Chapo Trap House - Movie Mindset Bonus - Interview With Director Brian Yuzna

Episode Date: December 23, 2024

Will & Hesse are joined by Brian Yuzna, legendary horror writer/director/producer behind such films as Re-Animator, Society, From Beyond, Honey, I Shrunk The Kids, and many more. We discuss adapting Lovecraft, all-nude Peter Pan, Clown Theory, copypastas, uniquely American ghouls, the importance of GOOP in cinema, and how real horror fans can enjoy horror even when it’s bad. Pre-order the 40th Anniversary edition of Re-Animator here: https://www.ignite-films.com/products/re-animator?variant=49677000933719 And check out the trailer for the re-release by friend of the show Ben Clarkson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIyXfP6egIs&ab_channel=IGNMovieTrailers

Hello, movie heads. Hesse and I are back with a special Christmas treat for you, a surprise episode of Movie Mindset. It is a doubly fun occasion because we are privileged to be talking to the person who was the subject of one of our recent episodes. You'll remember from our recent Halloween horror season, we did an episode on society and from beyond. So it is our privilege to be joined now by the man behind two of those great films, Brian Usna. Brian, thank you so much for joining us. My pleasure.

Brian, I'd like to start with HP Lovecraft, because with your films like From Beyond, Reanimator, and Necronomicon, you, along with your collaborators, Dennis Paoli and Stuart Gordon, are among, I would say, the most prominent Lovecraftians working in movies. So I just want to ask, what is it about HP Lovecraft's work that you connect with, and what are some of the challenges

that come with adopting his work into film? Well, I think that Lovecraft seemed to have been in the forefront of kind of horror that wasn't religious or, where I'm referring to Poe now, about sort of very mortal love, you know, love of the dead, let's say. So Lovecraft, he sort of began the, you know, he had things from outer space and, you know, I always liked the thing on the doorstep where they were taking the sensory organs of people and putting them in a metal canister and shooting them out of the space. So I think he was secular, and he was really determined to create a sense of otherness in his stories and the sense that there's things beyond our kin, that there's a whole history of humanity in which humanity is and still is just sort of a pitfall, kind of

insignificant in the whole thing. Yeah, the comparison to Poe is really interesting because like, like you said, with Poe, it's about love and mortal issues, but with Lovecraft, it's existential without being moralizing, you know, it's just like... Yeah, and I don't think that Poe was particularly religious, that Poe was particularly religious, but his sort of horror was not sort of cosmic. But horror, Dracula for example, or Frankenstein, Dracula especially, are very kind of really rooted in sort of the Christian tradition. You know, we always think of vampires in our horror tradition as being repelled by crosses and holy water and stuff. And I think that Lovecraft just didn't do that and he was, you know, he was really the equivalent. He really communicated a lot with other writers and fans of, I would say, weird fiction.

I don't even think horror was particularly used as a genre, or certainly not used in a positive way when he was starting to write. But he, he, he communicated a lot with other people. They had like conventions and they had amateur publications where they would trade stories. Uh, I kind of used to think it was a lot like, I don't know, I guess, 10 or 15 years ago, there was a website called Creepypasta. Yes.

Which writers kind of traded, it was sort of forum for trading your stories. It wasn't necessarily monetized. And of course, through that, we got the character of the Slender Man, which is pretty established now. And I think that's kind of what the world Lovecraft lived in. I think he's very difficult to read. I read a lot of horror and ghost stories when I was growing up. And something like Bram Stoker's Dracula immediately appealed to me, immediately responded. Something like Frankenstein didn't at all. It just seemed very clumped, just arch and archaic. And Lovecraft kind of was the same way.

It was kind of a difficult, not an easy read because he always talked around things. Yeah. And he's not really into characters. Most of his stories are like a person relaying something that happened to them. But in the challenges for adapting it, I think the really interesting thing

that you did in your Lovecraft adaptations is that you take an author that's sort of notoriously like humorless in his style and also Pathologic like so pathologically afraid of sex that it just doesn't feature in his work but of course ends up featuring in the subtext as a result of that and you've created these adaptations that are You know both the ones I'm very faithful to Lovecraft, but also in Reanimator and From Beyond, extremely funny and filled with sex. So like when you were adapting these works,

did you set out to do an adaptation of Lovecraft that was funny and sexy or was this like something that came out in the process of writing the scripts for these adaptations? Well, I did it. I developed the scripts for these adaptations? Well, I did it. I developed Reanimator, but Stuart Gordon and Dennis Paoli and William Norris had already written a pilot for a proposed TV series of Reanimator. And it was back when a TV series was on ABC, NBC, CBS, the middle of the road audiences. And it ended with Halsey's death.

