And so we come to this, the third, and final, installment of our epic “Britsploitation” interview.
Our last segment saw myself and John Milton, facing off against James Plumb, director of Night Of The Living Dead: Resurrection; SJ Evans, director of Dead Of The Nite, New Year’s Evil, Shadows Within and the freshly announced remake of the 1960 Brit horror classic The City Of The Dead; Dave Melkevik, writer of New Year’s Evil and Dave Beynon, director of the documentary Industry, My Arse, a look at straight-to-video UK films in the 80′s, to discuss the Welsh independent genre community and the UK horror scene.
Now, here, finally, we talk Ninja Turtles, Phantasm, remakes, sequels, premakes and CG in horror films.
Once again, I’d like to take this opportunity to thank James, SJ and both Daves for taking the time to speak to us and to thank them all for the support that they continue to show towards AndyErupts.
Let’s get to it.
AndyErupts – So, Crowd funding. It seems to be growing in popularity and there have been some pretty successful drives with AD Lane doing his crazy, no sleep marathons in support of his Invasion Of The Not Quite Dead and Axelle Carolyn’s The Halloween Kid…
SJ Evans – She did fantastic on that, didn’t she?
Dave Melkevik – How much did she raise?
SJ – Over ten grand.
AE – I think it only took her a couple of weeks to reach that total.
SJ – It helps if you have Neil Marshall around too.
AE – Do you see crowdfunding increasing in importance?
SJ – To be honest, I think its a fad. It seems to be something thats accessible for anybody to do but it’s overcrowded. Everyone has films and projects on there and theyre going,”oh, I’ll give it a shot and get some money from it if we can”.
If you go onto indiegogo or sponsume, you’ve got 200 films on there and it’s hard to pick them out. You don’t really bother looking at them all. Plus, you have to raise ten grand or whatever before people seriously look at the project. It will be around for a bit but i don’t think it’s going to be a successful way of funding films in the long term.
James Plumb – I think the thing that appeals to me about it is that it’s as much work, if not more work, than going down the traditional funding routes but what I do like about it is it’s not an investment. Basically you are offering people a credit or a t-shirt and then you’re not actually locked into paying them back or giving them x amount of the share, thats what actually appeals quite a bit.
SJ – I think thats the hard part of trying to get people to invest though. If you’re saying to someone, “put ten grand into our film and you get a credit”.. so what? However, if you are able to put ten grand in and you get 20% of the film, people will go, “yeah, that appeals to me”, but they’re not allowed to because of laws and what not.
DM – What I really like about the crowdfunding thing is that it helps you get your arse in gear straight away. I’m probably a bit ahead of in website terms and Twitter terms because I know the campaign is coming up soon where we launch the crowdfunding drive for New Year’s Evil. I’ve already put the website in place in order to try and connect with a future audience. It’s got its place though it’s difficult because so many people are trying to do it, especially if youre trying to do a horror. It helps if you can try and get some sort of niche funding. For instance, Dave’s project, Industry, My Arse, because its such a niche area its more likely that people will stumble across that and want to invest than if you Googled “crowdfund horror” and you could get 1500 films.
JP – SJ, you have the Dead Of The Nite one set up, haven’t you?
SJ – Yup.
JP – Have you actually found that strangers are doing it or is it people you already know and is it really just a nice method of taking cash from them? Indiegogo seems like the cleanest way to take cash off your real friends or your fake internet friends.
SJ – Well, if you look at how much I have raised, nobody is actually giving anything.
(laughter)
Apart from Dave here. Oh, and Dave B.
It’s very, very hard to convince a complete stranger to invest, especially when you need to have a certain amount in there or be close enough to your target. People will look at my account and go, “he’s trying to raise $17000, he is at $95 dollars now. I could give him $10, but it wont get made and i wont get anything back from it, so what’s the point?” That’s the problem.
JP – All of these sites have all these strategies and information on how best to do it. Such as setting small targets each time. There are different ways of doing it and it’s definitely something that I will be looking at with Final Girl, and with that it’s going to be small targets we are looking at, funding different sections of the film. The way that Final Girl is structured is that it could be released as a web series. It is something that we are exploring. It’s a lot of work but what definitely appeals is that, at the end of it, you own it and not owing 50% off to other investors, which is always a bit of a headache especially when dealing with distributors, but if you own it outright, and you approach distributors, it makes your life a lot easier.
