Interviews
‘Trick’: Exclusive First Look at Omar Epps in Patrick Lussier’s Slasher [Interview]
Writer Todd Farmer and director Patrick Lussier, who collaborated on My Bloody Valentine 3D and Drive Angry, reteamed on Trick, a brand new Halloween-themed horror film that’s heading to the ongoing Cannes market. Bloody Disgusting has an exclusive first look at Omar Epps in the main role of Detective Mike Denver, a man obsessed with a killer that has eluded him for years.
The story centers on an elusive serial killer, who descends upon a small town annually. He is responsible for gruesome murders year after year, each seemingly unrelated. No one believes this could be the same killer. Detective Denver (Epps) has faced Trick once before, having shot and killed him. Or so everyone keeps telling him. However, Denver knows Trick is still out there, and he’s coming back for revenge.
“Todd and I wanted Trick to pay both homage to its genre predecessors and cut a new trail with its slasher-noire set up,” Lussier tells Bloody Disgusting.
“Omar Epps plays the damaged and obsessive Mike Denver, a guy whose life has been shattered by his crusade to catch a killer everyone believes dead.”
Trick also stars Kristina Reyes as Cheryl Winston, a former final girl who survived the latest round of killings in her small town.
Lussier adds: “Reyes is Cheryl, the survivor of Trick’s first rampage, her innocence slain along with the lives of her friends as she finds herself caught in the battle between Trick and those who hunt him. But who is hunting whom?
“[Cheryl is] the survivor who must become a warrior, who fights to protect those she loves no matter how alone or lost she becomes.”
Lussier worked with co-star Jamie Kennedy as an editor on the first three Scream films and with horror legend Tom Atkins (The Fog, Night of the Creeps, Halloween III: Season of the Witch) in both his Drive Angry and My Bloody Valentine.
“Jamie plays Dr. Steve, a recovering hipster medico and Tom Atkins, the silver fox himself, is back as the gruff Talbott, restaurateur and horror film aficionado with a soft spot for charity, church and shotguns.”
Trick will introduce a brand new slasher named Trick Weaver, who kills as performance art.
“Trick is, for lack of a better term, ‘slasher-noire’ horror set in upstate New York, spanning five consecutive Halloweens where serial killer Trick Weaver taunts police up and down the Hudson River practicing murder as performance art,” Lussier tells Bloody Disgusting. “The Benton Township, where Trick’s murderous journey begins, has fallen into decay, almost like Trick’s initial killings didn’t just claim individual victims but killed the town itself.”
In regards to Trick Weaver, Lussier explains the duo’s approach to introduce audiences to a new kind of slasher through social commentary.
“How do you make a killer different? What’s the m.o. that’s unique? Today we’re hit with nothing but misinformation, disinformation, manipulation, all with the intention to make us believe lies and discount truth. That’s, pun intended, the trick now played on us all,” Lussier explains. “And for Trick, the weapon of what you think is real is just as deadly as the knife he wields. Steel and lies are the doubled-edge blade Trick uses.”
“Any slasher film seeks to make an iconic villain — to create a resonating nightmare and Trick is no different. In the eye of an enigmatic hurricane of violence, Trick lures each victim closer into the spin where you can’t escape.”
One of Trick’s masks can be seen in the aforementioned first-look image at the top of this article, but Lussier tells us that Trick will wear many masks throughout the film. Lussier also teases the kind of slasher Trick will be.
“At the core of the ‘slasher’ is battle of the ‘unknown other’ and the ‘final girl’, the killing of your innocence to become the adult you’re meant to be,” he tells us. “These enigmatic slashers seem to come in two types: the silent unstoppable killers like Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers or Leatherface, or the suffering revenge seekers who are more the killers of a whodunnit as in Black Christmas, Terror Train, Urban Legend, Prom Night, The Prowler, Valentine, My Bloody Valentine, and Wes Craven’s Scream films. Slashers like the latter are basically homages to Agatha Christie’s ‘And Then There Were None’ with bigger body counts. There’s a mystery at the core of each of those. Who is behind the killings? Why are they doing it? In Scream, like ‘And Then There Were None’, no one discovers the killer’s identity until the Killer unveils themselves. They are the smartest in the room and are more terrifying because of that.”
But what’s a slasher without the gore? Lussier promises to deliver in spades:
“We’ve gone out of our way to make the kills as grounded and practical as possible.
“Gary J. Tunnicliffe, who has been my partner in murder and mayhem since 2000, has once again returned to craft a festival of ferocity, drenched in bloody steel.”
Watch for big Trick news in the coming months.