And actually Herbert dies at the end of the pilot, he's brought back. But it didn't have Dr. Hill or anything like that. I had read Lovecraft and was not real fond of it because it seemed like the stories I read there somebody would see some horrible thing that you couldn't describe and then they'd faint. And so I wasn't that familiar with it. But when Stuart introduced me to Reanimator, when I read those stories, there's six of them, they're very un-Lovecraftian. They're not what we think of with Lovecraft.

They are kind of a monkey's paw kind of traditional, you know, things coming back from the dead. It's certainly a mad doctor Frankenstein type of thing, but it was really a very atypical Lovecraft story. It didn't have any cosmic dimension to it. So that made it very easy to make a horror story. Now, as we developed it, I immediately wanted to put in the headless guy. Because- Yes.

Probably the most memorable part of the animator and i i've always been a horror fan and i always loved the movies that had the brain that wouldn't die you know severed heads that talk or don't talk you know it seemed like that was that kind of was a horror thing i think the first horror movie ever saw in my life when I was a little kid was The Creature with the Out of Brain, which is basically it's a zombie movie and a mad doctor zombie because it had technology in it. So I've always liked also the you know the zombie or the night of the living dead type of thing. So that seemed to me like we could, that was like a horror movie as we developed it.

Now the humor of it basically I think came about because we had so much fun coming up with ideas of what can you do with it. And I think Stuart always credited William Norris as having sort of come up with the West character the way it comes off on the screen. And Stuart, and both, I wanted to make a movie that was, I was risking all my money on this movie and I was borrowing money and guaranteeing a return. So I was really off on the edge. I had nobody really, I was the only one at risk. On the one hand, that was really good because I was the final decision.

There's no, I didn't consult with anybody. Of course, creatively, Stewart and I worked together, but I didn't have like a distributor or a studio or investors that I had to convince of anything. For the risk I was taking, I wanted to make a horror movie because that's what I feel the closest to. I feel like with horror, I get it more. And I can tell I have very strong opinions of what's good in horror. The other part of it is that I was risking so much,

I wanted to get my money back. I mean, I know I'm a horror fan. I think everybody's kind of a horror fan. I think Everybody's kind of a horror fan, especially in adolescence. Yes, but when you are still a horror fan when you're older it's a whole different thing and also I realized that I Recognized myself. It's a horror fan Because I love all movies. I love every genre. I love it. The good ones. Yes. Horror, I like the bad ones.

That's how I know I'm a horror fan. That's a beautiful metric. I can watch crappy horror movies and enjoy them. So if I make a horror movie, I know there's horror fans out there. And if the movie's no good, and I told Stuart this, I said, we just, it's got to be sex and violence. We got to see, we got to go with the horror, we got to go over the top. Because if the movie isn't any good, we'll still have an audience. Because that horror fans will go for it.

They'll forgive you that it's a ridiculous or crappy or inept movie if you just deliver the goods. And so that work, that was great for Stuart because he likes to shock people. He likes to be the guy that shocks everybody. He was a first-time movie director as He was a first-time movie director, as I was a first-time movie producer, but he had been directing theater for 10 years, really all his life. He was directing in college. And he got his first fame, or I'll say notoriety, by on a all nude version of Peter Pan. And was actually taken downtown to be mugshot.

You know? What on like obscenity charges or something? I think this happened in college. Public indecency? Okay. Now in Madison, Wisconsin. Well, this was the era. Go Badgers. Well, this was the counterculture era. So we were both counterculture people, anti-war, anti-Nixon, you know, it was the counterculture, the hippies. And part of being a... part of

the hippie thing was like hair. The play hair had nudity. It was, you know, it was pushing the boundaries. It was having long hair and being shocking and free love and drugs and all this kind of thing. So Stuart was part of that. And so he put on a hippie version of Peter Pan as a countercultural statement, I'm sure, and got notoriety. And so he, besides being an incredible storyteller with actors, which I think is his greatest strength, he liked to go over the top so he could shock people. He always felt like that would be a, you know,

that's a good route to take so you can survive in theater. Well, when he got to film, he, you know, that's a good route to take so you can survive in theater. Well, when he got to film, he wanted to go over the top and luckily we both did. So there was never a moment when there was any discussion of pulling back on it. And so part of that was having nudity, kind of casual nudity, I guess.

Having gore, more blood, this kind of thing. And then as we developed the script even, we'd just laugh our asses off. We just had, you know, it's like, who would believe a talking head? What can a head do? The fact that Dr. Cain has a huge talking heads poster above his bed in the movies. Yeah. I forgot about that.

And when, you know, like when cuts off Hiltz's head and puts it on his desk, I remember clearly, I said, I know when I see these talking head movies, the 50s ones, seems like the heads always balance on the table. Oh, when he puts it on the bill all, like the attack. Well, they wouldn't balance. All over it. So then we said, oh, we came up with the idea of having the letter spike. Well, that becomes, you could do it non-funny, but Stuart's not like that.