AE – James spoke briefly about censorship in the first interview we did with him. The UK has always had this reputation for being strict on films, for films being banned and, of course, for the Video Nasties fiasco of the early 80′s. Recently, we have seen films like Grotesque, The Human Centipede 2: (Full Sequence) and The Bunny Game receive straight bans. Do you feel that the BBFC have relaxed or have changing attitudes forced a general relaxation?
DM – I think the worst example from the BBFC, going way back, is when they used to cut the use of nunchuks out of movies. Like Enter The Dragon. I think the reason for that was that they were worried that people would go out there with nunchuks and try and beat people up. I don’t know if you have ever actually tried to mess around with them but youre more likely to actually damage yourself than anybody else. You’d have to go away, spend 5 years mastering nunchuks and then go out and kick someones ass. When nunchuks suddenly became legit again, we got uncut Bruce Lee films and nunchuks were cool, so i dont know if in 5 or 6 years time if Human Centipede‘s sex is going to be accepted into the mainstream.
SJ – Didn’t Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have a problem with nunchuks?
AE – Certainly in the cartoon they removed Michaelangelo’s nunchuks…
DM – Yeah they got cut out of the film and one of the best moments in that film was this sort of one-upsmanship nunchuk scene and it got cut from the movie in the UK.
JP – (To Andy) Wont people mind that we are talking about nunchuks on your horror site?
AE – Its fine.
JP – I’m a kid of the eighties and the Video Nasties list but the fact was I was able to track these things down as a kid and that made me cool. I loved that. I also remember watching Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 in school, on some dutch import.
AE – Whoa. In school?
JP – Yeah. It was a very posh school.
SJ – I think the Nasties list actually helped a lot of these films.
AE – Definitely!
JP – Half the films on the list were just bad films and if not for that, no one would have paid them any attention ever again.
AE – I have them all, in one form or another, and you are absolutely right. There is some utter tripe on there.
JP – Kids nowadays just get a torrent and get a hold of them.
AE – That and worse.
Dave Beynon – There is this thing the BBFC have been threatening for years that is that they could go to an advisory only capacity. That’s something realistic that I would like to see personally and we might get there in 4 or 5 years. They also do these public road shows and consultations every couple of years to gauge public opinion.
One thing I will say and people might agree with it, is that to support people wanting to watch uncut horror films or uncut adult material, people have to stand up for it and if the BBFC are doing something then go on their website, email them and tell them. Try and address the stated causes for cutting things like sexual violence, possibility of potential harm. Look at what they are saying and sort of fight them at their own game. There are tons of good, reasoned arguments for saying that kind of thing in this day and age. I think hopefully, that if us that care about it can put that fight across and be seen as more than “a bunch of weird bastards having a wank to a horror film”, then that’s good. Not that any of us does that.
AE – It’s weird to me though as there doesn’t really seem to be any concrete standards. The BBFC quite happily released Irreversible, a film with an 8 minute rape scene, uncut. Ok, so horror trends come and go. I think “torture porn” is on the way out now that Saw is gone for now, while ghosts and demons are the current big bucks money spinners…
JP – Aw so its to late for me to make my torture porn movie now?
(Laughter)
AE – Is there anything you’d like to see more of? Or less of in horror?
JP – Well Dave mentioned the Human Centipede sex movie. I’d like to see that.
AE – It’s already been done. There’s a porno flick called The Human Sexipede.
DM – Its gonna be all ass to mouth really, isn’t it?
(Groan)
DM – I will say this and I know you’ll kill me for this Andy, and that’s if there is one franchise that its worth fetching back for 3D, it’s the Phantasm movies. If there is one instrument of death that will work in 3D…
JP – If you’re going to do a 3D Phantasm movie it has to be the full on gimmick. There just needs to be stuff flying at the camera all the time. Blood, spiked balls, eyeballs. Just flying at the camera. I’m on board. We want more Phantasm.
AE – One of the best uses of 3D I have seen in horror was in the opening credits of Final Destination 5.
SJ – That was fantastic actually. Really well done.
JP – So Dave’s answer is he wants to see more 3D?
DM – No. I love slasher movies and I think that doing an original slasher is really hard now. What else is there left to be done? I still have a place in my heart for them and ill give any a go, really.
