs itself, mirroring Quinn’s experience in the first Clown novel. It’s a side-by-side comparison that’s there by design, to play with the expectations of longtime readers.

“It maps almost exactly onto the first book,” Cesare said. “It is the exact same length. It’s down to within 100 words. I basically just looked at the structure of [Clown in a Cornfield] and was like, ‘What works here? How can we do similar things, but just at every corner when you’re almost expecting it to do one thing, it does a slightly different thing, but it still maps on?’ I’m still trying to play the game of remaking, quote-unquote, the first book, but it doesn’t match up at all. Sabrina feeds into that. It’s the guessing game. There are a lot of returning characters, and Sabrina is the Quinn of this book.”

From there, Lights! Camera! Frendo! keeps taking familiar ingredients from the first book – including returning characters Rust Vance and Cole Hill, who are still major players in the Kettle Springs community – and spinning them out in new ways, all while telling the story of a film production through the actors, the crew, even the craft service workers. In discussing inspirations for the book, which range from slashers like All The Boys Love Mandy Lane to Bud Boetticher’s Westerns, Cesare singled out Ti West’s X, with its serious approach to film production amid a slasher narrative, as a major touchstone.

“I don’t like when stories like this don’t take the craft part of it seriously enough or don’t take the minutiae of it seriously enough, which I think is where I think this has similarities with X,” Cesare said. “If I’m going to do this, I’m going to make it feel like you’re really on a set. As quick as some of that stuff goes by, there are all these other ideas in the book; I wanted those pieces to feel real.”

Lights! Camera! Frendo! and its promotional tour are Cesare’s primary focus for the next few weeks, but it’s far from the only major project on his plate. His cosmic horror creature feature Junction Row, which he co-wrote, just premiered at Fantasia Fest earlier this summer, and Clown in a Cornfield 2 is now officially headed for film production, though Cesare noted he can’t say much about it yet other than what’s already been announced.

In the book world, reprints of his earlier novels, including Zero Lives Remaining, Video Night, and more, are on the way from Union Square & Co. in the coming months. And in early 2027, the author takes on vampires with Bloodsick, a new novel that takes him away from the slasher movie world and into the world of bloodsuckers. Set in New England, the book follows what happens when a centuries-old vampire awakens from hibernation in the modern world, and the first place he visits just happens to be a party house full of teenagers.

“I wanted to play classic with it. I think that’s part of the fun is what stuff from vampire lore I leave in and what I take out, which, spoiler alert, I put a lot in,” Cesare said. “I love that kind of stuff. I love the destroying a town vampire thing. It’s just a little bit Salem’s Lot. It’s a little bit 30 Days of Night. It’s also got that body horror element and sexual element to it. It is still a YA novel, but that’s how I pitched it to my editors.”

There is no shortage of new projects for Adam Cesare fans to enjoy, but if you’ve read this far, you’re probably ready to ask one final question: What about Clown in a Cornfield 5? As with every book in the series, Cesare ends this novel with plenty of possibilities for where the narrative could go next, but in the book’s afterword, he also notes that this might be the end of Frendo the Clown…at least for a little while. 

“I literally put a winky face emoji in there,” Cesare said with a chuckle. “I think we’ve been on an every two-year schedule, like clockwork. Literally every August, every two years- 2020, 2022, 2024, 2026- a Clown in a Cornfield book has come out for four cycles of that. I think if there is going to be another one, it’s going to have at least a year of space. It’s going to break the two-year cycle in order to feel different. That’s all I can say and all I want to say about that.”

Clown in a Cornfield 4: Lights! Camera! Frendo! is now available wherever you get your books.

The post Adam Cesare on ‘Clown in a Cornfield 4,’ Upcoming Vampire Novel, and Stepping Back from Slashers (For Now) appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

After all, not only are we getting a reboot of the iconic show, produced by horror maestro Ryan Coogler, but original series creator Chris Carter was finally given the opportunity to go back to his divisive 2008 film The X-Files: I Want to Believe and re-edit the picture to be closer to what he had in mind before he was forced to conform to a PG-13 rating.

With The X-Files: I Want to Believe – Vrach Frankenshteyn now available to stream on Hulu and Disney+, Bloody Disgusting spoke with Chris Carter about what fans can expect from this scarier director’s cut.

Bloody Disgusting: Thank you so much for making time for us, Chris! The first thing I wanted to ask was about the new runtime, which is actually shorter than the 2008 cut of the film. What was the thinking behind that, especially as streaming services prefer longer watch times?

Chris Carter: Typically, with a director’s cut, people throw everything back in that was cut out. For me, the reason to do this whole thing was that, when we originally set out to make [the movie], we made it, showed the cut to the studio, and they had a very strong reaction. They referred to the movie as torture porn, and they said that this isn’t a PG-13 release; it’s like one of the Saw movies or something.

They said, “You promised us a PG-13 movie, and you didn’t deliver that. This is far too graphic and scary.” It was at that moment that I realized they really didn’t know The X-Files very well. So we went about cutting it back to what we thought could be PG-13, delivered it again, and they said: “Okay, much better. Now you’ve got to give it to the censors.” And sure enough, the censors said: “This is not a PG-13 movie.”

So we had to cut it back even farther. At that point, for me, it wasn’t really a good, scary X-File anymore. Ironically, if I were making an hour of television, I could have made it scarier. You actually had more permission with an hour of television. Anyway, this time, I wanted to make it the scary movie that we had originally imagined, Frank Spotnitz and I. So that’s what I did.

But there was another studio note early on: they really wanted more of the Mulder-Scully relationship story. But because we’ve had two reboots in between, I thought the fanbase would have gotten their fill of Mulder and Scully and their romantic entanglement by now. What they really wanted, and what I wanted, was to focus on a good, scary story.

BD: Where did this specific scary story come from?

CC: The original idea for this movie came from something that I read about a doctor in Cleveland, Ohio who had transplanted the head of a monkey onto another monkey. I thought: “That is an X-Files story.”

I actually flew out to Cleveland to meet with this doctor at Case Western University. We sat and talked about it, he was a very nice man, and he told me how he had done it and why it was successful. The monkey ended up dying, but it was still a successful transplant. I thought: “That’s perfect, why not do it as an X-Files story? A transplant of a head onto another body.” So that was the inspiration for the scary part of the story.

I always felt it was a great Frankenstein story, but it was never appreciated as such. It was only nodded to towards the end of the movie. So we’ve added this new title to give everyone an idea of what the story is really about, because [the film] begins somewhat ambiguously with the search party finding the arm and hand of a man we just saw get assaulted, and it doesn’t quite add up. So when you know it’s a Frankenstein story, I think you’re much better drawn into the movie.

BD: Was there any specific moment in the film that gave you guys trouble with the studio/censors?

CC: You know, it’s scary, those scenes with the woman being held in the box and then witnessing medical experiments going on and fearing for her life. That’s a really scary thing for people, the idea of being stalked by someone and taken like that.

But at the same time, I thought there was a connection between that and what Scully was doing, which was also a scary operation on somebody else. That and what they’re doing in the lab are two different kinds of medicine, and I thought it was a scary thing that you can be so unlucky to have to subject yourself to operations like that. It was a nice connection where Scully’s heartfelt emotions contrasted with the terror of the work going on in the secret lab.

BD: It’s common knowledge that you originally planned for there to be three X-Files movies to close out the series, and we’re 2/3 of the way there. So, regardless of the upcoming reboot series, is there any chance that you’d come back for another adventure with Mulder and Scully? And if so, do you already have a story in mind?

CC: I’ve got the perfect story for another movie. It could be that they just want to do another series, and I don’t want to get in the way of Ryan Coogler and his vision. I’m completely respectful of him and what he’s doing, and I can’t wait to see it. I’ve actually made a point of not reading the script because I want to watch it like everyone else.

But I do have another story that I’d like to tell with Mulder and Scully.

The X-Files: I Want to Believe – Vrach Frankenshteyn is available to stream on Hulu & Disney+ beginning August 14, 2026.

The post Chris Carter Talks Scarier ‘The X-Files: I Want to Believe’ Director’s Cut and Teases Third Movie appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

So much so that Train to Busan‘s massive success upon initial release in 2016 marked the start of Yeon Sang-ho’s ongoing exploration of zombie cinema; his tearjerker zombie hit spawned follow-ups Seoul Station and Peninsula, with Colony arriving in theaters later this month.

At the center of each is insightful social commentary, with Yeon Sang-ho picking up the mantle from George A. Romero in finding the zombie subgenre a handy mirror to reflect our current anxieties and fears.

So far, audiences have been hungry for the genre filmmaker’s zombie films, with each drawing a profit at the box office. But it’s worth noting that Train to Busan was the first of its kind, marking it as a bit of a risk for release. Yang Seon-ho, speaking with Bloody Disgusting, reflected on his breakout hit and how it changed South Korean cinema.

“Because Train to Busan was the first commercial horror film of its kind, I do remember initially that investors had their doubts about investing in this film,” the director explains. “But because there was an appetite for the zombie genre already in the webtoon market in Korea, I feel like it would have an audience in the film world as well. I think after the success of Train to Busan, we saw a proliferation, obviously, of zombie films or zombie series being produced in Korea. Most of all, like the Kingdom TV series on Netflix. I think they’ve been succeeding because they’ve continually combined the zombie genre with different genre elements, and so that is a pretty auspicious sign.“

When asked what makes the zombie such an effective means of exploring contemporary fears and social issues, Yang Seon-ho credits his biggest source of inspiration when it comes to constantly evolving his zombies across films.

The director says, “We often think of George Romero as the father of the modern zombie film. There is a certain archetype of the zombie, but that is not strictly defined, which actually makes it more feasible and easier for us to infuse this same subject with different reflections of society. I think director George Romero was very, very effective in portraying and physicalizing the latent fear of the era that we lived in.

“Because of that, the zombie genre is able to evolve and be reinvented.“

As Train to Busan established, and Colony continues, Yeon Sang-ho’s films tend to feature strong ensemble casts, comprised of clashing personalities and archetypes that fuel the human drama at the center of the zombie terror. 

It’s not the characters that serve as the introduction into these zombie-infested worlds, but society itself. And that extends to all of his genre works: “When I’m thinking of, or imagining these films, I always think about what parts of society do I want to see reflected in this film? I think every work that I’ve ever done has some reflection of society in one way or another. In the series Hellbound, for example, there are monsters. They deal with monsters from hell, but also, it’s a reflection of human society. The series I did, Human Vapor, also has very specific societal elements that are reflected in the series.“

“The reason that I feel that it’s important to find some resemblance of society in these zombie genre films is that I feel like that is a way to make the fear and the horror feel much more visceral and palpable when it is closer to our society and actually does point to a facet of our society,” he continues. “Also, not just from a societal perspective, but I also feel like from an entertainment perspective, that is also something very important.“

This Friday,  Well Go USA Entertainment brings Yeon Sang-ho’s acclaimed zombie thriller back to theaters across the United States and Canada on August 14, 2026, presented in 4K for the first time on the big screen.

The post 10 Years Later, Filmmaker Yeon Sang-ho Reflects On How ‘Train to Busan’ Changed Korean Cinema appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

While Schoenbrun’s latest continues to explore identity, it’s now through a playful lens.

The film follows Kris (Hannah Einbinder), a young queer filmmaker tasked with rebooting the Camp Miasma franchise. When Kris seeks out the slasher’s original final girl, Billy (Gillian Anderson), she finds art imitating life as the pair are thrust into a blood-soaked delirium of fear and desire.

Schoebrun paves Kris’s path toward sexual liberation with camp horror and humor, and no shortage of junk food. The tonal departure from previous works wasn’t just meant to be in service of this particular story, but a conscious choice on the filmmaker’s part to evolve.

“I want every film that I make to feel more like this full spectrum of who I am,” Schoenbrun tells Bloody Disgusting. “And I want every film to expand what I’m allowed to do as an artist and filmmaker. I was really conscious after TV Glow of, if I make another super angsty, teen angst kind of movie, I’m going to get pigeonholed as that person. I don’t think I am that person. It’s not that I don’t love that movie and that tone, but there’s a goofiness that has always been a huge part of who I am that, because of the first two films, where they came from and the time in my life that they came out, I don’t think that they captured the stoner goofball version of me in the way that I want to be seen.

“So I was really quickly like, ‘We need a giant geyser of blood in the first scene, and the thing needs to be playful and joyful and completely unexpected tonally in this way.‘“

That giant geyser, in the context of the film, comes courtesy of Camp Miasma‘s killer, Little Death (Jack Haven). 

While Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is Kris’s story, Little Death quickly steals scenes for their unceremonious yet brutal dispatching, culminating in a showstopping centerpiece slaughter sequence. Schoenbrun unleashes a massacre worthy of the ’80s slashers they’re homaging, complete with inspired needle drop and nonstop practical gore, all handled in a continuous take with a 60-pound camera rig strapped to Haven to capture the madness up close.’

It was easily the most challenging sequence in the entire film.

How did Schoenbrun and crew pull this off? “A lot of work. A lot of work. I even wrote in the script, ‘And now it’s time for the most complicated part of the movie.‘ But it was the part that everyone was most excited to work on because when you have a team that really is there because they love the sandbox-style play of making make-believe real, the more technically ambitious or seemingly impossible, the more excited everyone is to figure it out.

“And I’ve never done anything half as ambitious in terms of the interdepartmental meetings and timing it to the song, but also figuring out all the hidden cuts and all of the costume changes and how VFX was going to work with practical. It was like choreographing an entire play within the movie, except there are cameras and actors and all of this technical information. It was just hundreds and hundreds of hours of work and a team that was very, very dedicated to making something special. I think it’s a rule of magic that often the trick is just working really, really hard.“

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma releases in select theaters today, August 7, before expanding wider on August 14.

The post Jane Schoenbrun on Challenging ‘Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma’ One-Take Massacre appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Prime Video’s Fallout, which pulls from the rich nuclear wasteland of Bethesda’s multi-billion dollar gaming franchise of the same name, has not only risen to the occasion, but completely surpassed audiences’ high expectations. Fallout’s emotionally-driven post-apocalyptic saga juxtaposes the parallel stories of a hopeful vault dweller, a mutated Ghoul bounty hunter, and a loyal soldier as they make their way in this unique wasteland.

In honor of Fallout’s Emmy nomination for Outstanding Production Design, Production Designer Howard Cummings gets candid on the surreal joy of bringing this acclaimed video game universe to life and expanding upon its canon, the joys of practical effects and grounding Fallout in a tactile world, Fallout’s unique use of greenscreen to magnify environments, and his promise that things are getting “even bigger and bigger” in season three.

BLOODY DISGUSTING: One of the things that fans loved most about the Fallout video games is the immersive, detailed worlds that they feature. You got to work directly with Bethesda, but what exactly was that collaborative process like?

HOWARD CUMMINGS: When we were first starting out, it’s like, “What do you do with this? How do you make this a film?” But then you get there, and you realize that the challenge with Fallout is actually doing it. Committing to it. In the beginning, it was cool, and Bethesda didn’t really come out with an edict. They don’t tell me what to do. They were waiting for me to show them something, and then they go, “Oh, wow, you’re just actually doing it.” I got into the Fallout universe, and I really appreciated it. Then I began to appreciate the people and all the fans online who are doing their different mods. I get the ultimate fan mod. I get to do my own mod. It’s so cool. 

But in terms of working with Bethesda, they’ve never told me I have to do something in a certain way, which is awesome. I have a lot of freedom. They share their models with me, and they have a point person that I talk to if I have questions about the game because I’m not an expert on the game. There’s a lot of research. My basic inspiration goes back to Fallout’s original artwork. There’s a great book about Fallout 4 (The Art of Fallout 4: Bethesda Softworks) that’s just loaded with beautiful concept art. When you take those concepts, you can turn them into a game, but there’s a certain loss to it. 

So it’s weird. If I want to enhance something that’s in the game, I kind of look back at the concept and consider where to take it. You know, because I love Fallout: New Vegas’ story. It’s so good and so engaging, but Obsidian — who I think developed the game — it’s not as finely or artistically done as some of the other games. So a big struggle at times is wanting to honor what people like about Fallout: New Vegas, but I also want to enhance it in a way. But I have to enhance it based on the game, not just to be cool. 