He's always as, I think it's a sense of irony and a sense of fun. And that's kind of, and I like that. I like horror that goes over the top, but also is fun. It isn't just trying to make you feel depressed. It's kind of liberating. Yeah. And when I think of Reanimator and From Beyond, they're both incredibly fun and funny movies. And like you said, Reanimator was Stuart Gordon's first movie. I mean, it's remarkably well directed. It's a remarkably assured effort from a guy going out there for the first time. He was a professional director.

And in Reanimate, you can really see the kind of theater-like suspension of disbelief. When you go to a theater, you're a legitimate stage. You have to buy in to the world on that stage. It's so fake. It's so fake. It's totally fake, right? And you buy into it, and you buy into the rules of it. And I'll give an example of that, which is when Dr. Hill is trying to go into the house,

his head in a bag and a fake head, and his ear gets knocked off. And how many horror movies can you think of where a director could pull that off without groan, without just, you know what I mean? Yeah, it's a miracle. But Stuart pulls it off. I've never heard anybody complain about that.

I never heard anybody go, oh, you know, how could that happen? He has given that theatrical rhythm that works. You buy it, you know? So I think that, I mean, Stuart gave it the humor. I mean, it was put in the script, but it was, but the movie, Stuart always said, we're making a scary movie. And there's very little scary to it.

I mean, it's, maybe the scene where Meg goes down the hall and finds the dead cat in the fridge. Yeah. Maybe that's kind of well it's mostly it's mostly played for laughs and like maybe some can be. Yeah but like I think the humor I think the humor it gives the audience like I think the the sense of like you said Stuart's sense of irony and absurdity works so well with with Lovecraft for the source material because I think it

gives the audience like a way into this kind of impenetrable mythos but another element you talk about Stewart's work with actors in both Reanimate and From Beyond I mean like both these movies are really showcases for the lead actor Jeffrey Combs who then went on to play portray Lovecraft himself in your anthology feature Necronomicon. What is it about Jeffrey Combs and this sort of like haunted twitchy, but still sort of like almost Bugs Bunny, like physical, physical comedy that like what made him such an attractive, like such a perfect avatar

on screen for Lovecraft and like his characters and his work? Well, he's a talented actor. He did not want to have a career in horror. Actors are always dealing with that. If they have success, then they are kind of resentful that that success pushes them along a narrower path. I don't really know exactly, I don't know exactly what makes an actor that is fascinating, that catches your eye.

I know that in the casting process, because the casting for the animator was done, it was just done according to how movies are cast in LA and Hollywood. You get the castings, you get the castings, you get the headshots, you know, agents submit, you do, you do auditions. You know, it's done in a very, it was very typical process.

West was kind of always Jeffrey's part. You know, West, I think a lot of people could do that. Cillian Murphy would probably knock it out of the park. Oh, yeah, absolutely. But Jeffrey created, you know, in theater, the person who plays the character in a play the first time is always given credit in later iterations of the play.

And I think that in the case of even somebody else playing West, like in the reanimator of the musical, there was a different actor playing West. And it works. But Jeffrey created that character. He was the first one that did it. What I like about Jeffrey is he, I really like a lot of the movies from the 20s and 30s. And I kind of, especially the genre ones, you know, or somebody like John Barrymore.

These actors, you knew what they were thinking. It's kind of like when you watch the Alfred Hitchcock movie, you kind of know what the actors are thinking. Now, he does it a lot with how he shoots it, but actors from the 30s and 40s, 20s, it's kind of a difference. It's not that totally so-called realistic kind of stuff. Yeah, they're giving you a lot with their face.

It's like they're presenting senior. Yeah, with their whole body. Yeah. With Jeffrey, what I love about his style of acting is that his movements are all really all a series of little movements. You know, if he opens the door, he doesn't just open the door, he reaches, he grabs, he turns, he opens. Now it's all fluid, but you get his movements when he looks. And he played, of course, he played the irony, you know?

Yeah. Yeah. So I think he just, he had the great part because Bruce Abbott with Dan, he had the thankless part of being the lead, but really being the abbot to Jeffery's Pistello. You know, there's this in circus school, they have, if you're in clown theory, there's a white clown and a red clown. And the red clown's the one that goes and sets fire to everything. And the white clown's the one with the water saying,

stop, stop! And they say with comedy teams, the straight man has the hardest part. As a matter of fact, with Abbott and Costello, and I don't know, I think maybe at the beginning with D. Martin Jerry Lewis, you know, I understand that Abbott got paid more than Costello, because that's, the straight guy is really tough.

So Bruce Abbott generally doesn't get the kind of appreciation that Jeffrey gets. He's got, Jeffrey's got all the stuff to do. And then there's that, that is the lead with the girl. You know, he's supporting Jeffrey's madness, you know, in terms of the dynamics. And of course Barbara, she as the victim, becomes a very important part in a horror movie. And Dr. Hill ended up being the villain. So unfortunately, he passed right after we finished Brighter Reanimator, so he never got a chance to really, you know, get the… Dig into that role.