JP – For me, the films that most interested me, as a viewer, in the past couple of years, have been the cross genre films. Kill List again. It started off and you thought it was going to be another one of these gangster movies and then it moves into much darker territory. I have tons of projects, so has Dave, that are cross genre projects and I think that’s a good way to grab the audience.
I remember, back in 97 I think, going to the cinema and seeing From Dusk ‘Til Dawn. It was at the height of Tarantino’s hype and I didn’t read anything about it, didn’t hear anything about it and I went in expecting another sort of guns blazing sort of thing. I got that but I also got vampires running around and an erotic dance from Salma Hayek. I think that’s the way to go. To combine existing genres.
SJ – Id quite like to see a return to the old fashioned way of making horror. The old James Whale type of film that’s all about the atmosphere, the unseen. Building the tension rather than just going, “there’s a lot of gore”. It’s done. I like it to be a lot more psychological now and just build it that way. I find that a lot better than the likes of Saw with heads being ripped off etc.
It’s not scary, I appreciate the artistry of heads being ripped off but it’s not scary.
DM – I like when a film builds the atmosphere with a pay off right at the end.
DB – House Of The Devil was kind of like that.
JP – That had a great retro feel too.
SJ – Insidious was a load of shit.
JP – Andy, are you a fan of Insidious?
AE – Ah… We gave it a kind of middling review. It’s a film of two halves, really, isn’t it?
DM – Wasn’t it great until the psychic came?
(I nod)
AE – So, CGI. One of my favourite films ever is Fright Night and it’s still up there to this day. Then last year, they released that remake.
DM – You said that with such disdain.
AE – Exactly. I didn’t even review it. I wrote a big, scathing review but then just binned it. In the original, everything was done practically or using stop motion. Do you think that horror is becoming too reliant on CG at the expense of these fantastically talented FX artists or stuntmen?
DM – With the Wolfman remake, they had Rick Baker on set but they didn’t really use him. They relied on CGI. Have you never seen An American Werewolf In London? That was 1981 and it’s never been topped. They had the perfect opportunity to try and top it but they went down the CGI route. The trouble with CGI is that it looks so perfect that you can’t really get that natural feel. It can take you out of horror, it really can.
SJ – It’s the same with the remake of The Thing too. With the original, there was this physical “thing” and to me that was part of the attraction to it.
DB – Its too removed. You take the film, send it off to the graphics studio, they do their stuff and it comes back. It’s not the same as happening on set. I know its only for effect but it detracts.
JP – Talking from a director’s point of view, on Night Of The Living Dead: Resurrection, we had a fantastic makeup artist, Rachael (Southcott), whom we worked with on Final Girl and we planned on doing everything with practical makeups, and for the most part we did, but there were a couple of technical difficulties. We still got things that we could use so, what we are doing now is we are having a look at those things that didn’t quite come off as we wanted it on the day and for a low budget filmmaker, if it doesn’t happen on the day, it doesn’t happen. So we had to go in and use AfterEffects and other special effects packages to just sort of give them an extra punch.
It shouldn’t be done instead of, it should be used to add. We used it at certain points just to give a bit more impact. If we are adding to it, its fine. I think a lot of filmmakers and producers just think, “oh, you can do it in a computer no problem at all”, but the human eye can always distinguish between whats CG and whats not.
With something like Resident Evil, it’s nothing but CG blood spatter everywhere and they can never quite get the shadows right, they can’t get the colour or the gravity right but if they spent more money, I’m sure they could get it.
A very early film which I had no problem with the CG on was Starship Troopers because they spent a lot of time working on it. Most people now think it’s cheaper and easier to use CG but actually, that’s not the case. If you are going to do convincing CG effects, its going to end up costing you a lot of money.
It’s one of these preconceptions that people have about how these things are done but from a low budget point of view, we just work with whatever we can get hold of, so its better to use practical effects. Plus it’s good to have something for people to react to so if we have heads exploding, it’s nice for the other actors on set to have that there to react to, rather than reacting, well, to nothing. It certainly helped that our actors saw other actors made up. There was very little acting there, it was repulsive and as a life long horror film fan, for me to be walking around and to see people made up like that, I felt queasy.
I have seen the sickest shit. I have imported stuff from Japan where life is cheap but to see it presented in front of me, does have an effect so wherever possible, I’d definitely push for practical effects, yeah, but also have the knowledge that should you need that extra little punch, as long as its done subtly, it’s there.