What’s fun for me to work on in the show is that we have our own — it’s not set in the same timeframe as the games, right? The writers get around all sorts of stuff. They know so much about the game. It’s insane, and there’s a lot of stuff I do, and then suddenly someone is telling me why the choices that I made are now canon. Stuff like that is hysterical to me. I always try to stay true to what fans really liked about the games and try not to break it. We have a producer, James Altman, who’s from the game. If I have big questions about whether I’m stepping on some lore that’s going to make everybody go insane, then he’s pretty good at helping me with that. He’s on set all the time.

Like you were saying, there are some really creative ways in which the production design and props expand upon the games’ lore. It looks like a lot of the terminals in the series are modified computers from the late ‘70s and the start of the ‘80s that reflect a wider range of companies that existed in this universe. It helps make this world feel bigger and that there were competitors beyond just General Atomics and RobCo.

HC: I tried to see what they were sourcing things off of and then kind of go do that in the same direction. As I said, this story isn’t within the walls of the game. Visually, it’s the same thing, but I get to pull more stuff into it. You could probably hire me to “Fallout your apartment” or something, you know what I mean? I know how to make choices now based on all this stuff. A lot of that, we source stuff for all the decorating. It ranges from real vintage to things from Wayfair even that you can buy yourself that have this stylized bent to it. We have an approach to it all. What’s cool is that we are doing flashbacks, which there are very few of in the games. It’s usually just in the games’ intros. The flashbacks are fun, but in those we are still tweaking things to be more period correct, especially the stuff around Cooper Howard. There’s a sort of reality to his whole family and the emotion to all that stuff. So we kind of lean into it so it’s not as stylized in the retro-futuristic look. It’s a little more vintage-y. 

You definitely feel all of that, too. This show is such a celebration of practical effects, which adds such a realistic and tactile quality to this universe. Why was it important to go that extra mile and make sure that elements like the Power Armor suits were actually functional?

HC: You know, we work with one of the Nolan brothers — Jonah [Jonathan] Nolan. He’s our exec, and he also directed the pilot. He, just like Chris, wants to make things practical as much as possible. It’s always better to have this real thing that you’re working off of, even if you ultimately replace it with visual effects. So, the Power Armor was actually the first thing that I did. I had never done something like that before. So we had to take the game model, remodel it, and proportion it to a person. It wasn’t really built to be functioning as a full suit. It sort of fudged in many ways. So we had to remodel it, re-proportion it. 

We have a lot of great vendors, like Legacy — who have done like Iron Man’s suits — who helped solve a lot of problems with an armature that’s built underneath the whole thing that helps make it move. There was a lot of back and forth like that, but it was super fun. It’s the very first thing I did on Fallout. I said, “Do you know how long something like this takes?” It’s like at least 18 weeks, and then you need to rehearse with it and make it work. But that’s how we do it. Even the creatures! The Deathclaw, for instance, was a giant thing that Legacy created. We were trying to figure out the rig for its head. There’s a person there, and it’s all about the movement. Having the person moving the suit gave it a greater reality because it feels grounded. That’s why we do as much as we can practically.

Similarly, the Gulpers are one of my favorite elements of the show, and they’re so much more effective as practical effects. What was the process like for bringing them to life?

HC: They each have their own challenges. With the Gulper, it needs to eat somebody, and then later on, it throws itself up and dies. With that, we had to make the whole innards thing with a bag, which would get yanked out and all the guts and everything flies out of it. It’s fun to figure that stuff out. This last season, we had things like Radscorpions — these giant scorpions — and trying to figure them out. I thought, “Well, they should have little babies because the babies can actually jump on people.” And then determining if the babies are just as bad. That was a puppet, like a big puppet, when it came to the full-size thing. I have a scale chart that we do for the season, and it’s just hysterical because it’s just of all the creatures and things. We’re in season three right now, and everything’s getting even bigger and bigger.

So for the baby scorpions, that wasn’t something that was necessarily scripted? It was just you figuring out what made sense for these creatures?

HC: Yeah, we had talked about doing the big one, but then figured it’s even scarier if you’re getting surrounded or something by little ones. So we talked to the showrunners, the director, to figure out our environment, and then we can bring it to life. We put these duct works in this space that was kind of like a hospital. So we thought, “What if they’re in the ductwork? What if they pop out and jump on them?” There’s a lot of back and forth where I’ll pitch an idea, cross-reference it with the story, and then consider how to handle it practically. Questions over how we reveal it and when it stops holding up and looking real. Because, you know, they don’t always hold up. You’ll have to figure out ways to hide it behind something, or it’s dark, but you still try to do as much of that for real as possible. 

Walton Goggins actually had that giant thing thrown on his chest and wrestled it around and stuff. He’s really cool about that kind of stuff. I mean, he has to go through the whole makeup thing. All of that is so cool, too. We have great makeup effects people who still want the performance to shine through beneath it. You’ve got to read that line between what’s a mask and what’s real when trying to get somebody’s performance. There’s a lot of subtlety to play around with there.

The Brotherhood of Steel is another part of the show that I was just blown away when I saw for the first time. That armor is just so amazing, and there’s such detail to it all. How did you make sure that this felt like a completely different corner of the Fallout universe?

HC: That was interesting to figure out because, in the game, that’s very East Coast-based. There wasn’t a whole lot of West Coast information. There is some, but then I kind of made up some of the lore regarding what all this is. I pushed it a little bit Catholic, actually. They’re not Catholic, to be clear. The Brotherhood is not religious in any way. It’s like, it’s there. It’s military, you know. They had scripted this whole anointing sequence with Max and, to me, it just felt like incense and all that. We talked about how in the game we’re not seeing all the Brotherhood organizations, and so why don’t they each have their own thing? We’re not saying that they’re all like this. It’s just this particular group. 

Then, later on, in season two, there’s a meeting where all the different Brotherhoods are present, and they’re all into different things. Some hate women, some are run by women, but they all have their own thing. So, to me, charting those differences helped give all this more of a reality. It’s not all cookie cutter because we have the freedom to not just replicate things in a computer. We have the luxury of being able to detail things in a different way, which I think makes the story even richer. 

I love that Fallout incorporates greenscreens and state-of-the-art LED technology with real-world environments and that you actually built sets to pull a lot of this off. It makes such a difference. How did you find the right balance there? What were some of the challenges with finding the right locations, building sets, and not just relying on greenscreen?

HC: We’re working with these big, huge sets, but we also use this thing called the Volume that’s digital. We actually use as little greenscreen as we can. With the volume, you’re seeing the actors in real-time, and lighting effects — it’s all about the lighting — are working differently. It’s getting all the right reflective light, and even the Vertibirds are things that we do in the Volume. It’s really fun. We got really lucky with the Vertibird. The construction or the steel guy in the first season started out his welding career building aircraft. He got his professor from high school to help us build it because it was all pieced together with little pieces. It’s actually made of aluminum. It’s all aluminum, but it’s all hand work that’s been riveted and stuff. 

You’ve pulled off such incredible things in Fallout, but what was the biggest hurdle that you faced and overcame during production?

HC: For season two, it was definitely just trying to get the scale of the strip in Las Vegas right. In the game, it’s massive. And we really went above and beyond here. It’s truly huge. It’s like we’re actually shooting in Las Vegas. We have a mandate to do as much for real as possible. There’s an abandoned shopping mall near where I live that’s been like that for years. But, to me, that building looks a lot like Gamora. So we built all that. There was enough there that we could have just built the bottom of the building — maybe 14 feet — and then just made everything else digital. That’s not our style, though. 

I transformed this abandoned shopping mall and added giant pieces to it. All that lighting was practical, too. All that neon lighting. It’s challenging. It’s a big undertaking that takes a lot of planning. There’s a lot to do there. We model everything, find the sun direction, and things like that. I work with all the directors and cinematographers, and they’ll be like, “Okay, four o’clock is where the sun should be. ” It’s actually really strategically plotted out how to do all that. It’s only because we have such a great group of people that can pull shit like this off. It’s great, and I think that’s part of trying to achieve the scale that we need to achieve is probably the biggest hurdle. Even at the beginning of this season, I told our location person that we’re going even bigger. They’ve found us some amazing places that are truly incredible. I’ve listened to all of the people reviewing and talking about the show, so I know where people want us to push things. We all care about this show so much. 

Finally, what are some of your hopes for season three? What’s on your wish list, production-wise, besides making everything bigger?

HC: This season is bigger, yes. But it’s funny. That doesn’t necessarily mean that I have more money because generally that’s not the way it works. Season one, we shot in New York, actually. Season two, we moved the show to LA, which was great. That vault set was in New York in three different stages, and we moved it to one giant stage. I got to connect the vault into one giant vault, which was really super cool. I had to start with a whole new group in LA and try to educate them on what Fallout is and how this universe works. They’ve gotten all that by now. It’s kind of about halfway through the season you could sort of see it click and everybody just instantly had the same vibe. 

So this year, because weirdly almost everybody I worked with begged to come back because of how much fun they had, I was working with a really well-educated group of people. And now I can give them even bigger tasks. We’re tackling things that we couldn’t have before. People are always going “Oh my God,” when they see these environments. It’s so much fun to come to work because it’s all just there. I’m so glad we get to continue to do all this. 

The post ‘Fallout’ Production Designer On Bringing Bethesda’s Wasteland To Life And “Even Bigger” Season 3 appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

It stars Hannah Einbinder as Kris, a young queer filmmaker tasked with rebooting the Camp Miasma franchise. When Kris seeks out the slasher’s original final girl, Billy (Gillian Anderson), she finds art imitating life as the pair are thrust into a blood-soaked delirium of fear and desire.

Schoenbrun lovingly crafts an irreverent homage to films like Friday the 13th and Sleepaway Camp, even developing extensive lore behind the film’s fictional 14-film Camp Miasma franchise. That the film’s two leads are deeply entrenched in the world of horror filmmaking also inspired Schoenbrun to provide homework, a list of films and material on slashers, a move made all the more helpful considering that both Einbinder and Anderson are new to the realm of slashers.

It wasn’t just informative about Camp Miasma‘s horror, but the burgeoning desire between Kris and Billy.

Einbinder explains in a chat with Bloody Disgusting, “Slashers and horror in general create a real visceral feeling in the body. I think that was important to access when understanding what was sexually exciting to Kris, and ultimately to Billy as well. So yeah, I definitely think that’s why I wanted to watch those films and tap into that. I think it’s true of horror in general, but I think specifically for the fantasy that’s being kind of expressed and explored within Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, I think that, that was the thing that I was trying to tap into.”

“I decidedly did not watch the list because I am not a horror fan or aficionado,” Anderson adds. “But I did read a lot of essays about the genre and the different genres, and a lot of what I read felt like an education and felt like it informed the choices that I made as Billy.”

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma makes for a truly blood-soaked first foray into slashers, too. 

Just how bloody? “The blood is definitely intense,” Einbinder says of her first slasher experience. “I have sensory issues, like sound and certain sensations on my skin. This really tapped into one of my most visceral discomforts, which is any liquid on my skin, and then a fabric touching that. Even if it’s water, it makes my skin crawl.”

Einbinder cites an ultra-bloody scene as an example: “So, to be in sticky blood and then have the blood rain down, and have the blood fill up the bed underneath me, sitting in like a soaking bed for multiple takes. For the first take, it was dry. And then when we reset, we kept the same bed. I would get into the soaking bed as if it were not soaking. It’s just such an overwhelming kind of feeling for me specifically, I think. There was a lot happening that kind of contributed to my anguish and discomfort, and I used it, as they said.”

The post How The ‘Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma’ Stars Prepared for Their First Slasher Role appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Spirits, serial killers, and gruesome grimoires put Widow’s Bay’s standing as a premier tourist town in jeopardy. The series has resonated with audiences through its exceptional writing, directing, and acting. However, its painstaking production design is the true secret weapon that’s helped Widow’s Bay become an instant hit and pop culture sensation that’s positioned to be the big winner at this year’s Emmy Awards.

To celebrate the series’ Production Design Emmy nomination, among many others, Production Designer Steve Arnold breaks down how he achieved the community’s timeless, creepy quality, drawing subtle production design cues from Jaws and The Shining, the obscure Easter Eggs that fans are still discovering, and his hopes of more period piece episodes in season two.

BLOODY DISGUSTING: Widow’s Bay is a contemporary series, but it feels removed in time in many respects due to the remoteness of the island. It’s almost like it’s a few decades behind, with things like the rotary phones and older TV sets. Talk a little on achieving that dynamic and figuring out what belongs and what doesn’t in this world.

STEVE ARNOLD: Some of it was driven by the script. Many things were pretty well indicated in the script. This is a situation where it’s so remote that people hang on to things for much longer than you would ordinarily, in most cases. These people don’t always have the latest and greatest things. It seems like if technology is not really up to date there, then maybe people have given up on trying some of those things and they’ve just managed to get by with less. It’s kind of an analog for the world, in many ways. A lot of those things are part of the set dressing. Some of the broader strokes, like the interior of the town hall, I wanted it to kind of seem like it was maybe an older building from the 1800s. Maybe they upgraded in the ’50s, but they haven’t done much to it since then, so the paint and paneling are very dated and out of a time that’s no longer contemporary even though it’s set in a contemporary time period. So elements like that help push that feeling a little bit.

Also, when you’re in Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, and some of those places, there’s a lot of hanging onto the old. There are many old structures, houses, and things like that, which are rare on the West Coast. They get knocked down after they’ve only been standing for a few years. In those places, they kind of cherish that history that is inherent in a place that was settled much earlier. We’re talking about an island that was settled at the turn of the 1600s to 1700s. This dated and not-contemporary look for the buildings and various structures just made a lot of sense.

What were some of the difficulties in finding the right locations to shoot in or to use for exteriors? They all still feel so connected and at peace with each other, but I imagine you’re pulling from all sorts of different places.

SA: Yeah, we had some very good locations people. We actually started out looking for a coastal village much farther north, but then decided to try to find something a little bit closer. We went to Rockport to do a bunch of the exterior stuff, but one of the most difficult challenges we faced was with the Breakwater Inn. It had to be kind of rundown and a little derelict, but it was written as a Victorian building. Everyone wanted to find the perfect building that had the perfect exterior and the perfect interior that worked wonderfully for the show. It didn’t happen.

I knew we were going to be building the Captain’s Suite. That whole corridor, the parlor, the lobby, and all that stuff was so specific about what it needed to do. We looked at all kinds of things back there, but we couldn’t find the right exterior. I knew we were building the interior. We couldn’t find the exterior. The director of photography was renting an apartment nearby in this small town and drove by the building that we ended up using for the exterior. We changed the front porch and the entry door and all of that for the action that we needed, and it worked out really well. Then, in post, I wanted them to add this little tower piece that’s on the top that we kind of borrowed from the house in Psycho, which has the same mansard roof element at the top. I think the shot looked really great the way they did it. 

That’s so interesting about the Psycho connection because I also noticed matching set design elements from Jaws and The Shining, some of which are so subtle and obscure. How did you determine when it made sense to include these fun visual nods and when it was more appropriate to do something else?

SA: We tried not to hit the audience over the head with it too hard, but we had a lot of fun just pulling things from classics. I was watching Jaws, and there’s a conference room space in its town hall that has these little framed letters or something on the walls, which are otherwise very vacant. So we copied things like that. There’s a shot in Jaws where Roy Schneider is walking down the town hall’s hallway, and he hits his head on one of these low-hanging little signs. So we copied that, dead-on. You know, we took screengrabs from Jaws and matched all these little bits and pieces.

The drapery in the Loftis’ kitchen matches the fabric from Roy Schneider’s house in Jaws that’s hanging over the table, too. The kitchen is really a pretty close match to stuff from Jaws. When I was reading the first couple of scripts and read about the Breakwater Inn, I just immediately saw elements from The Shining. We were maybe going to try to do that iconic carpet, with the geometric pattern. It’s very, very graphic. However, it just didn’t fit in with what we were doing with the whole Victorian look. So we kind of moved away from that, but there’s the scene in the Captain’s Suite bathroom where Tom goes and listens to the countdown on New Year’s Eve; that’s directly from The Shining. Katie [Dippold] had written that specifically as something that should match, so we had a lot of fun with all those things.

There is such meticulous detail going on in Widow’s Bay between the “Teeth” and “Daddy’s Home” board games, Patricia’s grimoire, and all the newspaper clippings and ephemera at the Historical Society. How do you determine the right balance between making these things feel unsettling and haunted, but still realistic and rooted in reality?