… well, that the movie's been getting for 40 years now. Next year is the 40th anniversary of Reanimator, the first screening, first public screening. It wasn't even a final answer print. We screened on the 13th of May in 1985 at the Cannes Film Market, which is a part of the festival. It's where you buy and sell movies. Was there to sell. And it was a super successful screening.

So this year we wanna go back and hopefully get that same theater, the Star Theater on the Rue d'Antibes to do the 40th anniversary screening. And I think right now, this week, um, it's, uh, you can order the 4k preorder. They, I don't think they can deliver till the 3rd of April, but there's pre-orders or so, you know, a big pack with, you know, the 4k and a book, 150 page hard cover book, a, um, Dr. Hill bobblehead.

It's just the head. Do you have a letter spike maybe? There should be just like the bobblehead you get at Dodger stadium, you know, and everything. So there's a lot of extra that's for the big, you know, the, I don't know what they call it, the deluxe edition. And then there's stages down with different, there's lots of, there's, you know, lots of different kind of stuff you get with it.

And lots of new, like it was needed, but a lot of new extras, which is pretty crazy because it all, I think Rhianna Meyer already had a couple hours of extras. Now we have a whole new slew of extras, there's even a little mini-doc about the musical, which most people didn't get to see. I tried to get Stewart to agree to letting the musical so we could put it out. But he said that it would only work if you did a feature like Little Shop of Horrors or something.

He said it never works if you're shooting what's on stage. He said it looked like crap. But it's too bad because the musical never hit the success that it would have had to hit to make it into a feature and to make it to get a big audience. I mean, it did play. I played in LA for a long time. But, you know, it played in some in New York. I think it went to the Fringe Festival. It just didn't, it's impossible to make money off of theater. You know? Yeah. Just impossible.

You got to pay everybody every day for everything. And so we've tried to do, we were trying to do a stop motion puppet version of the musical, which would have been great. Oh my God. That would have been incredible. But these things are so hard to finance and you would think that there's so many billionaires in the world.

Yeah. I kind of think, are none of them really, aren't some horror fan millionaires, you know? Yeah. They could spend a million on a Wu-Tang Clan album, but not that. It's ridiculous. It's I was going to ask you, just speaking of the musical, you you're like a horror guy. You've said you understand horror more than anything. You have ventured out slightly into other realms with Honey I Shrunk the Kids, which is I wanted to ask you about

because I loved that movie as a kid. You terrified me as a child with Honey I Shrunk the Kids. There's a lot of scary parts in that. And I love that movie. But also The Dentist. I remember I wasn't allowed to watch it and I was too afraid to watch it. But I would watch the trailer for it almost every single day on just the iTunes store because I was like, this looks like the scariest movie of all time. And it gave me a fear of the dentist. I carry with me for my needed. Right.

Exactly. Exactly. But I that's just to say, apropos of nothing. But if you could, what genre would you do other than horror if you had your druthers? If you could do, you know, like if you had carte blanche, if you could do any project you want other than a horror project or a horror project if there's something that really sings to you. But like, you know, I mean, I would like to try stuff, but I don't think I could. And I don't think I have the confidence that I'd be any good at it, you know,

because I like a lot of genres, you know. Yeah. Like I really like musicals. I don't think I could do a musical. I don't think I could do a musical. You know, I think you'd be foolish. What are some of your favorite musicals? I like the real class. Well, of course, I like the Loop Shop Horrors, of course.

Yes. But I really, you know, I like stuff like My Fair Lady. The MGM classics. Absolutely. I like Meet Me in St. Louis. I mean, I just think these things are wonderful. Not everything, of course. Yeah.

I think I'm going to pass on Wicked, you know. I think I'm gonna pass on with it, you know. It's good. I like it. But anyway, I mean, but that wouldn't be, you know, I don't even know if I could do a, like Stuart did the musical of Reanimate. I had tried to set it up. I lived in Spain for like seven years and I wanted to do a musical. But I'm not sure that... I mean, I tried to set it up, but I wasn't putting myself up. I could produce it. I don't think I could direct... Let's put it that way. I could produce a musical. I don't think I could direct a musical. It's Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, that's fantasy.

Yeah, it's like an adventure movie. And I think fantasy is on the continuum with horror. So it's complete Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and make the lighting a little darker and make the ending not happy. He eats the kids in the cereal at the end. By making it, but when we, when Stuart and I, um, came up with the idea, we, we were both like family men and, and we were here at this house in my backyard

having a barbecue. And he had three kids and I had four kids. They were running around. And Stuart said, we should do a movie for our kids. We should shrink them. And then I said, well, you know, I went out as a kid. I used to imagine being really little, and the grass and the roots of the trees would be huge and adventurous. And then Stuart said, yeah, kids get shrunk, they get thrown out of the backyard, and the story is they got to get home. And that's where we started from.