AE – I have to just talk about remakes and sequels a little bit more. The Devil inside, despite poor reviews, opened to strong box office takings, and 2 days later there were rumours of a sequel. There are heaps of remakes coming out too. Could it be as simple as there are no good ideas left in the genre or are studios just plumping for easy, definite money spinners.
SJ – If they are going to make money they will keep doing it. If they think they can make money, they will keep adding to franchises.
JP – its not a new thing. I doubt there would be such a horror community if we didnt have Jason Takes Manhattan, which isnt the best film, but I grew up on that stuff. I’m all for it if the original has enough to generate sequels, prequels, remakes or whatever. If they are good films then fine. Why not?
SJ – It goes back to the old universal films, when the Wolfman met the Mummy and Son Of Dracula. Sequels will always be there as long as there’s an audience for it. I’m going to be looking for Dead Of The Nite 2.
JP – Just as long as they dont make any of those FUCKING REMAKES!!! Fucking hate them.
SJ – Sequels fine. Remakes, no.
JP – Remakes stink!
(Laughter)
SJ – I watched the Nightmare On Elm Street remake for the first time the other day.
JP – I watched that then forgot I had watched it as it popped out of my head straight away. I watched it and then it came on Sky again and I started watching again and realised I’d already seen it.
AE – Did you like it?
JP – Um. No.
AE – How about Friday the 13th 2009? See it? Like it?
JP – Nup. It just didn’t have anything new in it. That was all I wanted. I will watch any of the sequels again, even when it gets to Jason vs. Carrie, or on a boat or Jason in space. They could have Jason vs Leprechaun next and I’d still watch that but the remakes they are churning out today just seem to be the best bits from the existing source material and nothing new.
AE – Why do you suppose that is?
JP – Because they dont want to take those risks. They don’t want to alienate the original fan-base.
SJ – Going back to CG, with the remake of Elm Street, in the original when Freddy comes through the wall over the bed, that absolutely freaked me but when they did it with the CG, it was absolutely terrible.
JP – Just because you can do something, it doesn’t mean that you should. With independent films, we are forced to come up on the day with a plan B or a plan D and some of those alternative plans actually end up being much better than what was scripted and that’s maybe why people wind up watching our stuff rather than something that just has amazing amounts of money thrown at it.
SJ – Thats the solution for everything. Just throwing cash at it.
JP – I think if someone threw loads of money at me right now I’d be fairly happy. Unless it was coins.
(Laughter)
AE – David Cameron recently said that he wants to see more lottery money funnelled into funding mainstream money making movies. What’s your thoughts on that?
DB – Oh God, I mean, I dont know. It’s hard to understand. Usually anything that he will say won’t be coming out of his head. It will be out of his arse but its usually to lead into something else thats going on. So what’s going on that caused him to say that? So hes going to cut out the lower end of everything. The beginning filmmakers, the people getting training and coming up and say all we need to do is attract James Bond films and mainstream traditional British stuff. Dramas. Comedies. Just work on that lowest common denominator level and say to everyone else, “sorry, I don’t think you can do it”.
I don’t understand what he was getting at really, apart from a small amount of people getting very rich off it.
SJ – It’s going to be renamed the Richard Curtis industry. In a weird way, I agree with him, in the sense that they need to be backing more mainstream films, instead of arthouse films that they like to pat themselves on the back for or another adaptation of Jane Austen that in not going to do well. So i agree with that but then to say only with proven filmmakers is absolutely crazy. To not support young filmmakers is an absolute disgrace.
DM – But if you put Simon Pegg in a film had Spielberg direct it, there’s still no guarantee that it will actually make any money. No one knows what makes money and if we did, we would all be making those films.
JP – For me Roger Corman had it right. Get a bunch of young, enthusiastic directors, give them something thats beneath them and allow them to make it into something better. Then give them a couple more tries and let them make their own names from it. Most of the filmmakers that we class as the sort of Great American filmmakers, all those guys started in pure exploitation films. I love those films. Films like Death Race 2000. Let’s have that! Let’s have all these filmmakers who are really talented, working on exploitation stuff!
More people are going to watch that than whatever arthouse thing is coming out next. I know a lot of my filmmaking friends got wound up about what David Cameron said but to be honest, it’s not really that different to whats going on in Wales right now anyway. It didn’t make much of a difference to us.
SJ – And in Scotland, you dont care as you are going to be independent from the rest of us soon and leave us behind.
