For purposes of identification and public safety, a troll may (or may not) look like this

Dir. André Øvredal, Norway

Just when I thought I could not stomach another found footage horror film, Troll Hunter comes along and makes me eat my words. Produced in 2010, it has emerged from a mass of vampire and zombie ‘product’ to shine brightly as a beacon of originality.

In a tradition popularised by The Blair Witch Project (1999) but spearheaded by the infamous Cannibal Holocaust (1980), Troll Hunter purports to be the result of chronologically edited, raw footage left on the doorstep of a Norwegian film production company. The days of Blair Witch are well and truly over, so audiences are immediately in on the joke, although the film plays as a poker-faced portrayal of supposed documentary events with humour handled cleverly in an almost incidental manner.

As it goes, students from a local university – armed with video camera – set out to uncover the activities of a mysterious poacher who is believed to be muscling in on bear hunter territory. After hounding this lone ‘ranger’, trolljegeren Hans, they are graciously brought into the fold and granted permission to capture his strange vocation on film, despite the disapproval of the ‘authorities’.

Now, I know as much about Norway as Kurt Russell’s MacReady in The Thing, so there is a curiosity about all things Norwegian that certainly adds to the entertainment value – the snow-capped mountain landscape with fingers of low-hanging cloud, the lyrical yet vaguely obscene language and, of course, the Scandinavian-specific troll legend itself. But Troll Hunter is successful in so many other ways, from the modern wrangling of a fairy-tale myth to the presentation of the trolls themselves.

Similar to other well-conceived found footage horror films – such as the Spanish zombie flick [REC] (2007) – Troll Hunter uses the inadequacies of guerrilla filmmaking footage to its advantage, largely to obscure the crappiness of any computer-generated imagery and, consequently, create more believable monsters. Computer effects are cheap, which is why we’ve been forced to suffer at their uninspired mercy for 20-odd years now. What the makers of Troll Hunter do is employ a bit of creative thinking, such as green-filtered night vision and wavering camera, to smooth over any chinks in their CGI armour.

Most importantly, the trolls of Troll Hunter are not just roaring, charging, flesh-chomping monsters – they are artfully drawn characters, each with a personality of its own, including strange behavioural quirks and expressions. Through troll hunter Hans – a “Norwegian hero”, as described by one of the student documentarians – we’re given a fascinating reintroduction to troll folklore, including troll varieties such as ‘Ringlefinch’, ‘Tosserlad’, ‘Rimetosser’, ‘Mountain Kings’ and the largest troll of all, the ‘Jotnar’. But, as Hans makes a point of saying, “Fairytales often don’t match reality”.

While an adult horror film from start to finish, Troll Hunter successfully does what few modern horror films do – channel our inner child. The arrival of the first troll on screen literally had me clapping with excitement, which is a rare response these days with, more often than not, sadistic horror flooding the market. To exit a horror movie with a broad smile on your face is quite a rare thing indeed.

Troll Hunter will also have you humming along to Edvard Grieg’s ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’ from Peer Gynt before you know it.

More trolls please.

Troll Hunter is available on DVD (Australia) from Madman

Troll Facts & Fiction

• Sunlight turns them to stone or makes them explode (dependent on age)
• They’re mammals
• They only breed one offspring in a lifetime
• The blood of Christians is particularly attractive to them
• They are born with one head, but may grow more over time to scare other trolls and attract females
• They love to gnaw old car tyres
• They are stupid
• Average life expectancy is 1000-1200 years

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 11,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 4 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

The Bruce is loose

Way back in 2002, cult actor and all-round righteous dude Bruce Campbell starred as Elvis Presley in a film, Bubba Ho-Tep (directed by Don Coscarelli). In it, Elvis and JFK are both still alive and wasting away in their own decrepitude in a nursing home until an ancient Egyptian mummy vies for the souls of their fellow aged residents. Sound strange? You betcha. Even better, JFK is an African-American, played with soul-stirring reverence by veteran actor, the late Ossie Davis.