And it's unfortunate that, I mean, we had even built the sets that were shot in Mexico and I moved my family down there. And Stewart, for health reasons, had to quit, had to resign from the movie. And then, of course, when Joe Johnston came in, he had his whole, his own producer. And so there went on. I think if he hadn't had that problem, I guess our careers would have been a whole lot different. Because then we would have had this huge success with a family fantasy movie. And as he said, there's a darkness to it. And there was But instead, there's a darkness to it. And there was a lot of, there were tensions between the studio and us because Stuart kept pushing it to be darter.

And the studio didn't want that. In fact, when Stuart and I talked about when we first invented it, he said, he said, oh, we should have Fred McMurray in it. We should have it at Disney. We never took it anywhere. We never pitched it anywhere but Disney because we thought this would be our Disney movie for our kids, you know? Yeah, that's sweet. I also want to ask you about modern the modern horror landscape.

You mentioned creepypastas earlier. Do you keep abreast of those? Do you have a favorite creepy pasta that you've read? No, I don't. I just remember when it was first starting, I was interested in it. And I was really fascinated by the... And I think the thing that got me into it was when some girls killed some kid. Yes, it's happened like three times, I think now. And so for me, that was kind of something that fascinated me because people are so… It's amazing what kind of nonsense we believe. I mean, throughout history,

you think of how susceptible people are to nonsense, the nonsense ideas. And to think that these kids would kill somebody because of this invented character was pretty far, and so that drew me to Creepypasta and I saw that it was basically a forum, kind of a club for people to trade their horror stories. Just like there was one that resulted in 50 Shades of Grey, it was a a group that I think they traded stories about. Oh yeah, Twilight, Twilight fan fiction. Yeah, I think it's sexual fetish or bondage or something.

Yes, yes. So that turned into 50 shades of gray. But the slender man kind of turned into a legitimate kind of American boogie man. Yes. Well, just like in the movies, you know, Freddy is a legitimate, you know, Frankenstein. The movies have created these, you know, Jason and Michael Myers. You know, they are legitimate folk tales. Yeah, like they're up there with Dracula and Frankenstein kind of.

But you do the American. Yes. These are American ghouls. Brian, a little earlier, you said you had you have very strong convictions about what makes for a good horror movie. And when I think about some of the films we've discussed, particularly From Beyond and Your Society, I think of the incredible practical effects work done by Screaming Mad George.

Is like as part of your sort of criteria for how you evaluate or what you think makes good horror movies, are practical effects a part of that judgment or criteria? Well, I started making movies before digital effects were possible. And the early, I think when I was making The Dentist, they were just starting to use some digital effects. And I think the first time I really saw digital effects personally maybe, before I did The Dentist, I was actually going to direct I think Warlock 2. I was working on Warlock and then I moved over and did Return Living Dead 3 and Warlock 2 came out earlier because it was much further along the line and they had, I

think I remember an effect where they throw a knife or there's some kind of, you know, knife hovers in the air but of course it looked so fake it looked like type of digital effects and then of course we had Jurassic Park was the one that changed everything. Because Brad Park, Phil Tippett was the genius or a technical artist genius who was able, they had the strength of computers to get enough data to make the images look pretty real. But how you animate them is the problem. And that's what Phil Tippett was able to do. And Phil Tippett, by the way, did the did the ant in Honey After School. Yes, the ant terrified me as a kid. It's straight out of a Harryhausen movie.

It's like the beautiful, well the ant isn't stop motion, the scorpions are stop motion I think, but the ant is beautiful. I loved the ant. I loved that they became friends with it and it helps them. It helped me with my fear of insects honestly, even though I was terrified of it.

Oh, you know there's always room for a giant insect. Absolutely, absolutely. Then one I did one called I produced one called Arachnid. That's Arachnid. And it's an alien spider giant. I can't watch it. It's too scary. And it's in the effects. The digital effects are just terrible. That's too scary. And it's, and the effects, the digital effects are just terrible.