Interviews
‘Rubberhead’ Director Nick Taylor on FX Maverick Steve Johnson, Practical Effects, and Seven-Year Journey
Horror journalist, producer, and podcast host Nick Taylor moves into the director’s seat for his feature debut with illuminating documentary Rubberhead: The Life & Monsters of Steve Johnson.
It chronicles the wild life and career of SFX maverick Steve Johnson, based on the multi-volume book series Rubberhead: Sex, Drugs and Special FX, and those familiar likely already know Rubberhead isn’t your standard horror documentary.
Johnson is responsible for so many memorable movie monsters, having worked on Fright Night, Poltergeist II, An American Werewolf in London, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master and Night of the Demons, to name a few. He’s also extremely candid in ways that feel atypical in this industry, open about his failures as much as his successes.
“It was a natural progression for sure,” Nick Taylor tells Bloody Disgusting of his transition into filmmaking ahead of Rubberhead‘s world premiere next week at the Fantasia Film Festival on July 23. “I think with my podcast, I got adept at interviewing people and pulling creative lessons out of them, which was the point of my podcast. I wanted this movie to be sort of a creativity pill for artists where if they’re starting a project or feel creatively stuck, they could watch this movie and be inspired and get actual practical creative lessons.”
Taylor’s background in PR and marketing also organically led him down this path.
He charts the course from book promo to documentary director: “But also Bloody Disgusting had a lot to do with this movie because in the very beginning when I first met Steve, I was helping him promote his book and I said, ‘Hey, I got a marketing background and a journalism background. Let me help you promote this book. I’ll just pitch stories from your life to the media, and we’ll see what happens.’ And John Squires wrote an article about Steve making Slimer under the influence of tons and tons of cocaine, and that went fairly viral.”
“For a week, it was story time with Steve,” Taylor continues. “He would tell me a story from his life, and every story was about a major movie, a major director, lots of drugs and alcohol and insanity. I would write them up, and I think John published about three or four of them. So huge shout out to John Squires because that was really great. So yeah, there were definitely a lot of outgrowths of my journalism background that definitely contributed to this movie.”
Rubberhead condenses the multi-book series into a cohesive feature film with a breezy runtime, sparking the obvious question as to how Taylor approached condensing Johnson’s life down to an under 2-hour documentary film.
“That was one of the more difficult parts of all of this, because we had enough for a series or an epically long six-hour fan documentary,” he answers. “But from day one, I did not want to make a fan documentary. I love them. They’re a lot of fun, but I did want the movie to stand on its own two feet as a character-driven portrait of an artist and a time period and a technology, that being practical effects. I did want to be objective. I didn’t want to make this too long. I wanted to make it re-watchable. So I think we just really had to focus on what the narratives were that we wanted to tell. So there were some basically almost cliché archetypical mythic narratives present in Steve’s life. We could have made this way longer, but we wanted to keep it short. But luckily that’s why you have special features.”
Johnson quickly proves to be an engaging subject thanks to his self-effacing wit and frank self-reflections; expect no shortage of stories about how drugs factored into the height of his career or the failures it wrought.
That rare quality was an asset for Rubberhead, Taylor confirms. “He does not shy away from anything about the drugs, the addiction, the bridges burned, the mistakes made, the lessons learned. He just is honest about all of it. He’s had a lot of time for reflection, and he’s done a lot of reflection, so he doesn’t shy away from any of it, which is huge because it’s very refreshing. I don’t think a lot of people are that way, at least in this industry from what I can see. So I think it was hugely beneficial. We wanted to lean into that, and we wanted to make this sort of a gonzo Hunter S. Thompson sort of wild tale through Steve’s overall life.“
Condensing his life into this doc was a slow and steady process for Taylor, too. “It’s been almost seven years. It’s been a labor of love. We’ve been as indie as it gets. We would shoot what we could when we could, and then we would edit when we could. Then after a while it all came together.”
In a way, making Rubberhead brings Taylor’s horror fandom full circle. It turns out that the very film that sparked his interest in the genre and practical effects also comes with an amusing Steve Johnson anecdote.
Taylor explains, “My gateway for sure was Beetlejuice. I saw that at a very young age; I think I was four or five. I felt somebody had shown me, my soul. I get a little emotional thinking about it. There was something about that movie that felt so strange and unusual, but also felt so familiar. It was spooky, but it was fun, and it was lighthearted, and it had humor, but it also had this macabre celebration to it that I just really got into as a kid. I felt somebody had shown me my own soul. And funny story, Steve got fired from Beetlejuice because Tim Burton gave him his hand-drawn designs and Steve’s like, ‘Oh my God, these look like kids did them. This is not what you want. I know what you want. I’m going to redesign these for you.’ And Tim Burton was like, ‘Yeah, no, you’re not.’ So yeah, funny story.”
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