Bubba Ho-Tep struggled in distribution limbo despite attracting a devout following, which is why this interview (below) with Bruce Campbell took place almost three years after production. Given such a lag, Bruce managed to remain upbeat and forthcoming about the project – and very generous with the one-liners (“It could be called Grumpy Old Ghostbusters“) – making him one of my favourite interviewees. Ever.

The beginning of this uncut transcription centres mainly on Bubba Ho-Tep, but bear with it, and you’ll find lots of morsels about Bruce himself and, in particular, his career circling the mid-noughties. Having just recently met Pollyanna McIntosh and filmmaker Lucky McKee during their Oz publicity junket for The Woman, I really enjoyed re-reading Bruce’s words about his experiences with Lucky McKee on the director’s sophomore feature, The Woods. Maybe you will too.

Bruce, you always do us proud.

A Chat with Bruce Campbell

2005, on the blower

It’s really sad you’re releasing this film at the time of Ossie Davis’ death…

“I have to say, he lived a hell of a long life and I’m guessing no regrets from his point of view. Just look at his credits – you get tired looking at them. The guy worked all the time and, what was great was, when I worked with him, the guy had no airs about him. He has probably the most calm, inner sense about him than any actor I’ve ever worked with. He’s just unflappable.”

Do you think Ossie is believable as JFK in Bubba Ho-Tep?

“If you have a character that’s crazy, you really need a guy like Ossie Davis because, when Ossie talks, you really believe what he says. He’s such an earnest man. I start to believe, he just might be President Kennedy! You see, Ossie actually met President Kennedy. He used to have cultural references with a guy who’s influenced culture.”

It’s never really explained if your character and Ossie Davis are the real Elvis and JFK – are they?

“Elvis is Elvis. There’s no question about it. And I think it’s hard to quite buy the JFK thing. We’ll just have to go with his good intentions. I wouldn’t be holding your breath about JFK.”

So how did Ossie get involved with the project?

“It was just very difficult to get to Ossie. His agents didn’t want to give it to him. Don [Coscarelli, the film’s director] submitted it to his agents and said ‘I want to make an offer to Ossie Davis’ and his agents said ‘Nah, we don’t want to show it to him.’ Don said, ‘But this is a really good part for him’ and they said ‘No, we’re not gonna show it to him.’ Don said ‘Why?’ and they said ‘It’s just too weird, too low budget and all that’ – so Don had to go to a director friend of his who had actually worked with Ossie Davis before and get his phone number and get in the back door that way.The moment he [Ossie] read it, he said ‘Sure, let’s do it.’”

“Sometimes, Hollywood tries not to make any movies at all. It’s amazing what they try NOT to do. The same happened with me. The time Don wanted to make the movie was the time when all the casting happens for the pilot seasons for all the TV shows. And they [agents] were like ‘Oh my god, you can’t work at during time. What if you miss a TV show?’ and I’m like ‘So? I don’t wanna do a TV show.’ I sort of had to struggle with them about when we had to make a movie. I make it pretty clear to my representatives not to hide anything from me. Give me the lowdown. I’m a big boy. I can make my own decisions. If it sucks, trust me. If it doesn’t – if I like it – what do you care? People have a lot of opinions in Hollywood.”

Have you worked with Don Coscarelli before?

“I’d never worked with Don. We knew of each other and we had similar backgrounds – and we’re similar in age and everything like that. Basically, the first movie that we did is probably our best known for the both of us [Bruce’s The Evil Dead, Don’s Phantasm aka. The Never Dead]. So we had a lot in common and we got along really well. The Evil Dead and Phantasm were both drive-in movies here in the States. In the early ‘80s, The Evil Dead was usually playing on double bills with one of the Phantasms.”

What did you think of the script of Bubba Ho-Tep? Was it a bizarre read?

“The most bizarre. The most bizarre script I’ve ever read. But I was intrigued because I went ‘Wow, this writer is fearless – he’s utterly fearless.’ Because I mean, there’s a lot of political correctness nowadays and what you’re losing through political correctness is sense of humour – sometimes – and an edge and the ability to poke fun at everybody.”