That's a problem. Now for me, it's not that I'm against digital effects. And I love Harryhausen by the way. I love stop motion. I always feel like you've got to mix up the effects so that it comes to life. If you just do stop motion, you read it as stop motion. And digital, I guess there can be really good digital, but I always thought digital, they just move,

things move too fast, everything because they can. They're really animations. So it's animations, animation, I like animation features, but if I'm going to do a horror movie and I want it to seem real, you go to puppets, and puppets come to life because of the puppeteers. I mean, Screaming Mad George could put his hand in a sock and bring it to life for him, because he's the puppeteer. The society, the shunting, that is a giant guy in a suit. It's a puppet. There's…

Oh my God. …except that there's 13 people in the suit. But it's really a guy in a suit effect. Now, there's no digital in that because we didn't have digital then, but Beyond Reanimator, when Elsa Pataki has the NPE, I won't explain what these things are, but. Watch the movies, watch the movies. Watch them, watch them. The evil warden in her body, she's dead,

she's brought back to life, she's given the NPE. Well, it turns out it changes how she is. And so George built, Screamy Man George built an animatronic head for her. We had her real, we moved up her body. And so let's say we wanted to show that there's something moving within her. So this animatronic head had things that he could manipulate to move the fake skin around,

but we digitally added to it. Yes. So that you can't really tell when it's one thing or the other. With Ryrie animator, the finger eye creature, I think there's a sequence where it changes technique from shop to shot. Of course, there's no digital then either because we couldn't afford digital and it wasn't good enough, which you could afford. But originally, it's just pieces of props stuck together. Once it's put down with the goop where Dave Allen, the stop motion guy, did the movements frame by frame with the set behind it.

We didn't have digital even put in and take out stuff. But it jumps on the floor and runs. It's a pull toy. When it looks over the jar it's in, it's just somebody's fingers and someone pushing up a... But the fact that it changes constantly, at one point when Dan's on the sofa and it's going across behind him,

that's just a stupid puppet with a stick. Like a Mppet's type. And so the point is, it's whatever works for the shot. And I also think that with the effects, the practical effects, you can always, with digital effects, you're really limited. Once you do the animatic, you do layers of stuff. You bring in the guy for the lights, and you bring in the guy for the water, for the moisture thing, the program for moisture, for air or something.

Every layer, it's almost, to change anything, it becomes so difficult. But if you're doing it with a puppet, the puppeteer can keep trying and you can keep moving the camera around and throw a little bit of smoke, some blinking lights, a little goop until you sort of start getting it to come to life. The goop is so important. Or a lot of goop for society.

The thing about the goop is that the moisture type stuff is that it reflects light in most things. It's moving, so the light is moving. And I think you can just kind of look for it and try to find the effect you want. So I would generally lean way heavy on practical, but I wouldn't count out anything depending on the shot. I did a movie in Indonesia, a giant sea scorpion movie called Amphibious. Now, insects actually work really well with digital. Let me turn this off.

So if you're going to do an insect with something that has an exoskeleton, that's one of the things that digital does the best, Chief. But where you get into trouble, when I did the giant sea scorpion, I actually built a 40-foot sea scorpion that took 12 people with hydraulics. And not only that, I built it in the jungle of Bali with people who didn't live in chairs. I never did that. I brought a friend from LA to teach him how to do practical effects.

And we built that whole thing in the jungle. We shot it on the island of Java, so it really could move a little, but it couldn't run around, and it had to come out of the water. So we built a miniature puppet that could be manipulating. With the puppet, you can just keep working with it. But to get it to go up out of the water, I needed to use digital. And once somebody's working with it, the big face of the big one, it's real, but the eyes are never gonna look real.

And the mandibles are never gonna to look real. And the mandibles are never going to move like that. So I added the eyes and the mandibles digitally. So it's not that I'm against digital. It's that I think there's a thing that happens in, maybe it's changing now, I don't know, but when I was making movies, there was this thing where in the after the in the 2000s, when when digital everybody could do it on their computer. And I knew people that a friend of mine produced a movie in in my house. It was called Reborn. And it's sort of like a firestarter, but with electricity. And it's cheap, cheap movie. But he listened to these effects guys that said,

just do it all digitally. Then you don't have to worry about messing up the place. You don't have to stop to shoot the effects, which I used to always just have a second unit that was always working for that. You know, on the dentist, I had a second unit constantly working on the inside of the mouse stuff. So they do blood splatters digitally. They do the electricity digitally. And my friend who was producing it, he said, we're going to do it all digitally. We'll push it to post, we can shoot real fast. And I said, you know what?

When you go into the church of digital effects, you don't end up on a low budget, you don't end up in Jurassic Park. You end up in the scorpion king. They're throwing up, the guy gets his throat cut and blood goes against the wall. They won't even throw some liquid on the wall. It looked like an emulator. I mean, it reminds me of what you said about about about when you see a play. And you know, it's like these actors on a

stage show everything in your brain is saying this is fake. This is fake. But like through the craft of directing and acting, you can find yourself knowing it's fake, but believing everything about it. And when I think about practical effects, like a has and I when we talked about the films of Lucio Fulci earlier this year, the fact that I know that this is a rubber dummy, there's something about the practical effects and not just them by themselves, but within the I guess embedded in

the matrix of the entire movie. It like the knowing it's fake adds to the visceral reality of it in a way that I think digital effects don't. It's like you like the fact that you know it's fake makes it more real to you when you see it or when you experience it as a movie. I'll give you a good example of how less effective digital effects are. And of course, all of this comes with the caveat that I'm talking about not as tight today because everything's changing, right? I'm not... So I'll give you an example in the early era of digital effects. There was a guy that I think I did a movie called Crogity that had Arnold Boslow in it. And he played the mummy for in the remake of the mummy.