SA: We were lucky to have a brilliant graphic designer working with us who I’ve known and worked with for more than 25 years. With the games, they were delineated fairly clearly from the script, so we handed it off to the graphic designer, and she came up with a bunch of versions. I remember them. We had all kinds of versions for “Teeth.” I think that’s a visual joke that landed really well when this playfully fun character is the setup for this pair of rusty pliers.

With the board game that they play, we went through a bunch of different versions of that. The little pieces that move, if you look carefully, you’ll see that there’s a bat, a belt, a rolled-up newspaper. These are all elements of, you know, “Daddy’s mad and he’s going to take it out on somebody!” Those were little subtle things that maybe not everybody catches. The newspaper articles are interesting. The cannibalism in the church piece went through I don’t know how many versions before we finally came up with one that everybody was satisfied with. We made it much bigger so that you really get the impact of it. All the other elements in the Historical Society, like the graphics of the priest being eaten by a whale or whatever, were things that we were able to find in historical documents that were copyright free, we could get the rights to them, or we modified them enough so that they weren’t a legal problem.

That’s so interesting too, because that’s the show in a nutshell, right? It’s mixing these fabricated elements with things from reality that are still very dark. You feel that overlap, and it’s really well done.

SA: The one thing you might not notice unless you’re really paying attention is that when Tom is talking to the reporter, and they’re talking about cannibalism, if you look over the reporter’s shoulder, there’s a mannequin in a straitjacket. So, you know, just twisted things in the background like that. This was the kind of thing that Katie and Hiro [Murai] were both pushing for. They wanted to get these really graphic images in there.

The flashback episode to 1702 was a standout episode from this season that got a really positive response from fans. What were the joys and difficulties of getting to play in an entirely different century, and are you hoping for more of that kind of thing in season two?

SA: I love doing period stuff. I live for it. So I’m really, really happy with that material. We looked and looked and looked for the exterior of Richard Warren’s house, and luckily we found a fantastic house from the 1600s. It’s a real house. They took it all apart and moved it there, sometime in the ’80s. You may not be able to tell in the episode, but there’s a whole other house behind that house that’s also from roughly the same time period. People live in that house. They had told us previously they had an old house from the 1800s, but they really felt that that wasn’t old enough for them. They wanted something even older. Once we got in there, we were able to document what was there, how it was gone, how it was built, how the stairway went, and all those things. Little details like the trim around the doors and all that stuff. We were able to lift all of that stuff from an actual early colonial house, and so that was fantastic.

I love that the costuming also strongly reinforces the community’s eerie energy. Everything has this lived-in and foreboding aesthetic that’s conveyed, even by ordinary costumes that aren’t necessarily meant to be creepy. How was that accomplished?

SA: So we had a fantastic costume designer, Alex [Bovaird]. She’s British and had done a lot of research on what the real colonial people wore because a lot of it has been bastardized. When you see it in various shows, it’s not really right. So she was very, very particular about making sure that if this guy was from this particular year, then he would display these kinds of things, this kind of hat, this kind of shoe, waistcoat, whatever. She really got into it!

All that applies to Widow’s Bay’s contemporary timeline, too. Some of the stuff that Patricia is wearing, for instance, has an eeriness to it even when it’s just technically regular clothes.

SA: If you look at it really closely, you will see that Shelley Duvall from The Shining is in a lot of the stuff that Patricia wears. There’s a connection there with the styling. The wardrobes aren’t dead-on copies, but it’s the same style, the same feel, and everything else. When you watch her, and then you watch Shelley Duvall in The Shining, it’s just eerie, and you see that there’s a kind of connectivity there.

Speaking of Patricia, one of my favorite things from the season is everything between Patricia and the Boogeyman. The Boogeyman has such the perfect look that’s both familiar and feels ripped out of a slasher movie, but still different and original. How was that design figured out, and was anything else considered?

SA: We went through many, many versions. They had many, many different versions and props. Morgan [Kling], our props master, had various sculpts made of all these different kinds of slasher faces. We went round and round before we finally narrowed it down. It took quite a while to come up with that final slasher boogeyman face.

This show is absolutely filled with production design Easter Eggs that fans are still continuing to discover. Do you have a favorite and are there any that seem to have gone undetected so far?

SA: There’s a lot of things. I mean, it’s quite amazing what we were able to cram in there. When I got the job, I was in Los Angeles, and I knew I was going to go to Massachusetts to shoot it. We were already thinking about things that we were going to need, like graphic artwork on the walls and things like that. I knew we needed a map of the island, and I had the first three scripts and outlines for the rest of the show, basically. There’s a scene in Episode 5 where Tom’s on mushrooms and all that. There had been a bit in there where he’s drawing around his hand, like the hand drawing that the shaman shows him. You know, it’s the whole “kid’s turkey drawings” where you put your hand on a piece of paper and draw around it. 

So, I thought, I need a shape for the island. I drew around my hand, and I made it sort of very jagged and primitive and rough. So the island shape, when you see the maps, the brochure, the satellite imagery, and all the other graphics that have that in it, that hand drawing is my original hand drawing that I gave to the graphic designer. From that, we figured out where the town would be on the hand and all those other things. But beyond all that, this hand or this island has a grip on people. They can’t escape. They’re caught. They’re being held sort of against their will, in a way. That whole hand subtleness, I think, is an interesting connection. 

This is a show where there are just so many cyclical callbacks and ideas that echo through generations. The fact that the map is a hand and Tom is going through that same process with his own hand, on its own, is a really cool thematic connection. 

SA: And I was surprised at how many people, as you said, are taking screengrabs and figuring all this stuff out. People actually noticed this and called it out! They were like, “It’s a hand!” I thought it was pretty abstract and unrecognizable, but they still got it!

You’re going to have to trace your foot next season or something! Lastly, what’s on your wishlist for season two? What would you like to see or do more of next year?

SA: We built 25 sets, at least, on stage. I love building scenery. I love designing and building real things. So any new ideas that they come up with there would be great. Again, I love period stuff. If we can do some more things from the 1700s, or whenever, that would be a dream.

The post How ‘Widow’s Bay’ Production Designer Built A Haunted Coastal Community Filled With Horror Easter Eggs appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

In Blumhouse’s new horror movie, arriving on Digital on August 1, Sullivan stars as Sara, an Artificially Intelligent android whose sole purpose is to serve as the perfect partner for her owner, David (David Rysdahl). But impossible beauty standards and programming safety measures that have been tampered with set this love bot to destroy mode when her relationship with David becomes threatened.

Director Kate Dolan (You Are Not My Mother), who rewrote an original draft from Rafael Jordan (Salvage Marines), based on a story by James Wan, Ingrid Bisu and Jordan, drew inspiration from ’90s erotic thrillers like Fatal Attraction.

They became a guide of sorts to Sara’s villainous turn, Kate Dolan explained to Bloody Disgusting. “All those old movies, when I was re-watching them to prep, I was writing the script, I was like, ‘Damn, these women are really just being driven into these scenarios by these men, these hapless men who are just treating them so badly. These men should really be getting their just desserts.’ But I think that was something we had as a guide for Sara: what really makes her into that femme fatale or that evil woman is just the impossible task of being a perfect woman and trying to balance being the Madonna and the whore and all these different kinds of aspects of being a woman and not being able to compute that. That’s what drives her crazy.

“That was always what really drew me to the story: of how to reframe that femme fatale or that villainous woman of the erotic thriller and do something new with it and something different.”

Lily Sullivan agrees: “She felt like a contemporary evolution of those characters. It’s like processing it all and then putting it through in an output. But it was so fun to try to find the old Hollywood archetypes of women in the 1990s, where it is built around fantasy, projection, desire. Then you’re just, even as the actor, then going through makeup, going through costume, where it’s all of these things that are kind of messed up about the blonde wig, the covering your whole body in paint so you can’t see any of your imperfections, or getting your teeth whitened and a push-up bra, and you’re just like, ‘Whoa. Why am I so angry? Why do I not feel enough? And why am I actually, literally, the male gaze right now?’ I was like, ‘Booked.'”

It turns out, though, that it was the impossible ideal of perfection that Sara represents that terrified Sullivan. She credits Dolan for helping her take on the intimidating role, one she was extremely hesitant to tackle at first.

Sullivan explains, “To do it, I’m like, someone’s going to meet your freak. We’re both choosing to do this. But at first I met Kate, and I felt like I told her all the reasons why I couldn’t do it or shouldn’t do it or why I was worried instead of being like, ‘Yeah, I’d love the role.’ I just weirdly had this verbal diarrhea of freaking out that I was like, ‘I don’t think I can.’ But then usually when you are that scared, it’s usually an indication to walk towards it. But really for me, it was Kate.“

Once she was on board, though, Sullivan grabbed the role by the throat. “Then also just again, to walk into the inky, gross, shadowy stuff of being a woman where I’m like, ‘How about I go over-hypersexualize the hell out of myself?’ But I’m going to make it uncanny valley. I want you to feel as silicone as much as you can. So I’m going to bring my Jim Carrey version of it, The Mask work, the Jacques Lecoq method of finding it through physicality. So there was so much nourishment in the challenge of it. Even reading the words when I was reading Kate’s writing, I’m going into Palisade mode. I was like, ‘I’ve got to go figure out what that language even means.’ And, ‘It better be as jarring as I possibly can.’ We love David, but we judge him for being able to project a whole life onto this wonky woman who’s forced to be there.”

Dolan reveals she did a lot of research into AI, and our home uses of it like Amazon’s Alexa, which informed Sara’s soothing voice and mannerisms. It also informed Sara’s parent company and new owner, David. “I was reading a lot about why that’s appealing, but also bias within the tech industry and how it’s predominantly male-led,” Dolan says. “So, you’re getting a lot of men of a certain background and life experience all thinking that this is the right thing to do.”

The director uses the ’90s thriller framework as an abstract metaphor for how we’re currently engaging with AI now, and “how people engage with them and what you get from that back.” That didn’t just inspire Sara’s look and design, but her methods of murder.

“The kills were very much like, I won’t spoil anything, but it was always ways that the men would be taken down a peg, then emasculated, or just put in a chokehold; literally, it was the kind of concept behind a lot of them,” Dolan explains. “And then it was just like: what would be most fun? What would be really fun to do? What would be fun to film and fun to watch as an audience? I mean, they were great fun, and all our male cast were very eager and excited to have these death scenes. That was the most exciting day on set when they were getting ready to be completely eviscerated.”

If it’s not already apparent, it feels strange to consider Sara a villain when she has no actual agency, though there’s no question she’s the terror of SOULM8TE. And Sullivan had a blast taking on the baddie role. Especially when it came to eviscerating the pursuit of perfection and anyone who dares to get in Sara’s way.

Sullivan teases a favorite kill of hers as she recalls the joy of playing a horror movie psycho, “Even loving the stiletto in the mouth referenced from The Last Seduction, just sets the heart. Even just having the plastic apron as I’m sawing the man’s body like a cello, little wink at American Psycho. It was so fun making a film about AI that’s super tech-based. Obviously our whole lives are bombarded by it, and it’s quite nauseating. If you’re going to make a film about AI, this serving is fun, it’s twisted, but it’s also freaky. And the freak show circus is already here, unfortunately.”

The post Lily Sullivan and Kate Dolan on Killer AI ‘SOULM8TE’: “I Want You to Feel the Silicone” appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

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.

The post Eli Roth Wanted ‘Ice Cream Man’ to Have More Kills Than All His Previous Movies Combined appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Jon McKellan explains, “I was maybe 18 when [Silent Hill] came out. I was very ill; I had a fever, a cold flu thing. And my dad was feeling sorry for me, and he said, ‘I’ll go pick you up a video game at the local video store,’ and so he brought back Silent Hill, which I didn’t know about at the time. And so he brought that in, and I finished it in one night, but I had a high fever, so I don’t really know how much of that happened. I know I finished it; I remember the credits rolling, but I was in a weird space, and I was like ‘that was the best experience I’ve ever had,’ and so I felt like if I go back it will never live up to that moment, so I’ve decided to never play Silent Hill again.”

Earlier this month, Konami invited Bloody Disgusting to a preview event where I, alongside other journalists, got to chat with McKellan and Silent Hill series producer Motoi Okamoto about the upcoming Silent Hill: Townfall, scheduled to release September 24.

This interview and presentation provided the most in-depth look at what the new entry in the series had planned, finally shedding light on the mysterious title.

The first gameplay trailer for Townfall made it clear what the biggest change to the series would be: the first-person perspective. While this took me a bit by surprise, it seems like their reasoning for making the jump is solid. Presented in an immersive 2.35:1 CinemaScope aspect ratio, the new viewpoint complements the game’s focus on tense stealth and frenetic combat.

JM: “It was first-person from day one for us… I think the two biggest features we wanted to bring to the table in terms of gameplay experience, between puzzles and story, were stealth, evasion, peeking around corners, and the CRTV, which was one of the first features we were developing when we were like ‘what is our take on the radio?’ It feels like a very Screen Burn thing to do, to take this piece of analog tech and enhance it, and there’s no way to hold that in front of the player in third-person without having to render that onto the UI, and that starts to feel like a mini-map that feels really out of place in Silent Hill… Personally, I’m a huge fan of first, because when you’re going for proper terror or tension, not having an avatar between you and the enemies just lifts that experience a little bit. If you’re trending towards action, it makes sense to have something in front of you and see how they move, but when you’re going for stealth and evasion, there’s nothing better than being right up front.”

There are many signature Silent Hill elements that are present in this game, from the oppressive fog to the terrifying Otherworld, but Screen Burn wanted to make sure that they were putting their own twist on one of the franchise’s signature items, the radio. Their take on the iconic gadget is the aforementioned CRTV, which can be tuned to various signals to deliver story beats and help you track nearby enemies. It’s a very tactile, analog device that fits in with elements they’ve been exploring for years.

JM: “I think [analog technology is] creepy because we know it’s unreliable. It’s not magical, it’s not intelligent. These systems are cables and wires and transistors, and it can break. We don’t really think about the components in an iPhone breaking in the same way; we think of it as a device, it’s just a thing. But I think you know it’s kind of strung together with duct tape and it could fail you at any time, and I think that lends something to it. We talk about weaponizing nostalgia in all of our games, taking things you love, like text adventures in Stories Untold, something that was cute and quirky and fun, and turning it on its head to make it the most horrible experience you’ve had…It feels nostalgic for the people who grew up with that, and it feels really unique for the people who didn’t, so it feels like you win both crowds that way.”

Motoi Okamoto: “I think the 90s is right on the borderline between the more analog tech and the more modern digital tech, so I think it’s a time where those two technologies overlap and start to crossover, so I think that exact timing is part of the appeal, part of why analog tech feels so creepy.”

Another signature element usually associated with the series is composer Akira Yamaoka, who has done the majority of the games in the franchise. This time around, Screen Burn is teaming with Pilotpriest, a musician who has composed for film as well as directing films himself. While it may be weird for long-time fans to not have Yamaoka on board, McKellan said that Pilotpriest became an integral part of the project and fit into the tone of the series from the moment he was brought on board.

JM: “He sent over fifteen tracks within a month, and every single one of them made it into the game. It was like, this is perfect. He essentially became part of the dev team; he was working with us pretty much every day, working with the audio team, playing the game, feeling like if something didn’t quite land, a moment or certain encounter didn’t feel quite right, he would go back in and rescore and re-export. He was completely integral to the design of the game.”

While Silent Hill games have been set outside the iconic city before, Townfall follows Silent Hill f in setting the game both in a new location and in a specific time in the past. Simon Ordell, the player character you inhabit, is exploring the Scottish town of St. Amelia in 1996.

MO: “It was a very natural decision for a team from Scotland to create a game that is based in Scotland… I think we all know that Silent Hill fans are very analytical, and they like to go into a lot of details and guess and analyze what goes on in Silent Hill, and I think we’re able to provide an extra layer on that by giving them an opportunity to try to guess where we are going to explore next.”

JM: “I think on top of that, players will find out as they progress through the game that the town is really the star of the show, and what happened there. It’s not just a coincidence that it’s set in Scotland. There’s meaning to that; there’s meaning to the island community and the way it’s positioned in the world. All these things matter by the end of the game. So hopefully as people dig into it, they realize it’s not just a stylistic choice or that we just happen to live here. We make what we know, but there’s a lot of reasons to be Scottish and a lot of reasons to be the kind of town that it is.”

Prior to Silent Hill: Townfall, Screen Burn had developed two other games, Stories Untold and Observation, which are both much smaller in scale than this project. Fortunately, this experience synergized with the style of narrative-focused puzzle design that Silent Hill is known for, making the transition easier than anticipated.

