Interviews
[Interview] Nicholas Humphries Talks Debut Slasher ‘Death Do Us Part’
Director Nicholas Humphries is no stranger to genre filmmaking, having directed the web series Riese: Kingdom Falling, and the award-winning Little Mermaid short, among many others. His debut feature film, Death Do Us Part, is a cabin in the woods slasher that sees a soon-to-be wed couple (Julia Benson and Peter Benson) and their friends killed off during a weekend getaway.
I sat down with Humphries to talk about his directorial debut, working with a low budget, and embracing the slasher genre. Death Do Us Part releases today on DVD today from Anchor Bay Entertainment.
Bloody-disgusting: You’ve directed a lot of short films, including the award winning Little Mermaid, and you have a background in web series. How was the transition into your first feature film?
Nicholas Humphries: Scary. I feel like you get to make a lot of mistakes making short films and nobody will notice. Features are another beast. They get distribution and lots of people see them. Combine that with indie film limitations and the pressure to make a good one can be intense. That said, getting to direct the Syfy digital series Riese: Kingdom Falling had kind of prepared me for the experience in a lot of ways. My cast and crew on Death Do Us Part were also very professional and passionate about the film. We had a pretty beautiful and remote location up on the coast too. It was cold and exhausting but we all had a really good time.
BD: Why did you choose Death Do Us Part as your feature debut?
NH: Death Do Us Part kind of chose me. Ryan Copple, who was one of the creators of Riese (along with Kaleena Kiff) had started a production company with Julia and Peter Benson and they wanted to make a horror movie for their first feature. Little Mermaid had just won Best Short at Screamfest so we all kind of just hit the ground running together. Additionally, all I want in life is to direct horror movies. So the simplicity of a tongue in cheek, cabin in the woods murder mystery seemed like a safe place to get my feet wet.
BD: You were working on a really low budget and had a very limited shooting period. How do you deal with those restrictions on set? Anything you wish you had more time for?
NH: I really wish I had more time to kill people. We shot something like 100 pages in about 12 days so I had to be pretty economical when it came to my shot list. We had 2 cameras so covering the more talky scenes was pretty straight forward but it hurt me to have to think efficiency during the scenes where building tension and scaring the crap out of your audience is so key. Although I’m still pleased with the result. There’s some off camera violence but I think there’s something really effective about allowing the audience to imagine what is scariest to them.
BD: Horror fans love their slasher movies, but so much has already been done with the genre that it’s hard to make one that stands out. Was this something you had to keep in mind while shooting? What’s your take on the genre?
NH: Absolutely. I think acknowledging what’s come before is essential. That’s why Scream was such an effective film and has become a classic in its own right. It didn’t try and masquerade as something new. It played with audience expectations for the genre, sure, but most importantly, was a love letter to slasher movies and the fans that continue to support those films. That’s what Death Do Us Part was for me.
BD: It’s also a cabin in the woods film, so you had a lot of tropes and conventions to deal with. Did you embrace them or try to break them?
NH: I think that there are certain beats that you have to hit. If an audience comes in expecting Texas Chainsaw and you give them a rom-com, they’re going to start checking the time and disengage. Simultaneously, we really wanted to take the time to give every character a motive so that everyone is a suspect. So the first act is very much a character study. But I think this juxtaposition intensifies that moment when all hell breaks loose. We’ve also got some neat twists at the end and all the information is properly setup. It was important to us not to lie to the audience. So I guess we were guided by the tropes and conventions but didn’t confine ourselves to them.
BD: I know you love your gore, and some of the promo pictures are quite bloody. How much can we expect in Death Do Us Part?
NH: I would say we have a classy amount of gore in this film. I feel like when movies become about the gore, we desensitize and the bloody stuff can wind up having less impact. My hope is that audiences will have an emotional reaction to these characters getting cut up rather than a visceral one at seeing something gross. Frankly I was a bit surprised at the R rating, but perhaps I’ve just seen more horror movies than your average film-goer.
BD: Canadian horror seems to be on the rise. Why do you think that is?
NH: Canada actually has a fairly rich history in the horror genre. From the low-budget runaway productions of the 70’s and 80’s like Prom Night, Black Christmas and The Changeling, to Cronenberg and beyond, we love making horror movies here. I see it as carrying on a tradition in a lot of ways. I do see a lot of horror movies being made nowadays as more of a business decision. They’re cheap to produce and they’re almost guaranteed to sell. And this saddens me. I can always tell when a filmmaker loves the genre. It radiates from the work.
BD: You’ve got your next film in development. What can you tell us about that?
NH: I’ve signed an NDA so not much unfortunately. I think I can say that it is extremely ambitious and will be my biggest challenge yet. But I’ve been blessed with an amazing and supportive team of people from my Producers to our key creatives. A lot of talent will be bringing this one to life and I can’t wait to get started. I go to camera in June.
BD: What’s next from Nicholas Humphries?
NH: The scariest thing about a career in filmmaking is that it’s kind of hard to make a plan. And you never stop proving yourself. I’ve got the next feature in pre-production and a pretty unique found footage feature script in development I’d like to shoot soon after. And then I guess I’ll see after that. I quit my day job to focus on filmmaking full time for the next little bit. It would be nice to hit the big time but honestly as long as I just keep getting to scare people I’ll be a happy director. Oh and a short film I made will be distributed by Drafthouse on ABC’s of Death 2.5 so keep an eye out for that!
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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