I think it was I think it was. Yes, the Scorpion King or no. No, it was he was just he was in the mummy in the mummy returns. He was. Yes, yes, yes. Imhotep. He plays. He was in both. Yes the Mummy Returns. He was the Mummy. Yes, yes, yes. Imhotep. He plays… The meat was Imhotep.

Yes. That's what he played. Well, I forget the name of the actor that was the star in it. Brendan Fraser. Brendan Fraser. Yeah. And so he was that guy. And at one point, somehow his whole mouth decays.

You know? It's like… Yes. And it opens wide like an Apex you know? It's nice. Forget about that. And it opens wide like an Apex twin album. It's all decayed. It was done digitally. That movie got a PG rating or something. If that's out here, I would guess that if that effect

had been done with rubber practically, it would have gotten, with rubber practically, it would have gotten, the MPAA would have not allowed it to be a PG-13. It would have. Yeah, yeah. Because if it was real, if it was real plastic and it had red liquid and decay, not acceptable. But if it's digital, it's fucking animation, man.

Yeah, it's like an animated... If you see digital movies, you're looking at an animation. And I love animation. I love animated features. But in my horror, hey, I could make the horror animated feature. What is one, Monster House, or what's the one with the girl's name that was really good? Oh, Coraline.

Yeah, Coraline. Those were great movies. They're animated. Yeah. Fine, no problem. It's fine. When you read a Lovecraft story, it's a book. It's just words. Yes.

That's fine. It still gets you off. You never lose the fact that it's words. It's animation, it's animation. But if it's a horror movie, if it's going to be animated, be animated. But if it's trying to look like it's something else, I don't know. It just doesn't work as well. Even on that Reborn movie when they pull, there has to be sparks going out, right? Because it's electrical. Well, we always have had to do electrical kind of lightning.

We used to- Orcs of electricity, yeah. What they call protoscope. It used to be on film and they would draw it cell by cell. It's called rotoscoping. Well, with digital, way better. You can do it much better, but please have a real charge

where it begins with real smoke, you know? But then they say, no, you can't put smoke on the set because it's harder to, we won't have this clean and imaged anime, to do our digital. And you go, so now you're gonna add atmosphere digitally. So every step of the way you're making, you're getting further and further away

from something gets in. So one of my fingered effects that I've done was one scene that I love is the credit sequence, sort of the Pixar credit sequence scene for Beyond Reanimator. And it's when the reanimator penis fights the reanimator. And that's the number of different effects, right? Yes. First of all, digital effects are wonderful for erasing wires, erasing rods, erasing somebody who's manipulating somebody.

Covering your tracks. Bring stuff out the window, putting things, taking things away, taking out the palm trees. It's not supposed to be an LA. All that stuff is fantastic. With this rad, we had a real rad that we had to put rods on. Well, with digital, we could erase them. And the main part of the action was a shadow. And one reason for that was because sometimes to make something palatable, you have to get something, you got to make it a bit

stylized. And this is such a ridiculous idea anyway. But the guy who was the effects guy, Amador, I forget his last name, he did that fight with just manipulating these puppets with sticks, you know, and we put a screen for the shadow. And of course, when it jumps, we were able to erase the rod so you didn't see that. Fantastic, hilarious scene. And then we go to live action. Now you've got a stop motion penis and the rat being manipulated. And it, the whole scene just ends up being delightful. You know, it's just so, it's using a mixture of effect. Now, of course, it's a comedy scene.

You're not trying to get away with anything, but you look at Bindi Glark in Return of the Living Dead 3, Julie, with all the glass in her face and all this stuff. Well, imagine if they said, hey, hey, we're not gonna do that, we're just gonna put green on her face face and then we'll add it in later. Yeah, I think like a great example of this and of the thing you're talking about is that in the effect you were talking about earlier in

Return of the Reanimator, the of the stuff moving under the skin, there's a similar effect in that Mummy remake movie from the to from like 2000 where the scarabs like go up a guy's skin and it's digital. It's all digital. And when when I was a kid, that was like one of the scariest scenes of all time for me. But like as as an adult, it does not hold hold up like imagine if that was done with practical effects

Yes, I mean it was crawling under someone's skin. Yes. Yeah in in Return of the reanimator when the things are moving under the skin it's like, you know, it's the the mixture really adds to the The realism and it's I mean you can judge for yourself if you watch both the facts. It's very, I mean, I love the Mummy remake, honestly, but it's some of the effects. It's a different type of movie from this. Yes. It's its own movie. It really has.