JM: “I think Stories Untold especially was where we really started to find our feet on narrative puzzle design. I grew up with point-and-click adventures and text adventures, things where you were getting the story through the action, rather than the action being something you did between the story. The scale of Stories Untold and Observation were much, much smaller. You were in a fixed room; you did very little exploring of the area. With Townfall, we were like, ‘Can we take the narrative presentation of Stories Untold and the way that we solve puzzles and tell that story, and also allow the player to walk around and get into combat. All those things that were a bit newer for us.”

It can be a tricky balancing act trying to jump into an established franchise, trying to please long-time fans while still making sure the game is something unique and personal. Screen Burn and Konami were both aware of this, and worked hard to ensure Townfall brought its own perspective that adds to the series, while still respecting and referencing the past.

JM: “What we came to try and do was to find what felt like Silent Hill to us, and it seems to be landing the way we thought it would, which is to pull people in with things that feel distinctly Silent Hill, and feel reminiscent. You’re gonna get shades of Silent Hill 2 or shades of P.T., but then we start to subvert those expectations as the game plays out. So by the end of the game, you’re gonna feel like Townfall is something that’s completely unique to the rest of the series, but still feels like Silent Hill so that fans feel connected to what we’ve done.”

MO: “There are some parts of the game that feel somewhat similar to Silent Hill 2, but I think the one thing that makes Townfall stand out compared to all of its predecessors is that it has its own take on social commentary. It’s a game that explores the perspective of an individual opposed to society at large and opposed to corporations, so there’s that bit of a social angle that you can explore the game from.”

Knowing how hardcore Silent Hill fans are, everyone on the team is well aware of how much their game will be scrutinized down to the most minute detail. McKellan welcomes it, as Screen Burn’s past titles have prepared them for the type of storytelling and detail the series is known for.

JM: “Speaking as someone who had a Geocities fan page for Silent Hill 2, I was one of those people for a long time. I think that’s part of the fun for us, layering in the details. We pour a lot of love into the environment, not just to make it look realistic, but there are clues everywhere. There’s a sense of who the town is if you look deep enough. We know the player’s going to be very analytical, and so we try our best to cater for that rather than be afraid of it; we just lean in. We did the same with Stories Untold, even though there were no expectations on that game, but there’s stuff people have noticed in that game, you know the names of hardware and what that could mean as a metaphor. It’s our vibe, it’s the thing that we love.”

As they previously announced, the game will feature a total of five endings, including the expected secret endings that the series is known for. The way they described it, it sounds like they are using the Silent Hill 2 methodology of assigning an ending, allowing the player’s actions to dictate the conclusion. Multiple endings can be a challenge to write around, but McKellan said it was fun to rise to the occasion.

JM: “Because we have this slightly fluid nature of gameplay and how the player plays affects what ending you’re going to get in a very subtle way, we wanna make sure that each one of them still feels like it makes sense for everything that’s just happened before it. With the exception of the more secret endings, the endings should still feel appropriate, and that’s the hardest thing. If you’re gonna end up with that ‘go left, go right’ at the end of the game, both still need to work with everything you’ve built, and that is a challenge, and this is the first time I’ve written this way. It’s also fun. It’s a challenge and a puzzle of how do you figure out to make sure that whatever happens in Ending B still carries the message of what you went through, while still feeling rewarding enough to have people want to find the alternatives.”

Silent Hill: Townfall is the final game to be released out of the initial announcements from 2022, and it’s clear by the quality of the titles that Konami has made a statement about their dedication to the series. Not only was it a great business strategy for them, but they also did an excellent job of creating an environment for each dev team to flourish creatively.

MO: “The main reason we decided to have multiple titles in the works at the same time was because we wanted to convey to players that Konami is serious about coming back into the gaming landscape. A part of the strategy behind that was to work on multiple games at once so we can have an annual release of a new Silent Hill game every year. That way, players will know that it’s not a facade. We’re serious about coming back into the gaming space and providing players with new games.”

JM: “Overall, it felt like they gave us the creative freedom to do what we do, and know that there’s a little bit of oversight there so we don’t accidentally make the same story as another [Silent Hill game], given that we’re all drawing from the same pool of reference… Seeing those games do really well gave us confidence that people were accepting of the new Silent Hill and that the fans were here for it. It’s always been a confidence builder for us.”

In addition to chatting with them about the game, I also got to play a three-hour demo of Silent Hill: Townfall. You can find my article about my hands-on experience with the game here.

Silent Hill: Townfall will release on September 24 for PlayStation 5, and PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store.

The post ‘Silent Hill: Townfall’ Director on Reinventing the Series With First-Person Terror and Scotland Setting appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

At Creep I.E. Con Aftermath, horror icons Brad Dourif, Fiona Dourif, and Alex Vincent sat down with Bloody Disgusting’s Shelby Novak (of Scare You to Sleep) and Michael Roffman (of Halloweenies) to discuss the past, present, and definitive future of the Chucky franchise.

Now, you can watch the full panel below.

The three share hilarious personal anecdotes about what it’s been like growing up together with Chucky in their lives. They also digress on the elasticity of the series and why they’re game for anything Don Mancini throws their way. Speaking of which, there is also a tease of what’s to come.

The video was directed and edited by Matt Sampere with Diandra Lazor.

The post ‘Chucky’ – Brad Dourif, Fiona Dourif, and Alex Vincent Reunite to Talk the Past and Tease the Future [Video] appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

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.”

The post ‘Rubberhead’ Director Nick Taylor on FX Maverick Steve Johnson, Practical Effects, and Seven-Year Journey appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

“Now I feel like I’m thinking about, ‘Man, how am I going to write things that would be really hard or impossible for an AI to replicate?’,” Tremblay told me, speaking by Zoom from his home in Massachusetts. “Maybe some of that is ego. I’m sure every writer thinks, ‘Oh, an AI could never write what I write.’ Yes, I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t part of the thought process.”

While that’s something Tremblay might consider with any new work at this point in his career, the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of A Head Full of Ghosts, The Cabin at the End of the World, and many other novels and short stories tackled it in a more direct way with his latest book. Inspired by Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, and the quirky humor of the Coen Brothers, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is Tremblay’s attempt at a sci-fi-horror mash-up that’s both darkly funny and existentially nightmarish. It’s also, in his own words, a screed against the movement by AI companies to supplant human artists. 

“I didn’t want to make it too didactic, but no, I playfully described this book as an anti-AI screed,” he said. “This book, in particular, was driven by anger and frustration, for sure. Not every book is going to be driven that way.“

Despite the emotions that fueled it, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep does not read like a screed. Instead, wielding offbeat humor and tech concepts that feel both lived-in and frighteningly tactile, the book lays out tandem narratives all building to the same conclusion, each of them exploring our relationship to machine learning in a different way. One of these narratives belongs to Julia, a former gaming streamer looking for a new challenge in life, who gets a call from a California tech company with an interesting offer.

The company has, it seems, implanted some new technology in a brain-dead middle-aged man which will, in theory, allow them to pilot the man’s body through a rudimentary, still-developing system of controls. Julia, with her gaming background, would be the pilot, in her own way just as much a test subject as the human vegetable she’s controlling. 

Julia is a Gen Z streamer with an omnivorous pop culture appetite, inspired by Tremblay’s own adult children, who riffs on The Big Lebowski constantly and calls her strange new meat puppet “Bernie” in reference to Weekend at Bernie’s. Her wide frame of reference, and her interest in art and stories far beyond video games, is in part informed by Tremblay’s own experiences with Gen Z, and in part a response to AI companies who scrape art and culture as a means of consuming it for reference without really experiencing a story. 

“I know that one of the arguments that OpenAI and other tech companies are trying to make is like, ‘Hey, you writers, you artists, you take pop culture, you take your influences, and you create something. That’s just the same thing that the bots are doing.’ And it’s just not,” Tremblay said. “I wanted to have Julia have her outlook informed by all this pop culture, and I wanted to make that feel really human as a way to show how inhuman the AI is.”

The other side of the story belongs to “Bernie,” who’s addressed in his point-of-view chapters as “You.” In these chapters, the technology in Bernie’s body starts to flicker images through his seemingly dead brain, delivering half-remembered imagery and perspective in a nod to the “hallucinations” of an AI model groping for understanding it can never reach. These chapters in particular show off Tremblay’s flair for formalist shake-ups, and echo the kind of hyperstimulated writing that Dick and Ellison made so influential. 

“I think it was more just the general Philip K. Dick feeling of ‘The world is so strange,'” Tremblay said. “He’s a lot funnier, I think, than maybe a lot of people credit him. That’s definitely what I was thinking of when writing the book.“

Bernie’s chapters embody the strangeness of Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep, presenting imagery that’s at times puzzling, at times eerily filmic, and always unnerving. They also mirror Julia’s own journey in fascinating ways as the odd couple – the Gen Z gamer and the middle-aged vegetable – traverse the United States, and the tech in Bernie’s body wakes up to the possibilities of using his flesh for its own purposes. It’s a compelling narrative technique, but it presented some new writing challenges for Tremblay. 

“I quickly realized I couldn’t write this book the same way I have in the past,” he said. “By that, I mean all my other novels I had written in the order in which it was presented, even things that are nonlinear, which is most of them. I knew I couldn’t do that in this book. It’s not a spoiler, but hopefully the readers figure out pretty early that the Bernie chapters are a little bit of a preview of the next chapter from Julia, what’s actually happening with Julia. It’s all refracted from him.”

Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep began with a simple image, inspired by Tremblay’s reading of Mary Roach‘s book chronicling the history of our treatment of corpses, Stiff. As he read, Tremblay imagined a body sitting on an airplane, remote-controlled by someone else. At the time, it was a “silly what-if” concept, filed away in his head. Years later, when he became an author suing a tech company to keep AI from scraping his work for ideas, it started to feel frighteningly plausible, taking the “silly what-if” into the territory of a high-concept horror show about what happens when we try to exploit and commodify uniquely human aspects of consciousness. 

“It stuck with me,” Tremblay said of that what-if imagery. “And then a few years later, when I was a part of the case suing OpenAI on behalf of writers, that what-if suddenly didn’t seem as silly. The more I learned about how that corporation operates and without really any sort of ethical thought to anything, I was like, ‘Oh, I’m going to play with that. That’s actually happening.”

So, what if someone actually in favor of generative AI picks up Tremblay’s self-described “anti-AI screed?” He hopes that, at the very least, he’s made the ride enjoyable in a distinctly human way that might begin to reshape the conversation. 

“I think that was another reason why I wanted to have the humor,” Tremblay said. “If people are reading this book who aren’t on the side of like, ‘Hey, LLMs taking authors’ books is bad,’ maybe if they read something that’s cut with some humor, that maybe they’ll be more easily swayed.”

Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is now in bookstores everywhere. 

The post Paul Tremblay on Fighting AI with Horror in New Novel ‘Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep’ appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

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.

The post Avalon Fast on Women, Witches, and the Intoxicating Nature of Girl Horror ‘Camp’ appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Don’t Move adapts the 2020 novel of the same name from co-authors Murray and Darren Wearmouth, unleashing a prehistoric arachnid upon an unsuspecting church group’s annual retreat. It’s massive, and it hunts by vibration.

The creature feature is the first under Murray’s new banner, Impractical Studios, designed to bring his authored works and love of horror to mainstream audiences.

Murray has big plans for Impractical Studios; the multihyphenate talent teases an adaptation of his holiday slasher novel as he explains the origins of his new label. “The idea for that was I’ve written nine thriller novels with major publishing houses: three with Harper Collins, three with Penguin Random House, two with Blackstone, two with St. Martin’s Press. Big publishing houses. The idea being that I would create the IP, create the big ideas.

“I love horror so much, and I love writing thrillers. I have a degree in English and literature. So, the idea was that I would create the worlds I want to see on film and then eventually partner with people like McLean, who adapted Don’t Move into the screenplay. Don’t Move comes out this September, and then next year, we’re going to make You Better Watch Out, my serial killer thriller I wrote, and then so-and-so forth down the line.“

Murray Thinks the Movie is Better Than the Book

Don’t Move wasn’t the first novel Murray authored, but it was the first of his books that longtime friend Maclain Nelson read. That proved to be the true origin of this creature feature. “I actually felt like a bad friend because he’d written all these novels, and I’m like, ‘Buddy, I feel bad. I haven’t read any of your books,” Nelson tells Bloody Disgusting. “And I said, ‘What should I start with?‘ I was at his house one weekend, he looked through all the books he wrote, and he’s like, ‘Here, take Don’t Move.‘ He’s like, ‘I think that’s a quick read. I think you’ll like it.‘“

Nelson fell instantly for the novel: “So, I disappeared for four hours. He thought I left, and I just read it. I read it in one sitting. The story really caught me. I thought it was so fun. It really reminded me of one of my favorite movies, Tremors, in that it follows this group of people. Some sci-fi is happening. They don’t know what it is. They have to figure it out together. They have to come together as a community. I said, ‘Man, James, this is a movie. We got to make this.‘ He’s like, ‘Well, I do TV. What do we do?‘ And I said, ‘Let me take a stab at the script. If you like it, let’s move.‘ I sat down, really ingested the book, and a month later, we had a screenplay.“

Not only did Nelson adapt Murray and Wearmouth’s novel, but he also directed the feature, which Murray is the first to praise for surpassing his material.

“I hate to say it, but the movie’s better than the book, which never happens. It never happens.“

Murray credits Nelson’s direction especially. “Largely because of Maclain Nelson’s skills with actors and with heart and emotion; he added a whole layer to the movie that’s not in the book, which is that it’s got real heart. You care for these characters; you actually want these people to survive, and they often don’t, and it really is heartbreaking. So it’s got a lot of heart, a lot of depth, and it’s really funny. The book is not funny. The book is a slaughterhouse because Darren and I love killing people. But the movie has a lot more heart and comedy than the book did. So, I hate to say it. I love to say it, but the movie’s better than the book. And I can say it, I’m the author.“

Nelson emphasizes that while Don’t Move does have heart and humor, it’s horror through and through. “We obviously have a shift in the movie where it really gets real, but it’s supposed to be these people in this community coming together to be in the woods. So there should be some light moments. We’re not cracking jokes near the end when things are getting really serious, but to set everything up and to get to know people, you want to be there with them, and it just endears you to them as one by one,” Nelson explains.

Murray agrees. “I love horror even more than comedy,” he tells BD. “It’s so weird that I have been doing ‘Impractical Jokers’ for so, so long. But for me, what makes a horror movie great is when smart people make good decisions facing impossible odds, and sometimes it works out, and sometimes it doesn’t. When characters on screen are making the dumbest decisions possible, I check out as a viewer. I’m like, come on, man, no one is this stupid. So one of the hallmarks of all of my books, and then Don’t Move as well, is that these people are smart people and they’re making good choices and they still lose, but sometimes they win. That’s a good, compelling movie today.“

Smart Characters, Impossible Odds

Don’t Move, Murray and Nelson tease, comes out of the gate swinging. Murray praises Nelson’s changes to the book’s cold open, “It’s pure horror. Our lead character, Megan Forrester, who’s played by Lyndsy Fonseca, who is amazing and so charismatic and so warm and likable, goes through an unspeakable tragedy that unfolds rapid fire. It is fast-paced. It’s one of the rides at an amusement park, the swing ride just goes out of control and groans and creeks as people start spinning around in the chairs, they can’t get out.“

Fonseca leads an ensemble cast alongside Russell “Russ” Vitale. Tom Cavanagh (The Flash), Hunter King (Life in Pieces), Rob Riggle (The Hangover), and Joseph Lee Anderson (Young Rock) also star. Expect plenty of cameos including T-Pain, Matt Biedel, and “Impractical Jokers” member Brian Quinn.

The film marks the first lead role for Russ, who immediately won over Murray and Nelson. “The first time I Zoomed with him and just his voice, the quality of his voice, the swagger, his look, I was like, ‘This is Ricky Vargas,'” Nelson says. “Ricky in the book, he’s joining the church camping trip. Imagine the type of people. I grew up very religious. I went on a ton of church camping trips, and never once did a guy like Ricky Vargas come on the church camping trip. So, it needed to be this perfect human, the perfect character that you don’t expect and shows up, but has this likability and ability to ingratiate himself with the very different crowd, but then also you don’t know what he’s doing. He’s got some shady motives. And man, we have a new movie star out there because he took it all on.“

Competing for star status on Don’t Move, of course, is the behemoth monster hunting human prey.