“I think Joe Lansdale is just a great writer. He’s a cult writer. He’s got a very strong following and he’s written – good god, I’m going to be wrong but – somewhere between 20 and 40 novels. And this [Bubba Ho-Tep] was a novella, which Don Coscarelli got his hands on. What I liked about it, though, aside from the weirdness – because I’m always drawn to stuff that’s not sort of not straight down the line – was that it’s a story about two old guys. It could be called Grumpy Old Ghostbusters.”

Were you ready to play an old guy?

“Don had to figure that out. He was in a quandary earlier on. He thought, what, am I going to get a guy like Robert Vaughn who’s actually older or am I going to get a younger guy and make him up? So he happened to be talking to Sam Raimi [director, The Evil Dead] about something else and he mentioned he was trying to look for an old Elvis and Sam said ‘Get Bruce, he’ll do it’.”

Are you an Elvis fan?

“I am now more than I was before. By the time I graduated high school, he was dead a year later. He was dead in ’77.  So for me, he was beyond a Wayne Newton-type of character – one of these lounge guys who kinda got out of control. Who was this guy with this boot black hair who is 250 and he’s got these dumb suits on – he’s wearing capes, what’s his deal? Then when I went to look at his earlier stuff, that’s when you go ‘wow’.”

“There’s no one in the early ‘70s who could do an act like Elvis. People make fun of him all the time but there’s absolutely a huge charisma coming from that guy. It’s undeniable. So I have more respect for him now and I tried to treat him sympathetically as a character.”

Was it difficult creating a believable Elvis?

“Every American man has sung Love Me Tender in the shower – you know, walked around saying ‘Thank you, thank you very much’ [Bruce adopts an Elvis voice]. Everyone does that. The trick was working out what he’s like as an old guy. No one else has played him as an old guy so that was my easy out.”

How did you prepare for the role?

“The most important thing is not the mannerisms because those are just caricatures. You’ve got to embody some of those so there’s some familiar aspect – and make sure the makeup gives you a semblance of it. We were mostly concerned with the guy’s psyche now. He doesn’t have the Memphis mafia, he doesn’t have anybody – he doesn’t have the chicks, he doesn’t have his money. He’s got nothing. So it’s kinda a good place to start a character. And you end up sort of redeeming yourself throughout the course of the film so that’s mainly what we concerned ourselves on and tried to avoid a lot of the cliché Elvis stuff.”

“You’ve gotta say ‘thank you very much’ at some point. [In Elvis voice]: ‘It was the size of a peanut butter banana sandwich’. You’re gonna use certain descriptions. You have to have that. Mainly it’s what the old geezer was like.”

Have you received any feedback from Elvis fans?

“Surprisingly silent, in regard to email and things like that. Because they were too busy crying! Poor Elvis! If you’re an Elvis fan, you don’t want to think of him dying the way he did – ‘straining at stool’ I believe was the medical phrase. He was on a commode. He’d done so many prescription drugs he was really backed-up. That’s how he went. You don’t want to remember that. So in the movie, we try to make it that, if you’re a real Elvis fan, this is the way he should’ve gone. Not how he did go. Suspend your disbelief and you can see Elvis go off to a better place.”

What have the critics been saying about Bubba Ho-Tep?

“For a low ass budget movie, it’s been well-reviewed. In arthouses, you’ve got, like, a Merchant Ivory movie and then Bubba Ho-Tep. I love the fact that kinda a Roger Corman concept could play in arthouses. That’s the victory there. A B-movie is considered art.”

Have you been surprised by the reaction to the film?

“I always try to hedge my bets, lower my expectations. There are so many ups and downs with each movie. But this one, we had hopes for it. We got tipped off with some early screenings. We went to a film festival in Las Vegas, which was one of the first places it screened with an audience. And I went ‘oh good’. I was really relieved because you never really know… I mean, I saw versions of it at my house on video – but what does that mean?”

“Basically, after about four showings, I could look at my watch or look at the movie at certain points and point and they’d be a reaction. It started to play consistently, which was good. It wasn’t just my friends and family at the first screening. It played enough to get a broader spectrum of older people, younger people, later at night, early in the evening, and they still basically all reacted the same.”

