Interviews
‘Attack of the Murder Hornets’ and Director Michael Paul Stephenson’s Horror Approach [Interview]
Nearly twenty years after starring in Troll 2, filmmaker Michael Paul Stephenson made a documentary about it, Best Worst Movie, that chronicled its cult fandom and key players involved with the film’s creation. His follow-up documentary, The American Scream, put a compassionate and joyful spotlight on the Halloween home haunt, told through three households in a Massachusetts town. Stephenson’s latest, Attack of the Murder Hornets, takes on a timely subject and approaches it through a ‘50s style horror lens, infusing his sense of wonder and humor along the way.
Mere months into the start of lockdown last year, headlines broke reporting of a new invasive species that threatened to cause catastrophic agricultural harm if not captured and eradicated immediately. As if 2020 didn’t have enough problems. That species dubbed the “murder hornet” is an Asian giant hornet, a predatory insect with toxic venom and aggressive attack behavior. Next to this monstrous new enemy, U.S. bees have no defense. Attack of the Murder Hornets follows a small group of beekeepers, scientists, and naturalists in their attempts to locate, track, and eradicate the murder hornet before it’s too late.
The very idea of the murder hornet lends well to horror, and Attack of the Murder Hornets begins with an introduction to Ted, a beekeeper who lost his hive to the invasive insect. In the on-camera introduction to Ted, the beekeeper makes his fandom of The Exorcist known. Stephenson explains how the classic horror movie bookends his documentary through Ted, “He starts the film talking about the sound of bees from The Exorcist, and then he ends the film with his daughter playing “Tubular Bells” on the piano. At his birthday party, his daughter is on the piano, and she’s told to play the theme song for 2020, and it’s that. It was just one of those feelings where you know exactly what kind of movie you’re making here. I wanted to lean into the horror and the sci-fi from the beginning; it makes it fun and character-driven.”
However, when Stephenson set out to make this doc, there was no guarantee they’d even find a single hornet. With that uncertainty looming large, the filmmaker found an entry point to the story through its characters. Stephenson explains, “The first thing that I always immediately try to zero in on is characters, people that I will be interested in even if I was watching the paint dry or something. Just people who are interesting. From there, it becomes access. It’s really having relationships with these people so that you see real life. You’re there with them. You get an intimate look at people’s lives when you do these sorts of things.”
In the scant six weeks to shoot the doc, the crew at the center of the doc did find indeed find the intimidating insect. Stephenson proved so invested in capturing his subjects on camera that he forgot the dangers of getting too close to the murder hornets. “It’s funny because you would’ve thought at the beginning that I would’ve thought that this is life-threatening, so I better figure out how to protect myself. I wasn’t thinking about that at all. I was thinking about how I didn’t want to miss a single thing, and there was no guarantee we’d even find a single hornet. The odds are so slim. It’s not like you just get up here [to Washington], and they’re flying around everywhere. This is a very rare occurrence, in terms of actually seeing them, catching one, and tracking it back to the nest.”
He further expands on the safety preparations, “We realized that when we do find the nest, we’d need to wear these insane looking hornet suits. In theory, these suits would provide more protection. I thought they’d researched these suits through trial and error, but come to find out, it was just someone going to Amazon and buying hornet suits from Asia. We had to wear those during the nest eradication. I did get stung, but I wasn’t stung by a hornet. I was shooting the bees, in a bee suit, at night. I was shooting Ted in the dark amidst a swarm of bees buzzing all around my head. All of a sudden, I see a bee crawling up my suit’s mask, and as it gets to my nose-level, I realize that it’s on the inside of my mask. Within moments it stung my face. It turns out I’d left a hole in my suit near the collar, and six or seven bees found their way in there. Within a minute, I was being stung inside my suit. Thankfully it wasn’t murder hornets; that would’ve been really bad.”
As with all three of his documentaries so far, Stephenson gravitates toward horror and leans into earnestness through the people featured in them. “With docs, and for me, your characters on many levels become a sort of extension of your family. I’m still close to Best Worst Movie folks. I’m still close to the American Scream folks. I was just talking to George [Hardy] a week ago from Best Worst Movie. You really get invested in those people. I’m rooting for their success. You have to go three-plus years without a species sighting for it to truly be eradicated. So, I’m rooting for them, and I’m hoping that whatever small thing we may have done with the story creates a conversation not only around this invasive species but the value of public service. The value of science and citizen science.”
While the filmmaker hasn’t figured out what his next film will be just yet, it becomes evident in speaking with Stephenson just how much enthusiasm he has for the genre, “I don’t know what it is about horror, but it’s fun when you can experience it with someone else.”
Attack of the Murder Hornets is available now on Discovery+.
Eli Roth is a formative name in the “Splat Pack” of ultraviolent filmmakers who first came to fame during the 2000s.
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.
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