How Real Spiders Inspired Don’t Move’s Prehistoric Arachnid

Don’t expect to see the prehistoric monster in its full glory ahead of release, but Nelson’s approach to designing the arachnid might induce arachnophobia all the same. The director studied spiders up close for months, picking different features from a variety of species for maximum skin-crawling terror.

“For six months, this was my research for the spider, because we created our own way on how it moves and whatnot. I would be in my backyard, I would lie down on this cot, and I would just look straight down at the grass. I was shocked at how many spiders would just come across anytime you are outside. I’d watch the spiders, how they move, some that would do a little thing and then hop and do a little thing and then hop. I saw this one that had these crazy crab arms, the front four were way longer, and the back ones were shorter.

“I just started documenting and making characteristics of all these different spiders that I liked and that were creepy. We built with our CGI artists all the creepiest little intricacies of all these different spiders and created our own kind of super spider.”

“It’s like an alien,” Murray says of this movie’s monster. “It really is. It moves like an alien. It doesn’t think as we do. There’s no reasoning with it. And that’s what I love about Don’t Move, the book and the movie. The horror mimics my favorite horror movie all the time, The Descent, which I think is brilliant. It mimics that kind of horror in the same kind of ways. It works on three levels: It’s human versus the other, which is this creature that cannot be reasoned with, can’t be logicked with it whatsoever. You can’t talk your way around it, right? It’s completely alien.“

He continues, “Then it’s human versus each other because of the inner dynamics of the group. It’s a group setting. They have different motives. They have different pasts that conflict, and it’s the constant conflict between those personalities and then the human versus, in this case, herself. It’s Megan Forrester versus her own trauma that she went through at the beginning of the movie. She’s got to overcome her own past in order to succeed and win and survive at the end.“

That neither Nelson nor Murray is known for horror makes this feature all the more rewarding for the pair, who forged their own path in getting Don’t Move made after a lot of rejections. “Maclain Nelson, Jordan to my Peele,” Murray jokes, acknowledging that studios still haven’t seemed to fully recognize how well horror and comedy go hand-in-hand, particularly in the comedian-to-horror-filmmaker pipeline.

“Not a lot of people believed in this. It’s why we had to do it ourselves. It’s why we didn’t get a studio to back it. We had to go prove it ourselves. We didn’t get invited to the party. We had to create our own,” Nelson says.

Murray agrees, “That’s what indie horror movie making is all about: doing it. I’m really proud of that. That’s what I’m most excited about, that moment before the first time it premiered since September in that first theater, sitting there next to my buddy, my friend for life, and saying, ‘God dammit, man. We made it. We made a horror movie, and it’s good, and I think people will like it.’ And that should be celebrated, man. It’s so hard to do.“

Tickets are on sale now for the Kansas City premiere at the Midland Theater on September 8 and the Los Angeles premiere at the TCL Chinese Theater on September 9, ahead of Don’t Move‘s theatrical release on September 11.

The post ‘Don’t Move’ First Look: James “Murr” Murray & Maclain Nelson Preview Giant Spider Horror Feature That’s “Better Than The Book” [Exclusive] appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

From a screenplay by Brea Grant (Torn Hearts, 12 Hour Shift) and Ed Dougherty (MLM) and segments directed by Grant, Dougherty, and Chelsea Stardust (Satanic Panic), Grind features four interwoven stories that parody the gig economy, hustle culture, and the evils of late-stage capitalism.

The anthology follows weary everyday people juggling side hustles just to survive, while going up against greedy oligarchs, and cleverly uses dark humor and bloody practical effects to portray a world much like our current economic nightmare.

Bloody Disgusting had the pleasure of chatting with Brea Grant and Ed Dougherty about the socioeconomic commentary in Grind, casting Barbara Crampton as a villain, and DIY filmmaking.

Bloody Disgusting: Every segment in this anthology feels relatable because people are actually struggling to survive in the gig economy right now. How did the two of you come up with the idea of creating Grind?

Brea Grant: Like you said, we were trying to come up with a cool idea that seemed relevant right now. The thing that everyone we know is talking about is the economy, the lack of work, and the nightmare hellscape that is late-stage capitalism. It felt like the right time to write something that really featured that as the main horror. As the main thing that people were scared of, this world sort of came to us over the course of a couple of years.

Ed Dougherty: We wanted to make a hit film, and we said, “Let’s make a horror anthology, that’s the most marketable thing there is.” [laughs]

BG: [laughs] Definitely not!

BD: I love anthologies!

ED: We do, too. We feel like it’s kind of an undervalued form of horror film, but it’s a hard sell.

BG: People told us not to make it. They said, “Don’t make an anthology. It’s too hard to sell.” But we did it anyway.

BD: I guess I’m just one of those weirdos who likes anthologies and watches them all.

ED: We believe that there are a lot of weirdos like you out there. It seems like every good horror anthology has a long life, but it’s just getting over the initial hump that’s difficult.

BD: Chelsea Stardust directed some of the segments with the two of you and serves as a producer. How did she first get involved with this project?

BG: The project has a long history. We shot the first segment, which is about multi-level marketing, a couple of years ago. We had decided we wanted to make a full anthology, but it took us about a year after shooting that initial segment to shoot the rest of the movie. When we did that, we knew we needed to bring on a producer aside from Ed and me, since we were directing the bulk of the movie, so that was how she came on board. I’ve been friends with her for a long time, and the one thing I know about her as a friend is that she is very organized, so it felt like a good fit. I just called her one day and said, “Would you want to produce these three segments that we have left to shoot of Grind?” and she came on board.

BD: There are some fun cameos in Grind, but we have to talk about Barbara Crampton. She’s so good as a villainess. Why did you want her for this role, and what was it like working with her on this film?

BG: She’s in her villain era, which is so fun. [laughs] Obviously, we’re huge Barbara Crampton fans, and when we were making MLM, it was a smaller part of the movie that we knew we needed to call on people who could do a good job but were also friendly to us [laughs]. I’m friends with Barbara Crampton, and we’ve done three movies together before this. So, it felt like someone within our reach, but could also really draw a horror crowd. She has a huge fanbase, and she’s also super supportive of all the projects that she’s been in, so that was also really exciting. She’s a great actress, and she’s super funny. I think a lot of these horror actresses, especially those who came up in the eighties and nineties, weren’t given an opportunity to be funny. I think she was ready to jump on an opportunity that was different than what she was used to; it’s not running around and screaming. She is a cult leader, and she is quite funny in it. She just takes the comedy so well and seriously, and she does such an amazing job with it. She has a scene across from Rob Huebel, who is obviously a comedy master, and I feel like the two of them together were hilarious. It’s been fun to watch Barbara go from these iconic roles to a different kind of role at this point in her career. We’re super happy to be a part of that.

ED: And she loves the movie and has been so supportive. Every time she posts about it, I’m like, “I can’t believe this. This is amazing.”

BD: This is an accurate parody of the current socioeconomic situation in this country, as well as our obsession with online culture. It repeatedly asks the question, “What are you willing to do to make money,” in a world with wealth inequality and evil oligarchs. It’s fun, and it’s a horror movie, but it’s thought-provoking. What do you hope audiences take away from Grind, besides having a good time?

ED: I read every review and every Letterboxd review; Brea does not. So, I’ve seen it all. I’ve seen some reviews that say, “Good movie but doesn’t propose a solution.” I think we do propose a solution, which is that the power of unions and organizing is the only way that we will be able to fight back against oligarchs. I do think that is the message of the film. Organizing is the only way to defeat these villains. I do think we have a lot to say in the film. I’d want someone to say, “Man, I’ve never seen a horror anthology that had a political message before.” [laughs]

BG: I think the other thing is that what is currently happening is that we live in a world in which people kind of feel alone in this. They’re like, “Well, I’m doing bad, “or “I’m having trouble paying my rent.” We wanted to hang a lantern on the fact that this is happening to everyone, that wealth disparity is at an all-time high. We’re pointing out to people that you aren’t in this alone; you’re not the only person doing side hustles. Every filmmaker friend I have is working a side job of some sort at this point, and that is just in Los Angeles. Outside of this city, I think things are more dire. I think it was about infusing some politics into something that could make people realize that they aren’t alone and that there are ways of fighting back and fighting the system that has been set up against them.

ED: I think the tone of the movie, which is darkly comedic, also really matches the tone of life right now. Everything seems almost at a parody level as far as the disconnect between oligarchs and trying to make a living and reality. The absurdist nature of the film kind of captures the real tone of life.

BD: There are some cool creature effects and makeup effects in this movie. Can you talk a little bit about the practical effects and makeup?

ED: I think especially because of the message of the film, which is pushing back against the current hellscape we’re in, we wanted to use as many practical effects as possible. We used matte paintings, miniatures, and practical creature effects. I’m always afraid of the matte painting because we used the old school matte painter, but they do look a little AI. I heard someone make a noise behind me during one of the shots, and I was like, “I hope that noise wasn’t them using AI because that’s a matte painting.” [laughs] There’s also the fact that it’s pretty DIY. It’s a film that we financed ourselves and shot in our houses as much as possible. We wanted the whole thing to feel handmade and very tactile.

BG: We’re old school horror fans, so we love seeing practical effects. The practical stuff is really fun for us. It’s the stuff that we think is actually cool. [laughs] So, practical stuff made the most sense for us. We both grew up in the punk scene in the nineties, and I think it just kind of comes naturally to us to try to do things ourselves. And we both work on projects for big companies, with smaller companies, but always for other people, so trying to do something ourselves to see what that felt like was also part of the experiment of Grind.

ED: This was our chance to do everything we wanted our way.

Grind screens at the Chattanooga Film Festival on June 20.

The post The Work ‘Grind’ Is Hell, So Brea Grant & Ed Dougherty Made a Horror Anthology About It [CFF 2026 Interview] appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Time and reality blur for stars George Mackay (Wolf, 1917) and Callum Turner (Green Room, “Neuromancer”) in the hallucinatory time travel mystery releasing in New York and Los Angeles theaters on June 19, 2026.

But this isn’t your standard time travel movie.

Rose of Nevada bends time and genre in its exploration of Cornish identity and community, upending the lives of  Nick (MacKay) and Liam (Turner). There’s a listless, dreamy quality to the time travel, and for inspired reason: Jenkin approaches it like a haunting.

While time travel was on his mind early in the writing process, Jenkin’s partner and collaborator asked a question that unlocked Rose of Nevada and inspired the filmmaker.

Jenkin explains, “I remember saying to Mary [Woodvine], my partner, who’s in the film, I said to her, ‘God, it really seems like I’ve fallen into this thing of either making films about ghosts or films about time travel,’ and then she said to me, ‘Yeah, but aren’t all ghost stories just time travel films, and aren’t all time travel films just ghost stories?’ And then I thought, ‘Oh, great. So I’m not making two types of films. I’m actually always making one type of film.’ But that was ultimately liberating because I thought there’s a nice gap or a crossover in the perception of genres, there’s a lot of room to play and to be free within that.”

“Once I’d abandoned the idea that I was going to master quantum physics in any academic sense,” the filmmaker continues, “It was incredibly freeing because I thought, ‘Well, I can just set my own rules here,’ and it really doesn’t matter what the rules are as long as you stick to them. You can’t bend them for the sake of the plot or for the sake of a character arc or something. You have to establish those rules upfront and stick to them, which made me really think I’ve got to limit the time travel element. This film can’t be about time travel.“

Bearing the brunt of the time travel disruption is Mackay’s Nick, a man struggling to support his family before the ill-fated voyage upends his entire world. It’s the type of role that was an easy yes for the actor, simply because of the filmmaker behind it.

“I saw Bait at the cinema when it was first out a few years ago and was so struck by it,” Mackay tells BD. “I just hadn’t seen a film like it. I want to work with the best directors. I want to work with the best directors and people who have a singular vision. As an actor, the process of work is almost my biggest draw, as well as what a story’s saying, but I think you learn by doing, and if I can do my bit in as many different ways as possible. The physicality and the discipline of Mark’s filmmaking, how that is so entwined in the DNA of the film, and therefore in the way that I work within it, that was the biggest draw. I’m just a fan of Mark’s. I was just very pleased to be involved.”

That reflects in Rose of Nevada‘s unique casting; Mackay initially was eyed for Liam.

“When I first got the call to meet Mark at the audition stage,” Mackay said, “We didn’t wind up reading scenes, but they said, ‘There’s a project. There are two roles in it that you could be right for, and Mark is leaning towards you for Liam.’ So, I had a look at Liam, Callum’s role, and had my interpretation of the script ready to talk about it and what I thought that character was, who he was, and how I’m thinking about how I might inhabit that or what I saw in him. And when we met, we didn’t talk about the film at all. We spoke about everything else. But following that meeting, I got the message, said, ‘Mark would like you to be part of the film, but he thinks you’re definitely more of a Nick,’ which I think I just may be a complete sheep because I went, ‘Of course I’m Nick.’

Mackay continued, “But it’s funny, I do have in my own life, I just started a family, and so much of my last few years of being has been trying to figure that balance and what that means and how you navigate that. So with family being at its core and all the kind of conundrums that come with staying level with that, that rang true. So I felt like I understood objectively, I have my interpretations of what both men mean to each other and within the story, but then once I was playing Nick, I just became about a very present focus on who he was and what his situation was. What I liked about him is that he’s a very straightforward bloke. In the best possible way, he’s quite a simple man. It’s just he’s in an extraordinary situation.”

Jenkin wrote Rose of Nevada during the pandemic lockdown that had forced a halt in production on Enys Men. He’d return to rewrite once Enys Men had been completed, creating overlap between films. “They are even more in conversation than you’d think because the first draft of Rose of Nevada was before I’d made Enys Men, and then everything I learned through the making of Enys Men, I fed into Rose of Nevada. But also the reaction to Enys Men, all the critics and writers and audience members who are telling me what Enys Men was about. I’m always the last to realize what I’ve done, I think like most filmmakers. You don’t really know what you’ve made a film about until the audience tells you. I was able to feed that into Rose of Nevada and also scale it up a little bit. So, yeah, in some ways it predates Enys Men, and in some ways it follows on from it,” he said.

Jenkin’s latest caps what’s unofficially been dubbed his Cornish trilogy, a moniker that initially surprised the filmmaker, but he’s come to embrace it. A recent revisit of Bait made it even clearer. “I can now understand why people are linking the three films together. I’d forgotten how linked they are, which is amazing, really, considering the first draft of Bait was written in 1999. So, most of my adult life has been one way or another making this trilogy. I am quite looking forward to starting the next chapter.”

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A24 releases the dark reimagining of the classic folk tale in theaters this Friday, June 19.

Hugh Jackman stars as a grizzled Robin Hood, who begins Sarnoski’s latest in a grim place of death and violence before a grave injury presents a rare chance at salvation.

In 13th-century grit and squalor, the violence in The Death of Robin Hood is especially brutal, setting up a stark contrast for the outlaw’s thematic journey in his final days. Speaking with Bloody Disgusting ahead of the film’s release, writer-director Michael Sarnoski explained that the visceral brutality at the film’s outset was both a reflection of period authenticity and in service of Robin’s story.

“It’s always a little bit of both,” Sarnoski explains. “The initial idea for the movie was I wanted to humanize these characters from this old legend and really understand them. So, part of that is understanding the authenticity of the period and studying the brutality of the old ballads. Both things evolved at the same time, because then it became this story about this person who was grappling with their own legacy of violence and their own folklore.”

He continues, “It was a little bit of a chicken and the egg thing where it was like, ‘Okay, the authenticity is where we’re going to access the humanity.’ But then, through that, we also have to access how these people felt about that violence. And because of that, we really have to make that violence feel human and real and brutal and not Hollywood-ized at all.“

But don’t expect The Death of Robin Hood to be too beholden to period accuracy; the filmmaker never wanted to lose sight of its characters or their humanity. “I was more trying to capture, in my mind and soul, what it might have felt like to live at that time. When you’re steeped in nature and all of its brutality, but also all of its divinity and spirituality, what would that just feel like on a deeper soul level? A lot of the research was focused on just trying to capture that human side of existing back then.”

The Death of Robin Hood avoids retreading the familiar origin story of the outlaw and his Merry Men; the past is a distant memory steeped in blood for this iteration of Robin Hood. Save for Little John (Bill Skarsgård), very little calls back to the familiar folklore fixtures and iconography. 