Bruce Campbell fans are pretty hardcore… How do you interact with them these days?

“I just live in the Ethernet now, which is nice. There’s no PO box, there’s no way to get hold of me. I don’t have a fan club… I just have a website [www.bruce-campbell.com]. I float around… and people can send me emails… I think it’s a much more convenient way to go anyway.”

Do you read those emails?

“Oh yeah. Not all of them. But if someone has a catchy subject line, I will read it. That’s the only way people know how to get a hold of me. So I run across old mates that way. I’ve actually got lots of work through email because people don’t know how to find me. Yeah, like a gaming company… they don’t know about the screen actors’ guild. So they look around the Internet, they Google you and they go ‘Oh, Bruce Campbell’s website…’ It’s modern day commerce… It’s like your website is your calling card. I go there now and I’m going to be posting shit for everything that’s coming up in the next year.”

“I’m ten times more approachable than the average actor, like, this year, I’m going to be going to 30 different cities. No one has to root through my garbage because they can see me in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. I’m not a mystery. I don’t have to worry about that 1000 millimetre lens trained on my door while I’m suntanning, you know. With movie stars, be careful what you wish for. I’m an actor – that’s why things have worked out differently for me. My day job is an actor. In Oregon [where Bruce lives], nobody gives a crap. I can go and buy groceries, things like that, and no one really cares that much.”

You’ve got a new book called Make Love the Bruce Campbell Way, which leads me to ask: how do you make love the ‘Bruce Campbell way’?

“Very carefully. No, you do it fictitiously. You do it as a novel. It’s a fictitious piece where I play me in a fictitious story. The scenario is, basically, I’ve been in a lot of B movies and I finally audition and get a part in a Mike Nichols movie opposite Renee Zellweger and Richard Gere. I’m this wisecracking doorman. And I decide because this movie is all about advice and relationships and all that, and because the doorman is giving advice to Richard Gere who’s starting a relationship with Renee Zellweger, I decide to go ‘method’ to really research my role just like a real actor would do. Go full bore. But my B movie sensibilities can’t help themselves and I wind up kind of infecting the movie with a B movie Ebola virus, kind of. And it all goes to hell in a handcart. The movie ends up getting cancelled mid-shoot and I get blamed for it. So I have to clear my name in Hollywood. It’s an adventure-horror-drama-comedy.”

You’re also in the next feature film from Lucky McKee [director of May] called The Woods…

“He (Lucky McKee) is very cool. [The Woods is] gonna be like a movie from the ‘60s. It could also be called ‘The Creepy Evil Women’. I play a husband, and my wife and I drop our troubled teenager off at a girls’ school in the middle of the woods. And her 17 year-old worst nightmares basically come true. It’s very Polanski paranoia-ish. It gets a little psychedelic. Lucky would say something like ‘You know that take was very good but I need some more awkward pauses’. And so the actors all look at each other and go ‘Well, that will be easy’.”

So what was it like working with Lucky?

“Lucky has a strange sensibility in the way he shoots it. He doesn’t like anything normal. I’ll give you an example: Recently, I went in to replace some lines of dialogue, like you always do – you add screams or grunts and groans or you add lines to the movie. And so, we had a cue – it was a simple line. So for the first take, Lucky’s there. First take goes by, you hear the beeps and you say the line of dialogue. And I think I matched the tone of it and I got the synchronisation pretty good and Lucky was shaking his head and I go ‘What’s the matter?’ and he goes ‘I don’t know, you should do it like you’re nauseous when you do it the next time.’ We go again and it goes ‘beep, beep, beep’ and my synchronisation is way off and it sounds pretty strange and Lucky is like ‘perfect… Perfect!!!.’ So that’s Lucky McKee in a nutshell.”

“I’m usually very wary of young directors because, as hot shit as they think they are, they don’t really know how a set works… a lot of them. And the loss of order is disturbing sometimes, whereas you can get a man or woman who’s been around the block once or twice and they get to know how a set works. They know how to make their day and they know how to keep pace. But I thought it [The Woods] was a good experience.”