AE – Hmmm. I dont know about that. Can I just ask each of you for your earliest horror memory or your most influential horror scene?
(All Ooh and Aaah. A long silence ensues as all think)
SJ – Yeah you can ask…
(more silence)
JP – Yeah, back when Alex Cox used to do Moviedrome on BBC 2. Invasion Of The Body Snatchers. The Donald Sutherland one. The ending of that, I think.
It was the first horror I saw with a really depressing ending where you just despair through the whole thing. That was the formative scene that made me think, “yeah, i want to make films with really depressing endings”. John Carpenter is for me, my favourite director of all time, and with recent exceptions, all of his endings have been so strong that you actually forgive some of the slower periods in the second act.
SJ – What was he doing with The Ward.
JP – I don’t want to talk about The Ward.
SJ – Mine is Carpenter again. Halloween. It was the first real horror that I saw. I mean, Jaws, a classic and it scared me as a kid but Halloween was the first real proper, proper horror I ever saw. The final scene where Donald Pleasance looks out the window and Michael Myers is gone. That left me open mouthed. Stunned by it. I remember going to bed and looking out the window just expecting to see him there. Ok, I was 23 but still. Also the scene where Jamie Lee Curtis is in the cupboard and he starts smashing the door in. I have ripped it off totally in Dead Of the Nite, actually copied it. We had to buy a door from Wickes so we could destroy it.
DM – I don’t actually remember. I remember horror books like Dracula and Frankenstein. Oh yeah, what i used to love was Dr Terror.
(no one remembers it)
It was like a British version of Elvira, on BBC. He used to come on and introduce a horror film on a friday night. You felt like you were watching something a bit different, a bit special, with this guy in a latex mask talking about horror. He would show you a lot of early Hammer stuff like Curse Of The Werewolf. It was just nice when you were young, staying up past your bedtime, especially watching a horror. It kind of left an impressiuon on me.
SJ – Is this a suppressed memory? It was a guy in a gimp mask, wasn’t it?
DB – When i was growing up and was starting to take notice of what horror films were, going round to friends houses and watching films on their parents VHS machines, the stuff that kind of got to me was like early David Cronenberg films. When I was probably way too young. I didn’t quite understand what The Brood was really about and didn’t quite understand what was going on in Rabid, and I kind of got Scanners. I was about 9 watching that and I could tell that it wasn’t a horror movie, just that it was something a bit adult. Not in a sex way but they were talking about things you, as a nine year old, haven’t got a clue about.
JP – Is this the bit you tell us you got a boner at Videodrome?
DB – Seeing those David Cronenberg films, they scared the shit out of me. It wasnt just killers or monsters or anything like that, it was more like, “what is that? That’s just not fucking nice, that’s weird”. That’s what got to me. I don’t watch them very often but I do like them.
JP – Stuff like Shivers is so messed up. This swingers party where they all get like the worst case of VD you can imagine?
DB – And like the end of Swingers…
Everyone – Shivers. Not swingers.
JP – I don’t know which is more disturbing.
AE – Ok look, one last thing to SJ. What is the current status of House On The Edge Of The Park 2?
SJ – It got delayed after the very sad passing of David Hess. He was involved and owned a big part of the rights to the film so it got put on hold and then Andrew (Jones, producer) and James got going with NOTLD:R so it got put on the back burner a little bit. We will be refocusing on getting it done. It is going ahead, hopefully sooner rather than later. We are just doing another draft of the script as things have had to change what with David not being around anymore and everything has to go through Ruggero (Deodato, director) and Giovanni (Lombardo Radice, City Of the Living Dead, Cannibal Ferox) first before we can get everything signed off, so thats where it is.
AE – Excellent. Well that’s the end. I just want to say thanks to you guys, as you have all been really supportive of my wee page. I really do appreciate it and I know John Milton does too and as I’m sure all our writers do.
SJ – Well we were talking before about what a fantastic site you are doing and like James was saying, you don’t just copy and paste a press release, you put time and effort in.
AE – I have been guilty of that…
SJ – I take it back then.
JP – What’s great about the internet, and there are a lot of things that are great about it, is that there are indie blogs and indie filmmakers who are able to communicate with each other directly, and to be honest, we both need to be supporting each other. I think thats important.
DM – Well said.
And that’s that. Keep your eyes peeled for more on everyone involved and their individual projects.