“It wasn’t straightforward,” Sarnoski says of his writing process and choosing which characters to incorporate. “It kind of happened organically. I knew I just wanted the pieces that I needed for that character, but then at the same time, I wanted to acknowledge that he’s grappling with what he believes his life was, and the violence of that life and of that time. But then at the same time, he’s also not a fully reliable narrator. He has been jaded for decades and has just been steeped in that violence. Even he and Little John especially aren’t 100% sure which of these things were stories and which were real in some way, because I think even in our own lives we have that, where our memories become these stories that we just tell each other.”

“I wanted to make sure that we’re doing some justice to that Robin Hood legend, and there are a lot of references to that. I wanted to use it sparingly and specifically, but then also acknowledge that no one in this world is 100% sure who this guy was, not even the guy himself.”

While Jackman commands the screen as the world-weary outlaw, it’s Murray Bartlett (“The Last of Us”, Opus) who steals scenes as the enigmatic leper standing vigil over the Priory.

Bartlett’s complex performance, buried under unrecognizable costuming and prosthetics, surprised even Sarnoski in more ways than one. “The initial surprise was finding such a great actor who was willing to completely disappear. And that takes a lot of ego death and bravery and excitement for the pure creative, emotional side, and also bravery in the performance side of, ‘You’re not going to have 90% of the tools that you usually use. You’re going to have to do this with your eyes, your voice, and just your physicality.’ So, I think just the surprise of finding someone who was like that was the feature, not the bug. He was so excited about that, and he found it very liberating.

“Then, it sounds kind of obvious, but the next surprise was just you write this character on the page, and you’re like, ‘Okay, he’s supposed to have this depth, he’s mysterious, but he’s also gentle, and he becomes this almost teacher.’ In your mind, you’re like, ‘Okay, I think this character can work.’ But then you see Murray embody it and you’re like, ‘Oh, this is so far beyond what I ever could have hoped for.’ And it’s so moving and so human in spite of all the limitations on the performance.”

Sarnoski notes this character acts as the ferryman, right on the cusp of life and death. That, along with the period, also informed the Leper’s look, “In those old monasteries, they had these orchard cemeteries that were also where they buried the body. It’s this place of graves and growth. He has subtly different outfits that he wears depending on if he’s ferryman or orchardman. There was a lot of thought that went into all of that.”

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The four-disc release, loaded with special features and new interviews in addition to the restoration, arrives almost exactly three years after Roland began his long pursuit of the missing elements that he was warned were lost to time.

It’s a fitting journey for Day of the Dead, the third film in horror master George A. Romero‘s zombie series, considering the film’s long road to reappraisal after its initial failure at the box office in 1985. A huge departure from the popular Dawn of the Dead, the third film set its battle for humanity’s survival in an underground bunker, waged between a small group of scientists and ruthless soldiers.

It was underground where Roland began his pursuit of the missing interpositive elements, starting with the old-fashioned paper trail in Scream Factory’s basement, sorting through records from their 2013 Blu-ray release.

Scream Factory’s Years-Long Quest to Restore a Horror Classic

“So, there I was, going through boxes and boxes and boxes, trying to find this one specific invoice for a delivery company amongst thousands of pieces of paper,” Roland tells Bloody Disgusting. “That was the start. I was able to figure out the delivery service, and from there, it just went into a whirlwind of… drama? Yeah, there was some drama in there at one point; I thought it had been stolen by someone.”

Roland notes of his Indiana Jones-like journey, “the short and sweet of it is, it took forever, I was trying to find leads. Anything. I was seeing ridiculous things online, you know, like it was in a diamond mine in South Africa. I even followed up on that. I thought it would be hilarious if it were actually being kept in the Wampum mine. So I called them, and this poor woman who answered the phone sounded like she got this call every other day.”

Roland notes, “The records, for film vaults and such, aren’t the greatest. I’ll just say that. So, I think that’s, over time, that’s something that we definitely need to improve upon in this business.”

John Harrison Reflects on Day of the Dead‘s Surprising Legacy and Original Vision

While now considered another Romero zombie classic, critics and audiences rejected Day of the Dead at first, especially the Caribbean-style theme music from composer and first assistant director John Harrison.

Few are as surprised by the massive shift in the film’s reception as Harrison. The filmmaker and longtime Romero collaborator reflects, “Now, if you had asked any of us, and George included, that, ‘hey man, you know, in 45 years, this movie’s gonna be considered like a cinema classic.’ We all probably would have said, ‘Oh, we’re making a movie, man. We’re just having fun making a movie, and God, can you believe it, that people are paying us to do this?’ I don’t want to minimize it. I don’t want to say that we were just goofing around.”

Harrison continues, “All of us were really serious about our craft and about what we were trying to do. But I don’t think that any of us, maybe George, hopefully, had some feeling that his films would last for a while. I was a kid, you know? I just wanted to have fun, make movies, and be part of that whole scene. So, it was really disappointing when Day came out, because it was a bomb. I mean, let’s be truthful about it. It was a bomb. And people hated the score. So, 40-some years later, it’s become, for some people, the apogee of that first dead trilogy. The best of the three in its own way.”

Harrison also points out that Romero’s Land of the Dead would later face a similar reception and reappraisal, which was all the more fascinating considering early budget cuts caused Romero to drastically scale back Day of the Dead‘s story. A lot of what was excised was later revisited in Land of the Dead. “That was actually part of the original Day of the Dead concept,” Harrison explains of the 2005 film.

“Because of budget and schedule and so forth and so on, and ratings,” he tells BD. “George couldn’t do it, and that’s why we ended up with the more condensed version of Day of the Dead, which everybody now knows and loves. In a way, I’m kind of glad, because it has a real identity being trapped in those caves, and the end of the world, the two sides of society. Going at it, headbutting, to try and survive. But the whole Fiddler’s Green idea and all of that stuff that ended up in Land of the Dead was part of the original Day.”

George Romero Predicted Social Media and Modern Culture

Suzanne Romero, founder & president of the George A. Romero Foundation and the late filmmaker’s wife, breaks down the film’s trajectory even further. “The original Day of the Dead script, I think, at one point, it was written for a $12 million budget, and it was basically cut in half. And it’s a great script. But that’s what happens with filmmakers, and you gotta make do.”

She continues, “But I really think that this film is really for the fans and people who love physical media. And in terms of the foundation, well, anytime George Romero is mentioned is good, because what we are doing is to provide a healthy legacy. We’re uplifting his legacy, we’re supporting the archive, and we’re also supporting the Horror Study Center. So, all of these three things are what the Foundation is striving to do. As far as I’m concerned, the more we say George Romero’s name, the better it is.”

The mention of Land of the Dead brings up one recurring theme of Romero’s work: the filmmaker’s ability to keep his pulse so thoroughly on the current social climate in a way that feels prescient. 

Roland agrees, “I think one of the most amazing things that doesn’t get talked about enough is in 2007, he came out with Diary of the Dead. That pretty much predicted YouTube culture. I mean, we’re going through it right now, the exact things that were happening in Diary of the Dead. It’s incredible.”

“Well, that was intentional,” Harrison says, “because I was part of that and worked with Peter [Grunwald] and George on developing that whole script and production. And that was definitely intentional. There was nothing accidental or, ‘Great timing, guys!’ It was not like that at all. It was intentional.”

Suzanne Romero agrees, “[George] was very wary of social media, but very wary of the internet. He was always very suspicious and thought that we ought to beware; we ought to be walking very carefully into this space.“

“Which we haven’t done, of course,” Harrison adds.

“No, of course not,” Romero responds. “And AI. I mean, he would be writing about AI right now and thinking, danger! What the fuck are you doing, people? But not only that, but he also did it in a layman’s way. You know, he really brought it to very familiar language, and people that spoke to each other, it was in a very natural way, and it was the way he developed characters. The way he evolved with how his women were more powerful, because he kind of regretted that in Night of the Living Dead, [Barbra] was weak. He always thought the women ought to be much stronger, and I think it started with Season of the Witch.”

Everyone Wanted to Be a Zombie in a Romero Movie

George A. Romero’s legacy certainly looms large over Scream Factory’s impressive new release, offering a comprehensive look at Day of the Dead through a dizzying number of new audio commentaries, featurettes, and interviews detailing everything from the “mine fever” that spread among the cast and crew to Ernest Dickerson‘s high-pressure day on set running the second unit camera.

That’s also reflected in Romero’s zombies themselves, dating back to 1968’s Night of the Living Dead.

“In Pittsburgh, it was a badge of honor to be a zombie in a George Romero movie,” Harrison recounts. “Everybody from the Dean of Students at Carnegie Mellon to the presidents of corporations. I had a story that came out of Dawn. I was pitching a commercial for my own little company, and I’d done a bit for George as ‘Screwdriver Zombie’ on Dawn. I didn’t get cleaned up enough, and I went to this meeting at the first thing in the morning. The vice president of this bank is looking at me, going, ‘Is there something wrong with you?’ I said, ‘No, no, that’s what I know? I’m fine.’ He said, ‘Well, you’re bleeding out of your ear.’ Okay, so then I had to tell them the whole story. And he listened to it, and I thought, well, this is gonna be ridiculous. I’m coming in talking about being a zombie in a movie, and I want to sell him this, like, multi-thousand-dollar commercial that the bank is gonna pay for. He listened very carefully to me, and he said, ‘Well, listen, we’ll talk about the commercial, but do you think I could be a zombie in one?”

That hasn’t changed in the present, either.

Suzanne Romero confirms, “We’re producing George’s film, Twilight of the Dead, and we get requests, ‘Can I be a zombie in this film?’ So, even today, people are very interested, and yet it’s terrible. I mean, it’s hours and hours of makeup.”

Scream Factory’s Day of the Dead four-disc 4K UHD + Blu-ray Collector’s Edition releases on June 16.

The post George A. Romero’s ‘Day of the Dead’ Gets New Life After Search for Long-Lost Film Elements appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Kojima Productions and A24 previously teased not to expect a direct translation of the 2019 game, which introduced “a catastrophic series of events that blurred the boundaries between the worlds of the living and the dead, bringing forth nightmarish creatures into a fragmented world on the brink of collapse.”

The adaptation is said to delve into the mysteries surrounding “Death Stranding,” with the game’s creator, Hideo Kojima, revealing it would introduce a brand new story.

While plot details remain scarce at this stage, writer-director Michael Sarnoski is nearly finished with the script. In a chat with Bloody Disgusting, the filmmaker teased more about what to expect, at least tonally.

“It’s not going to be as dark as Robin Hood. That was a movie that really had to capture this kind of visceral violence so that we could go to this deeply soulful place, and feel that contrast, yet also feel how those things coexist in this world. That was really important to me. Death Stranding is a game that deals with heavy stuff like the veil between life and death, isolation, connection, loss, and the distance between people both in space and time generationally. And so it has all of these pretty weighty themes, but it’s also like an adventure game and an adventure movie,” Sarnoski says.

Expect a different kind of darkness in his adaptation. “So, I think it will definitely have some darkness to it, because yeah, there are ghosts and things like that in that game. There’s heavy stuff to explore, but I think it’s going to be a different kind of darkness.

“I think I like making movies that don’t shy away from the darkness, don’t try and sugarcoat it, don’t try and make it easy, but find a way through it, and a way to integrate it into the light and hope as well.“

Sarnoski explains why he gets so confrontational with darker themes and subject matter: “So at the end you don’t feel like you’ve copped out on the dark things to get to the light, but that you’ve found a way to properly bring both of those things into yourself. That’s what we needed to do, because there’s no escaping the darkness and the death, and the sadness and all that stuff of life, but we have to find ways to still be good to ourselves and good to other people through that.“

Featuring an all-star cast including Norman Reedus, Mads Mikkelsen, Léa Seydoux, Guillermo del Toro, and Margaret Qualley, 2019’s Death Stranding centres on courier Sam Porter Bridges (Reedus) as he embarks on a mission to deliver hope to humanity by connecting the last survivors of a decimated America.

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“Your Baggage“, directed by Andrew DeYoung (Friendship), sees O’Flynn’s scene-stealing Patricia once again renew her fight with the Michael Myers-like stalker that slaughtered her peers during her adolescence. Thrillingly, it makes for one extended chase sequence that sees Patricia trying to warn others, while evading the undead killer.

In short, this episode’s incredible riff on Halloween and the slasher subgenre transformed Patricia into a fierce Final Girl.

“Well, that felt like a bucket list that I didn’t know was on my bucket list until I did it, but when I did it, I just lapped up every minute,” O’Flynn tells Bloody Disgusting of her triumphant turn this episode. “It felt fantastic for her to get that moment where she is becoming a badass. That was amazing.”

The actress turned to a few notable references for her performance. “Horror-wise, I go back to my youth, which was referenced in some of the episodes: Wicker Man, Carrie, and Rosemary’s Baby, that sort of thing is my kind of vibe.”

O’Flynn also notes how the series’ unique tone allows for so much creative freedom to make bold swings. “There’s something very freeing about it. Every moment is up for grabs, so it’s like we don’t have to totally land in one direction or another. It keeps it alive.“

Patricia is the eccentric assistant to Matthew Rhys‘ Mayor Tom Loftis, who’s at the forefront of trying to solve the island’s pesky curse predicament. Rhys felt the same about “Widow’s Bay” and its rare ability to make you laugh and scream in equal measure, stemming from series creator Katie Dippold. 

“The mandate was, ‘It’s a real world with real people. You play for real.’ There’s no playing for comedy or horror,” Rhys echoes O’Flynn’s sentiments on how freeing the series’ tone has been.

New episodes will release every Wednesday through June 17 only on Apple TV+.

The post ‘Widow’s Bay’ Star Kate O’Flynn on Patricia’s Triumphant Final Girl Transformation appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Repo! The Genetic Opera is a futuristic dystopian musical in which society has regressed so much that the disenfranchised can have their organs repossessed by the malevolent and monolithic GeneCo. Repo! first found life in 2002 as a stage musical by Darren Smith and Terrance Zdunich, under the title The Necromerchant’s Debt. In 2006, a ten-minute short film was directed and financed by Darren Lynn Bousman as a proof of concept, before it became its own feature, hot on the heels of Bousman directing his celebrated Saw trilogy. 

Repo! The Genetic Opera gained a cult following and has continued to play in theaters for years, acquiring a reputation that’s akin to Rocky Horror, complete with “shadow cast” performances during shows. It’s a title that continues to come up in conversations nearly two decades later, despite no sequel or official follow-up.

However, the film will be returning to Regal theaters in a new 4K restoration on May 29, making this the perfect way to experience this underground sensation.

To celebrate Repo! The Genetic Opera’s upcoming 4K release, Darren Lynn Bousman, Terrance Zdunich, and Bill Moseley (Repo!’s Luigi Largo) open up regarding the horror musical’s enduring legacy two decades later, the hundreds of hours of footage that are being combed through for the new 4K physical media release, and if there’s any hope of a sequel.

BLOODY DISGUSTING: The history of this film has always been one of the most fascinating things to me, with its roots being in a stage musical, then a short film, and then the finished film. What’s it like looking back on the project’s trajectory, but also its legacy, nearly two decades later?

DARREN LYNN BOUSMAN: I tell this story a lot, and it’s one that just makes me happy. When Repo! came out — No one ever means to make a cult movie. That’s not what you set out to do. You mean to make a good movie, and then it may become cult. I think that when we made this movie, we thought it was going to be in 3000 screens, and it was going to be like Chicago or some of these other musicals. I remember sitting down with my wife and watching the first major review show that was going to review it — At the Movies, with Ben Lyons. So it finally gets to Repo! and I remember there was a trailer and he says, “We’re going to end the show with what I’m going to say may be the worst movie of all year. No, it’s actually maybe in the running for the worst movie of all time, Repo! The Genetic Opera. And then it went to commercials. 

I remember sitting there, and it was like getting punched in the ballsack. Then he comes back and for like four minutes just trashes Repo! Just trashes it. At the time, I was like, “Fuck. Oh no,” but in retrospect, that review makes me so goddamn happy because here we are, 17 years later, and it still has a fan base and still has people singing the songs in theaters. We’re re-releasing it digitally in new 4K and Dolby Atmos. Terrance was saying that all this is our “Middle Finger Tour.” It’s our “Fuck you Tour,” two decades later. 