It's really not, there's nothing to do with the original String of Mummy movie. Yeah, it's like an adventure movie. It's like Indiana Jones type. Brian, I don't want to get you out of here, but I mean, like I'm talking about like the current the current state of horror movies. I just wanted to ask, like one of the one of this year's big films is The Substance, which is usually influenced, hugely influenced by your work and huge. I just wanted to ask you, what do you make of this,

both this kind of body horror renaissance and also the horror genre as a whole, as it gets more respectable? What do you make of the state of horror movies today? I must say I haven't seen The Substance and I don't tend to... I tend to not... The older I get, the less patience I have with movies. I mean,

it's really too bad, but I used to see everything when I would see everything that came out. And now I won't tend to. I do know that I think the reason they're respectable, because when I started making horror movies, they were sort of a step up from porn. It was a province only of degenerates and psychopaths who are a horror writer or a director. But you know, now porn is pretty respectable. Yes, absolutely. I mean, it's not what it used to be. And horror, I think that at one point, horror was, when I started, horror was where you could see gore.

Once the Rambo movies came out, once these action movies started co-opting gore from work. Or had to try harder because you can get you can get it all from rambo now and i think what really changed everything was walking dead. thing was walking dead because as it was looked down, it was just not respectable at all. But as it got more and more successful, the critics can't be against something that's too successful, because then they're out of touch. Yeah, and then Frank Darabond too. They have good reviews or acceptable reviews, but often they don't really like it. And so the kind of things they like about it is that it's not really about this. Oh, it's really about this. Oh, it's really about this. Right. Now, of course, for every movie, every horror movie, it's always reflected the era of which it came out of. There is that there. It's like

with Dawn of the Dead. The fact that they're in the mall is seen as like a great comment on consumers. Even back then, they said it. Now every horror movie is like, it's a narrative about trauma. Yes, it's really about trauma. And then the problem gets to be that even back then, Romero ended up being a victim of these reviewers saying his movies had some deeper meaning, some political meaning, and then you end up with Day of the Dead, in which, except for the effects of Tom Savini, which are still delightful and wonderful horror, the movie itself is so self-conscious about being about...

The military, yeah. Yes, yes. George Romero, just think of this guy. He had the great fortune to have made probably the movie that is the seminal movie of this age of horror. The horror movie. Now you do the living. Is what I look at and I say that is when a corner was turned.

And we're still kind of there. I mean, it reached its apotheosis with, with, um, the walking dead, which ends up being George Romero's soap opera. Yeah. Yeah. Yes, exactly. There's no horror gone anymore. It isn't, I like, you know, my favorite tagline probably ever at the movies was

for Dawn of the Dead, when they said, when hell is full, the dead will walk the earth. That's the kind of explanation I want. Not that it's a damn germ or some kind of a, you know, communicable disease, that zombie-ism is a communicable disease. God, that takes all the fun out of it. zombie-ism is a communicle, but it takes all the fun out of it. And I know, but it did work in 28 Days Later, which was another big movement. That's a good one, yeah. But it just gets, you know, you end up with movies that aren't, you know, it's like, it's like horror used to be, you know, directors would do it, producers producers because it's a way in you can afford to do a horror movie because horror fans will accept

Incompetent movie so if you're going to be incompetent not have any money It's a good way to get in and if you're good like Sam Raimi and make an evil dad it I mean look only out look at his career I think I think you need a little ambiguity, you know, like especially in horror because you need things left unexplained so that the viewer can pour into that gap their own neuroses or fears or you know self mythology. So that's kind of what I think. Now I have not seen the terrifying movies but from what I understand, they're sort of relentless kind of killer. Yes. Yes, absolutely.

That may be a going, you know, maybe that's going back to something. I don't know what, but maybe at least it's not pretentious. Yeah, absolutely. I love those movies. While there's be the most, I'd rather somebody just be depressing. Well Brian, I want to thank you so much for your time and sharing a little bit from your career and your perspective with us. Really has and I are huge fans of your movies and I want to thank you for sharing a little time with us today.

Thank you so, so much. Thank you for having me and please go pre-order your reanimator 40th anniversary. The link will be in the episode description. But it's at ignite-films.com and that's the only place you'll find it and I hope you'll enjoy all the new extras. They even have an extra about Stuart Gordon's days at the Organic Theater in Chicago before he made movies. There's just a lot of great stuff, and plus you'll see the best version

you could get of Reanimator. Will there be nude Peter Pan on the DVD extras? I don't know, there might, you know, I haven't seen that one, but it's it's got footage from back then. So I'm sure they'll only seen the newspaper article with Stewart's in the Higgins, the Chicago Tribune or something, you know, being infamous. Well, yes, the link to buy the Reanimator 4K Remaster will be in the episode description. Please, everyone, go and check that out.

Once again, Brian Usna, thank you so much. Thank you. Fun. Thanks. Bye.