Interviews
‘Escape Room’ Almost Had a “More Nihilistic” Ending, Which Was Changed After Test Screenings [Exclusive]
Escape Room (read our review) was the first horror hit of the year. Taking the escape room craze to the extreme was a natural fit for horror, but the film really outdid itself with its final escape room. Now that Escape Room is coming out on home video, we talked with director Adam Robitel about that crazy ending.
Spoiler alert for people who haven’t watched Escape Room yet.
After Zoey (Taylor Russell) survives all the deadly escape rooms Minos built for her and five other unwitting participants, she found Minos’s warehouse headquarters in New York and bought tickets for her and Ben (Logan Miller) to confront them. The film ends with an escape room on a crashing plane, but this isn’t Zoey’s flight. It’s just the test run for Minos’s latest game, which they plan to execute on Zoey and Ben’s flight.
Robitel told us Escape Room originally had a more conventional ending.
“In full disclosure, we had a test screening of an original ending which was much more nihilistic where Zoey ends up going back to her dorm room,” Robitel said.
“She’s been gaslit obviously and she finds a clue in one of her puzzle books that leads her back to the academic hall where we first met her. And underneath her desk, she finds a little note from the Puzzle Maker and her mother’s compass pendant. It was a really fucked up also implying that Minos maybe even had something to do with her mother’s plane crash. She’s like deer in headlights and it felt a little obvious. Then the puzzle maker voice comes on the loudspeaker and it’s like, ‘You ready to play again?’”
That doesn’t sound bad. It still shows that Minos is a monolithic corporation that will always have a new game, but it’s kind of a let down after the ice room and the upside down room.
“One of the things that became clear out of that test screening was the audience wanted two things,” Robitel continued. “They wanted Ben and Zoey to have some sort of closure and they wanted a little bit of a peek behind the curtain of who Minos was. So I had this challenge of how do I make them proactive? How do I do this game of a checkmate?”
With that, Robitel had to come up with one more escape room that would top all the others.
“I felt like the movie’s all about these beautiful sets,” he said.
“I thought how fun would it be if we set up a little checkmate where Zoey gets the drop on where they’re located, but you also show that Minos is still watching them and planning a nefarious, horrible idea. The plane became a cool misdirect where you think you’re watching one thing and at the last minute, the curtain is pulled back.”
The new ending was still a controversial choice, but we at Bloody-Disgusting are glad he risked it.
“I got very excited about it and a lot of people felt like it wouldn’t work because Zoey wasn’t on the plane,” Robitel said. “It was all a big mind meld kind of thing. Ultimately it seemed to work. Some people really feel like it’s weird and some people are like, ‘Oh, that’s really clever.’ It was a tricky ending to stick, as they all are.”
Escape Room is now on digital and comes out on DVD and Blu-ray Tuesday, April 23.
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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