TERRANCE ZDUNICH: I echo everything Darren says. It’s wild looking back at it now, both in the sense of, I think the parody of the future we were telling has come true in a very shameless way. So that’s wild to see. But I think what’s even wilder is the level of creativity that’s involved in it. Whether you love it or hate it, it’s so bold, and it’s so audacious. I think even now there are a lot more movies out there. There are many more things. Technology is better. Somehow Repo! still feels like the most creative thing in the room. As one of its primary creators, I’m very proud of that. 

I think on some level, whatever that essence is, it’s never disappeared. It’s been the battery of the whole thing. I think the fan base can feel that, has been changed by it, and has adopted it as their own. There’s always been this camp of people who don’t get it, and if I think of creativity as being the defining principle, then if they don’t get it, it’s kind of okay. It’s kind of their loss. 

DLB: In terms of the project’s origins and evolutions, I came on board on Chapter Two of it. It started off in coffee shops and clubs, and then it moved to become a black box theater show. Then Terrance ended up doing it off-off-Broadway. It was insane to see the progression of it, but the one thing that never changed — and the one thing that stayed consistent — is that you knew you were seeing something different. You knew you saw something undefinable. 

I remember even in our first production on the stage—we were supposed to be open just a few weekends, but we sold out, and we kept extending and extending and extending because people would talk to their friends and be like, “Dude, it’s fucking crazy.“ We always had this line of people outside waiting to see it. People either loved it or hated it. There was no in-between. I think that’s carried over for every incarnation of this thing. It’s either a movie you really get or really don’t get. I love both ends of that spectrum. 

Repo! The Genetic Opera is headed back to theaters with a 4K release, but Darren, I saw you sharing that hundreds of hours of behind-the-scenes footage were being looked at. Is a 4K physical media release also on the way?

DLB: Yeah! Just a few months after the theatrical run, the 4K will come out, and it’s got a ton of shit in it. I mean a ton. My wife filmed over one hundred hours of behind-the-scenes footage while we were filming. Every second. Every wart. It’s there. We have a ton of great stuff. Bill, we haven’t asked your permission yet, but I want to put out your initial audition, which I still have on my computer right now, on it. There are so many great things that I think fans would freak out over if and when they see it. So that’ll all be there for those who purchase the 4K disc.

On the topic of new footage and physical media releases, fans have always wanted to see Repo!’s original short film and the Director’s Cut. Will either of those finally be available on the 4K release?

DLB: I can’t answer on the short film. Maybe. Maybe it’s a hidden thing or an Easter Egg that if you find it… On the Director’s Cut, though, no, not yet. That is a very expensive thing because when you do a musical, it has to be mixed and color corrected, and there are visual effects to consider. So the Director’s Cut exists, but none of that’s done with it. So they would have to go back into the actual negatives and fix all that before it’d be released. But there is a ton of extra footage. So maybe if this thing does well, they might put out the Director’s Cut a few years later. Bill, how long was it between The Devil’s Rejects and 3 From Hell? 

BILL MOSELEY: The Devil’s Rejects was 2005, and then 3 From Hell was 2019, so 14 years. 

DLB: So we would still be longer. We would have 20 years if we ever got to do a sequel. 

Is a sequel a possibility? Has there been any renewed interest in your parts on some sort of continuation, especially now that places like Shudder exist? If the 4K theatrical release does well in theaters and the physical media sells, then is there a chance that it could lead to something new? Even if it was a limited series or something other than a movie.

TZ: We’ve always wanted to do that. This started on the stage. It’s an opera. We always loved the idea of an ongoing musical series. It’s why we did The Devil’s Carnival. But as Darren intimated, it’s very difficult to do a musical, let alone do it well. Darren and I have discussed more short-form musical pieces. Almost like a bunch of Thriller-style short stories, put to music. I think with everything going on, we’re hoping that someone shows interest because we certainly would love to do that. 

DLB: I mean, listen, I think the thing that’s fun here is we left Repo! with the Largos in charge. We have Pavi, Luigi, and Amber Sweet. I think that’s a fun way to pick back up and see how the world has changed. But Terrance is right, I think that we now live in a world where everyone is distracted with their doom-scrolling and their limited attention spans. So there’s an exciting opportunity for short-form verticals, even if we release a series of them. Maybe each vertical has three songs in it, and then you can put them together for a feature later. I think that the opportunities are there for us to do something dynamic if we’re given that ability from Lionsgate or whoever. That’s what we’re hoping for. Would you come back for a sequel, Bill?

BM: I’m down for it. I still take my singing lessons so I can still hit those notes. 

Bill, you were also a big part of The Devil’s Carnival. Is there a character that you preferred between Repo!’s Luigi and The Magician from The Devil’s Carnival? They’re both such rich roles.

BM: I certainly loved the Magician because I had a little buddy. Luigi, well, I think Luigi would have been a completely different character if he’d had a little buddy, like Mr. Bunny. Instead, all he had was his violence. I certainly love playing Luigi, but I actually really loved the Magician. I just had so much fun, even though we were freezing our asses off at four in the morning in a tent in Riverside, California. Just jumping around and being the Magician, who is kind of precious, but also very magical. And of course, I had Mr. Bunny. 

I was disappointed, though, because we did a sequel, Alleluia!, and nobody could find Mr. Bunny. Mr. Bunny had disappeared from the face of the Earth. So I was given a stuffed jackrabbit. It just wasn’t the same. Mr. Bunny, of course, was nicely glazed, but the jackrabbit was fully-haired. The only thing missing was the little jackalope horns, and that just wasn’t the same. 

DLB: Bill, you don’t understand that would have all been answered in The Devil’s Carnival Episode Three. We just never got to that point, sadly. 

BM: Exactly, because there was no Mr. Bunny. 

TZ: We cursed the whole production with that. We didn’t know at the time. 

DLB: I have a funny story that I’ve talked about, but I don’t think people actually believe it. I swear to you, this is a true story — it’s a Devil’s Carnival story — but it’s one of my favorite stories. We’re on the last night or second-to-last night of filming The Devil’s Carnival, and we were shooting in a not great part of Riverside, California. We’re shooting really late at night, and then all of a sudden, my assistant, who doesn’t speak great English, comes running and he goes, “Crime. Crime.” And he’s pointing, and there are these three meth heads running from the trailer, and they have a bag. Immediately, I knew what that bag was. That bag had the hard drives with all The Devil’s Carnival footage. 

We were such a low-budget film, and we didn’t back anything up. If they had gotten away with it, we would have been done. The movie would have never come out. The funniest thing, though, was that everyone was still in make-up. Terrance was still Lucifer. Everyone just takes off running after these guys. There are literally like 30 crew members and cast outside of this house, dressed in full hell regalia. The father comes outside and goes, “Get off our porch! What are you doing in our house?” At the same time, we’ve called 9-1-1. He’s denying that his sons have done any of this.

Long story short, the police showed up, and they were talking to us and said, “Did anyone see any weapons?“ We’re like, “No.” The police said, “Did anyone see any weapons?” Someone from our crew goes, “Oh yeah, we saw weapons.” They said, “Thank you,” and that gave them the ability to go into the house, and they got the hard drives back. If they had not retrieved those drives, then there would not be a Devil’s Carnival or a Magician. We almost lost it to the meth heads. 

BM: Wow. It’s almost like magic. 

DLB: Exactly! It is! We were able to preserve The Devil’s Carnival! 

I remember when Repo! The Genetic Opera first came out there was a lot of chatter around Paris Hilton’s inclusion as Amber Sweet. It’s a film that she seems to really be proud of and an experience that she speaks about fondly. Darren, she’s even in your next movie, right? Can you all talk a little bit about working with her and her role in everything? 

BM: I thought that Paris was great. I really enjoyed working with her. She was very prepared. I do remember going out with her one night. There was a group of us that went out to dinner and then to a discotheque in Toronto. We came in through the kitchen, and there was a dance floor at this discotheque that had an area that was closed off with couches. We were all led into the center of this discotheque dance floor, and all the screens were playing Paris Hilton videos. The music was Paris Hilton disco music, and we basically sat there and ate hors d’oeuvres as Paris vamped around the perimeter of this little island and took selfies with people. Darren, I’m sure you can expound on this a little, but part of what really seemed to gun down Repo! was the inclusion of Paris Hilton. I thought that was grossly unfair because she did a great job. She sang. She was a great character. 

DLB: What I love most about Repo! is just the “What the fuck” factor of it all. I think where Repo! succeeds is that it has a complete “What the fuck” factor where you look and see Sarah Brightman, world-renowned opera star, and Christine from Phantom of the Opera, singing with Paris Hilton, Ogre from Skinny Puppy, and Paul Sorvino. You have complete opposite ends of the spectrum from Sarah Brightman to Paris Hilton, but it works. 

One of the reviews that we got for the stage show, that I feel also translated over to the movie, is that it’s a “mishmash opera stew,” or something like that. It was basically saying that Repo! is every end of the spectrum, and I think that the casting accomplishes that as well. The fact that Paris was willing to come in and basically poke fun at an archetypal character that basically is her — this heiress with this princess mentality. I think it helped cement Repo! to be the cult classic that it is now. And yeah, Paris and I are working together right now on another project where, again, she’s kind of making fun of that archetypal reality show persona.

Repo! The Genetic Opera returns to Regal theaters on May 29 with a 4K restoration.

The post ‘Repo! The Genetic Opera’ Creators on New 4K Restoration and Wild Set Theft That Nearly Ended ‘The Devil’s Carnival’ appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

For years, social media has blasted us with conflicting messages about how to achieve a “healthy weight,” while the medical establishment continues to push outdated information about the body mass index. With Looksmaxxing and 90s thinness now dominating online spaces, it’s never felt more frustrating to live comfortably in a human body.

Writer/director Natalie Erika James combines this highly-charged topic with one of horror’s oldest taboos in Saccharine, a body horror tale about the confluence of cannibalism and diet culture. With the tag line, “you are who you eat,” this surrealist film blends girly pop style with the devastating experience of disordered eating. 

Hana (Midori Francis) is a medical student obsessed with losing weight. Hoping to impress her gym crush, Alanya (Madeleine Madden), she signs up for a 12-Week Challenge in which she’ll monitor her caloric intake while completing a series of intense group workout sessions. As Hana diligently tracks her plateauing progress, an old friend reappears with a miraculous, yet pricey, diet pill. Using her scientific expertise to recreate the formula, Hana makes a horrific discovery and must decide if she’s willing to consume the unthinkable in order to achieve the physique of her dreams.

James’ powerful film combines supernatural elements with grounded gore while exploring the pain and grief of self-acceptance. To unpack this surrealist vision, Bloody Disgusting sat down with the Australian-American filmmaker for a candid conversation about the horror of diet culture and the art of human consumption.

Bloody Disgusting: I’m obsessed with movies about cannibalism. It’s my favorite cinematic taboo, but it can be equally taboo to talk about diet culture and body image. What led you to combine these two topics? 

Natalie Erika James: I was fascinated by this idea of desire towards another person as an avenue in which to fill a void in yourself, or projecting your aspirational self onto someone, and how that can morph into a desire to possess and objectify. I think that’s what cannibalism does. It is the ultimate possession and the ultimate way to objectify someone. 

BD: I felt really seen by Saccharine. Who would you say your target audience is, and what message do you hope to send to people who may have a complicated relationship with food and their own bodies? 

NEJ: My aim was to speak to an audience that has dealt with similar struggles, with eating disorders or body dysmorphia. When I was growing up, there wasn’t anyone talking about this kind of subject matter in such an explicit way. I think horror allows you to do that. Whereas a lot of the films that I saw on the subject seemed to have this neat packaging around it, an almost moralistic kind of messaging. I didn’t feel like it captured both the thickness of certain feelings and the highs of compulsive behavior. That was what I was trying to accurately convey. But at the same time, I feel like the audience is broader than that. It’s anyone who would want to have an insight into that experience or can relate to it through any sort of addiction or compulsive behavior. I think all of us have something, whether it’s scrolling or shopping addiction, anything that relates to the feeling of trying to fill a lack in yourself through external means. 

I know that the topic of eating disorders can be difficult to navigate because it’s often very triggering. What was the culture like on set, and how did you approach developing Hana’s character with Midori Francis?

We definitely had a real awareness of the sensitivity of the subject matter. We consulted with The Butterfly Foundation [an Australian charity dedicated to serving those impacted by eating disorders and body image issues] and had an intimacy coordinator who was on set for our actors as a backup resource. We also had language and tone setting meetings with the crew to create an environment in which these things aren’t taken lightly. It’s definitely the nature of diving into an uncomfortable topic that you have to have a lot of uncomfortable conversations. Oftentimes, I found that what makes things uncomfortable is that people are very well-meaning and try to be almost overly sensitive, but there hasn’t been a discussion about what the right language is. It requires a very intentional kind of understanding from everyone. 

I shared my own experience with Midori, and she was very open to leaning on some of that as well. I think in the film, there are so many fantastical kinds of heightened moments, but we were always able to come back to, okay, what’s the real-life experience of that, and how do we build a performance?

 I think that comes through in the film. In the spirit of uncomfortable conversations, I want to be careful how I ask this question because I make it a policy not to comment on people’s bodies. But I think in a film like this, it does matter. I really love Danielle Macdonald’s performance as Josie. Why was it important to feature this role and different types of bodies in this movie? 

I think Josie is so crucial to Hana’s story because she almost acts as a foil to Hana, but is also her anchor. She’s a woman in a larger body who is so self-possessed and confident. She thinks of herself as worthy and has love in her life. It’s all the things Hana really wants for herself, but is trying to achieve in the completely wrong way, by becoming smaller. And so she really is the voice of reason for Hana and also a source of connection. I think the act of being seen or accepted by someone is what really shrinks that sense of shame that Hana carries around. Josie is crucial in so many ways, and I think Dani as a person just embodies Josie. She is that grounded and has this effortless confidence in herself. She’s the perfect fit for the character. 

Watching Josie push back on this idea that smaller is better was so refreshing, but the moment that made me cry was a scene in which Hana looks at herself in a really vulnerable position and seems to finally find compassion. Is this a story about self-acceptance and body grieving?

Yes. Hana’s arc goes from one of self-destruction to self-acceptance, at least for a while. It’s about dismantling a sense of shame in yourself and recognizing how much that shame can imprison you. That scene is so pivotal because I think you hear the word self-love a lot, especially in online and wellness spaces. But what does that look like? How do you cultivate it? It can be as simple as looking back at a younger version of yourself and having empathy for where you were and an acknowledgement of how hard you’re trying. I’m glad to hear it resonated.

 Throughout this struggle, Hana is haunted by Bertha, a ghost that seems to grow larger in relation to Hana’s compulsions. How do you view her place in the story? Is she a villain, a victim, or something else? 

Bertha’s role is twofold. On one hand, she is the entity on which Hana projects all of her worst fears about herself. On a surface level, you could read it as a larger person depicted as a menace and read fatphobia. For me, or at least my intention was, we’re dealing with a character who has internalized this fatphobia. So we’re seeing Bertha through Hana’s lens. Her monstrosity is really driven by shame and self-hatred. It’s not so much about the literal size of her body. I think it’s really important that at the end of the film, we understand that Bertha is a real person and actually very loved.

I want to ask a similar question about Alanya, particularly her 12-Week Challenge. I think society creates a lot of conflicting messages about the right way to have a healthy body, and it can be really confusing. How do you view Alanya’s role in Hana’s life?

Maddie Madden had an interesting challenge in the sense that again, so much of Alanya is viewed through Hana’s aspirational lens and objectification. But I think she did an incredible job of grounding the character and making her very compassionate as well. Through association, Hana tries to create a new version of herself. I also feel as though there are hints that Alanya has gone through some sort of eating disorder journey of her own. 

There’s a sense that we’ve moved on from the diet culture discourse of the early 2000s, where women’s bodies were absolutely torn apart. Now this idea of thinness as an aspirational ideal has definitely come back at full force. But now it’s couched in wellness language. It’s about self-improvement, and it can be tied to mental health as well, but a lot of the underlying sentiment is the same. There is a line between self-improvement and self-erasure, something that we have to be really conscious of because it’s masquerading as something positive; there can be seeds of the same energy. I think Alanya has a mix of that. She’s well-intentioned, but even the poster that she has up in the gym has this before and after imagery. There are mixed messages there. 

I don’t want to spoil anything, but I absolutely loved the ending. It was the last thing I expected. I also love how queer the film is. At one point, Josie asks Hana if she’s decided whether she wants to be with Alanya or if she wants to be Alanya, which is a question that comes up a lot when exploring one’s sexuality, but it also ties back to what you were saying about objectification and consumption. So Josie’s question becomes quite literal. Where do we leave Hana and Alanya? 

In the end, Hana has an opportunity to forge something really authentic with Alanya. All the while, she’s been projecting her desires onto her, and there is this sense of fantasy tied up in it. When it comes to accountability, which Alanya kind of forces her to confront, Hana has an opportunity. But unfortunately, at that time, shame overrides it and wins. It becomes this all-consuming drive. That’s the tragedy, that she has all the tools and yet, if you can’t fill yourself up, there’s no external thing or person that’s going to do that for you. 

On a lighter note, I am obsessed with the way you film food and eating in this movie, particularly this credit sequence in which mouth-watering treats are merged with medical procedures. What do these moments say about the connection between food and the body?

Throughout the film, food is many things. At some points, it is a dopamine high and the ecstatic thrill of consumption. It’s kind of like a ride. That’s why we tried to infuse it with color and texture. On the other hand, it can be this source of nauseating, inescapable oppression. So the mix of those two things is what we tried to capture in those end titles. At the same time, food is also nourishment. It’s the first nourishment we get from our mothers as babies. It’s love. It’s caretaking. It’s Hana’s dad cooking her pancakes inexplicably, as well as her mother’s use of food as a means of control. So it’s many things. It’s not just nutrition. It’s very charged. 

It’s also something we can’t escape. Unlike other substance abuse issues, we have to eat to survive, and so we’re forced to navigate a relationship with food. I think a lot of the way we do that is shaped by how we were raised. What role do Hana’s parents play in the story? 

It felt crucial to truly understand the depth of Hana’s preoccupation with weight, food, and her body. When you think of appearances, it can feel very artificial or superficial. Who cares if you’re 10 kilos, 10 pounds heavier? What does it matter? But so much of how Hana views those things is tied up in love and value and acceptance. Once you understand that, then it becomes an existential crisis. It’s not just about looking good so you can go to a party or something superficial like that. It’s like, how do I exist in the world and feel okay? That’s what’s at stake for her.

Well, speaking of existential crises, I am a huge fan of Relic (2020) and Apartment 7A (2024). Along with Saccharine, I think they both feature elements of female life that we don’t often talk about. Why do you think it’s important to bring issues like aging, caregiving, abortion, and disordered eating to the screen?

When I start a project, there’s nothing more exciting than asking questions you don’t know the answer to, the things you want to think about or explore within the work. I think it’s inevitable that the things I grapple with are female-skewed and uncomfortable, but worth talking about because it’s territory that feels unmined or unearthed. 

I find that you’re often telling these stories in a surrealist way. I’m particularly thinking of the dance sequence in Apartment 7A. Sometimes I find that your films are softening the edges, and sometimes I find them sharpened in a really appealing way. How do you approach telling these heavier stories? 

I think particularly with that [scene], there was a very conscious sense of spectacle, like masking something horrific. But I’m always concerned with the subjectivity of the character and how she experiences it. The hard-hitting moments come later, after the fact, when something’s already occurred. I’m always concerned with how to externalize what’s happening internally. And often, surreal elements of horror are great for doing that. 

I think horror allows you to push things a little further, always with the intention of having the right emotional impact as well. It’s not as effective to just push things for the sake of it. It always has to be tied to some emotional truth. But I think horror allows you to go to places where you can balance absurdity alongside these really harrowing subjects.  

Saccharine opens in theaters on May 22, 2026 from Independent Film Company and Shudder.

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Like most horror authors, the writer behind The Troop, The Deep, and other modern classics of the genre is aware of his own mortality, and it makes its way into his work. But it wasn’t until his late 40s that, according to Cutter, a book like his new novel The Dorians started to feel like the right way to tackle aging, and the fight against it, head-on. 

“When I go play basketball, I used to, coming home, I’d say, ‘I’m feeling a little achy, I might take an Aleve,'” Cutter, whose real name is Craig Davidson, told me from his home in Canada. “Now, I take one before I go play so that it kicks in by the time I get on the court. I think there’s just something specific to that type of narrative that, at this point, has really found enough momentum on a personal level that I felt like just sitting down and writing something to do with reversing aging.”

The result is The Dorians, a sci-fi horror exploration of the lives of five elderly test subjects, all preparing to face death, who are pulled into a mysterious medical trial that could stop or even reverse the aging process. Each of them is dealing with a different ailment, a different version of death hanging over them, and all of them feel like they have nothing to lose. But by the time teenage scientist Astrid is done with them, they might be rethinking that. 

According to Cutter, the book was inspired by a number of concepts swirling around in his brain, beginning with the idea that certain species of jellyfish can achieve biological immortality, giving him the inspiration for the creature that powers Astrid’s experiments. Then, there was the legal reality of Canada’s MAID (Medical Assistance in Dying) laws, which allow people to end their lives on their terms with the aid of trained professionals. And finally, Cutter found the notion of centering his book on elderly characters appealing, particularly after writing books like The Troop and his last novel, The Queen, both of which follow young people. 

“I really enjoyed that, actually,” Cutter said. “I’m the person that when I was in high school, I had jobs, and there’d always be a couple of retirees at the jobs I worked at who were doing it just to stay sharp or give themselves something to do. I would naturally gravitate towards them and listen to their often rather long and involved stories, which I’m sure one day I’ll tell the same. I think as we get older, our storytelling abilities develop, but they also get languorous. Yes, I enjoyed coming up with those characters, but they came to the fore, as they usually do in my work, as a process of moving through the narrative paces. They change, obviously, in this book, most of them depending on the petri dish that I’ve built for them and the way that they can be most interesting within it.“

The particular petri dish, metaphorically speaking, surrounding each of the test subjects in The Dorians is better left in spoilery territory for now, but one of the more fascinating choices Cutter makes in the book is flipping the script on the relationship between his test subjects and his scientist. This time around, the person running the strange experiments that make everything go haywire is a young girl, brimming with intelligence and drive but not always equipped with the social skills necessary to handle her elderly patients.

Though The Dorians spends most of its time in the heads of older people going through profound changes, Astrid’s place as mad scientist gives it an undeniable extra source of tension. According to Cutter, putting a young person in control of the whole narrative was inspired by the classic Twilight Zone episode “It’s a Good Life,” which starred a young Bill Mumy as a little boy with incredible powers who holds an entire town of adults under his control. 

“It’s like the student shouldn’t tell the teacher what to do. To invert that seems to destabilize the whole fabric of decorum and law and everything that we accept as humans,” Cutter said. “We do see, in some cases, that power is installed in the hands of people who don’t know what to do with it, who misuse it, who misrepresent it. I feel a little for Astrid. Astrid is the little prince whose vast intellect has separated her from the rest of humanity and made it almost impossible for her to really see other human beings as human beings.”

Broadly speaking, The Dorians falls into the category of Wellness Horror, a subgenre which only seems to be picking up more steam in an age when dramatic weight loss can arrive in the form of a pill and tech billionaires spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to look and feel as young as possible. But even with the prevalence of the phenomenon in mind, Cutter yet again swerves on some of its more predictable narrative hallmarks by revealing, almost immediately, what’s driving these experiments. Inspired by biologically immortal jellyfish, “The Hydra” is the seemingly eternal creature that powers Astrid’s work, and in order to accept its benefits, each test subject must have part of it implanted in their bodies. It’s a reveal that other novels might take hundreds of pages to lay out, but for Cutter, it needed to happen right up front. 

“It felt like it would be interesting to unpack it, show readers how it might be conceivable, and you push towards an inner logic that may be taking over in the book,” Cutter explained, “I think that’s partially because a lot of my books, they do have a small or larger scientific aspect to them. That’s just based on, I think I enjoy researching that sort of stuff and finding that sort of stuff out. It could have worked fine without all the extra scientific detail, and maybe even in some points in these books, I go a little too far. I find it fun. [Michael] Crichton is a big influence in this book. He does such a masterful job of telling a story and introducing really interesting science, sometimes very complex science, but finding a really interesting way to breezily move through it and then out the other side without really sacrificing too much momentum.“

The Dorians is also, in its own strange way, kind of a sibling novel to Cutter’s most famous book, The Troop. Both follow a group of people journeying to a remote island, both follow a scientific discovery gone wrong, and both focus not just on the territory of sudden and inexplicable changes to the body, but also on being stuck somewhere with no chance for salvation or explanation. 

“Isolation is the most valuable commodity in most horror because if it’s seen by a bunch of people, then it can’t be allowed to germinate in the most interesting ways, or it’ll get cut off and it’ll get stopped, some sort of logic or sanity will prevail,” Cutter said. “The more that you isolate characters, the more you allow increasingly insane things that can happen out of sight, but also you allow the characters to develop and take on layers, often perverse ones, once you strip away the general decorum and governance that prevails where you are and where I am.”

Just like The Troop, once Cutter has stripped his characters of closeness to civilization and exposed them to constantly evolving horrors, The Dorians becomes a battle not just for bodies, but for souls. 

“I think that’s what’s interesting about a lot of horror stories, is that there are two paths that you can take. At some point, in this case, the thing inside of you starts to make you make choices whether you want to or not. Characters change. Nice characters become not-so-nice characters, and it’s hard to hold onto your humanity, which is generally the sweet spot for me.”

The Dorians is available May 19 wherever books are sold.

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It’s no wonder that for several years now, various parties, including no less a horror giant than James Wan, have been trying to get a film adaptation off the ground. Development on The Troop movie has been relatively quiet recently, but while speaking to Bloody Disgusting about his new book The Dorians, Cutter did offer a brief, optimistic update.

“Well, there is [an update], which is to say the wheels keep spinning,” Cutter said. “It is in the hands right now of a company called Lyrical, who is excellent, and they’ve got a script that they like.”

Lyrical Media is the production company behind recent acclaimed films like How to Blow Up a Pipeline and Elevation, and their other developing projects include upcoming films from James Tynion IV and Adam Wingard. Those feel like good hands for The Troop to be in, so what’s holding things up? According to Cutter, it’s all about finding the right partner, something the project recently lost.

“I can’t say the name of it, but a very popular production company, a very well-known and well-regarded and really good production company had it, but then they signed a big deal with a studio,” Cutter explained. “In that case, they had to dissolve their co-partnership because the studio doesn’t want them developing [pre-existing deals]. They want them developing brand new stuff in-house.”

Originally published in 2014, The Troop follows the title group of young scouts as they head to a remote island for a weekend camping trip. Once there, they find a mysterious man with an insatiable hunger, and in trying to help him, they’re plunged into a body horror nightmare that moves like a horrific freight train. The book remains a favorite across social media and made Cutter into one of the most recognizable names in the horror lit landscape to this day.

The biggest movement on The Troop film so far came in 2019, when Wan’s Atomic Monster shingle picked up the rights and launched development on an adaptation. Now, with Atomic Monster’s merger with Blumhouse, it seems they’re no longer attached, but that hasn’t dimmed Cutter’s excitement. 

“Talks are ongoing,” Cutter said. “Let me say this: It is not defunct. It is not dead. That has been through so many iterations over the past decade or so. Different people have taken stabs at it. I remain hopeful that at some point it will see the light of day.”

If Nick Cutter’s hopeful, we’re hopeful. Bring on The Troop movie! 

Nick Cutter’s latest novel, The Dorians, is on sale May 19.

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The Monkey’s Paw scenario that sees lovelorn Bear (Michael Johnston, “Teen Wolf”) dealing with a nightmarish vision of love when his wish for crush Nikki (Inde Navarrette, “Superman & Lois”) to fall madly in love with him comes true also brings no shortage of unnerving tension, shocking moments, and bone-chilling scares.

Barker draws out the tension and awkward social encounters to a palpably discomforting degree, which is by design.

It’s those uncomfortable, pregnant pauses and unique tone that convinced Barker he was the only one who could execute his vision when it came to editing.

Barker tells Bloody Disgusting, “It was one of those things where, even on set, I was nervous that if anyone else touched this, it wouldn’t be what I want it to be, and nervous that even if I were to cut it, that people wouldn’t get it and that I would have to cut some of my moments out. It’s always a thought in your head. You’re like, ‘No, trust me. It’s cool. It’s going to be unnerving if you just let me hold on it for this much longer.’ It was defending that.“

The rising filmmaker credits his sketch comedy background for developing his instincts when it comes to timing out the scares and really messing with the heads of his characters. “When you edit for years and years, there’s a certain rhythm that you kind of pick up, where you’re like, ‘Then it should cut to this person, and then it should hold on this,‘ and you can almost close your eyes and feel it, and then be like, ‘Okay, and then it should cut.‘ If you can close your eyes and see the scene, when do you think it cuts to the next shot? When you feel that, you probably should cut, right?“

“But it’s something you pick up over years and years,” he continues, “but also comedy really lends itself to horror. I think it’s because, as a comedian, you’re constantly studying the human condition. You’re constantly studying psychology, why people react the way they react, and why they talk the way they talk, and so when you’re constantly thinking about that, it really lends itself well to creating a story that’s very psychological.“

It also helps that the comedian-turned-horror-filmmaker is a fan of the genre, using that familiarity to navigate and avoid common horror tropes.

“I just think about the movies that I like, and if I roll my eyes because I’m like, ‘Why would they do that?‘ or ‘What made her choose to do that?‘ I’m constantly trying not to have that in my films.“

Inde Navarrette commands the screen as Freaky Nikki, the inhuman entity holding Bear’s crush hostage in her own body. When asked whether there were deeper conversations or backstories about the entity informing Navarrette’s riveting performance, Barker explains that he instead wanted to ground the supernatural in as much reality as possible.

“I actually just told her to play crazy, jealous girlfriend. Most of the time, it wasn’t like, ‘Play this demonic entity.’ It was like, ‘In the circumstances that you love him so much that you’re watching him sleep, play this out. Why are you watching him sleep? Because you love him that much, and why are you wearing his sweater, because it smells like him?‘ There’s a because for everything. I try to make a because for everything, and hopefully for an actor, that becomes easier when you can kind of justify the things that you’re doing. She doesn’t just go on a killing spree, and it becomes like a slasher film. It’s just not like that.“

Bear is arguably the much trickier role to cast, as the sweet romantic hopeful who’s ultimately responsible for what’s happening. Michael Johnston has the tough task of ensuring audience allegiances despite his character’s duplicity.

Barker had a specific approach to finding his Bear, but found himself immediately won over by Johnston’s portrayal. “The first way you attack it is finding someone who plays that awkward, but kind of charming, really, really well. He played this awkwardness really well right off the get, and he has this voice, like a very specific voice. He does a lot of voiceover work, and I didn’t know that until after, but he has a very specific voice that I clung onto. Then, I discovered this darkness in him, under his eyes, that he was so good at playing.

“Oh. This is Bear. So, he plays the innocence of doing the wrong thing, and he plays the innocence of that, and so it was like, boom.“

Prepare to meet your new horror Obsession when it releases in theaters on May 15.

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Barker stars alongside his creative partner, Cooper Tomlinson (Obsession), with whom he co-wrote the script and previously co-starred in his feature debut Milk & Serial. 

Production recently wrapped in Vancouver, British Columbia, on Anything But Ghosts, though details on the upcoming feature remain scarce at this time. With an even higher profile project on the horizon for Barker, a new Texas Chainsaw Massacre, where does Anything But Ghosts fit in Barker’s current wave of intense horror?

Speaking with Bloody Disgusting ahead of Obsession‘s release, the rising horror filmmaker revealed his next film will lean more into comedy than his previous two efforts, giving a little more insight into the plot as well.

“It’s all going to feel like the same brand,” Barker tells Bloody Disgusting. “It’s slightly different. It’s so different than Obsession, because the idea itself just lends itself better to comedy, because it’s literally about two ghost hunter con artists.”

The two con artists will be played by Barker himself and his long-term creative partner. “It’s Cooper and me doing our thing, so it lends itself better to comedy, but it’s still set in this super grounded world. It’s ghosts being real in a world where ghosts are not real. Just like [Obsession] is a wish going wrong in a movie where magic doesn’t exist or in a world where magic doesn’t exist, right? That’s kind of what I try to do.“

Aaron Paul (“Breaking Bad”), Bryce Dallas Howard (Jurassic World), and Violet McGraw (M3GAN, “The Haunting of Hill House“) also star in Anything But Ghosts.