“Lucky is good, he’s very intense, he knows what he wants and he’ll give you shit, you know. It’s fine. It’s his first big studio movie and so they’re just tinkering with it and they’ll put it out this year.”

And you’ve also just done a Disney movie, Sky High?

“Yeah, it’s kinda a teen movie, only the teens are superheroes with crazy Disney hi-jinks. It’s a lot like Flubber – an updated version with the same light tone. Trucks full of digital effects. Total fluff.”

And Alien Apocalypse…

“A tender love story, as you can tell from the title… Basically, it’s Spartacus with aliens.”

What about Man With The Screaming Brain?

“I’ve been trying to make it for, embarrassingly, 16 or 18 years… I rewrote it for Bulgaria because that’s where we shot. Wound up being a very strange little movie for a sci-fi movie. It’s more of a social allegory than a horror film.”

Wow… What is Bulgaria like?

“Pascinating. Pokey ass place, so I tried to capitalise on it.”

You’ve also done a lot of work Down Under with the Hercules and Xena television series…

“I loved the dynamics between Australia and New Zealand… The love/hate. They all think Australians are hicks. Almost everyone on the Hercules and Xena crew bailed to work on Lord Of The Rings. Australians are much more gregarious than Kiwis. They’re just like Americans who talk different.”

What about Don Coscarelli… Will you be working with him again?

“We’re doing Bubba 2. We have a prequel and a sequel at the same time – one film as the prequel AND the sequel. Elvis was very much into the black arts and we’re kind of concocting a story that’s… this is very theoretically right now… that there was a lost movie of Elvis’ that was stopped being made under very strange circumstances in the early ‘70s. He was making a horror movie because Colonel Parker thought he should make a ‘terror picture’. Then he got in some trouble in New Orleans and people started dying for real during the making of this movie. So now, Elvis is probably better suited to deal with what that was way-back-when, so a series of events take place where Elvis is actually able to travel back to New Orleans and take care of some old business. That’s in the very early writing stage.

Note: As far as this author is aware, Bubba Ho-Tep 2 has never made it beyond the conceptual stage, although here is some more recent scuttlebutt found on the net.

Are you listening to him?

Dir. Kevin Smith, USA

I just finished writing a review for this film when my browser crashed and the entire review – with hyperlinks, facts, dates and trivia – disappeared never to be seen again.

To say I am angry is an understatement so, instead of rewriting the review and further fuelling my rage, I am now going to walk around the block, punch some trees and say to you all ‘Go see Red State – it is really, really good’.

Over and out.

Red State is in cinemas (Australia) from 13th October 2011

He just drives

Dir. Nicolas Winding Refn, USA

After providing foreign-language fodder for international film festivals over the past decade or so with his Pusher trilogy, Denmark’s-greatest-contribution-to-cinema-since-Lars-Von-Trier – Nicolas Winding Refn – is having no problems wrapping his film directing skills around the English tongue. Critics fawned over his UK release Bronson (2008) and now, with the minimal-action actioner Drive, he consolidates his rise as ‘a (big) talent to watch’.

Drive works so well because of its refusal to accommodate genre labelling, but in order to give it a tick-box – as us film pontificators have a tendency to do – it is like Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle has crossed coasts to drive in Michael Mann’s Los Angeles. This is contemporary L.A, but with a distinct ’80s aesthetic that comes through the title credit typography, the Tangerine Dream-influenced music by Cliff Martinez, the muscle car culture and our hero’s shiny scorpion jacket, which he persists on wearing regardless of blood-sprays.

Ryan Gosling (The Notebook, Blue Valentine) plays a baby-faced, cold-as-ice operator – epitomising the explosive, pent-up rage of a De Niro, folded into the quiet-type, mystery-guy charisma of an Eastwood. Gosling’s got this film in the palm of his hand and, like Natalie Portman in Black Swan, he’s found his ultimate ‘ta-da’ moment.

A loner, a Hollywood stunt driver and an occasional getaway guy, Gosling – as the exceptionally talented, young ‘Driver’ – develops a love jones for his next door neighbour, Irene (Carey Mulligan), who is mother to little Benicio (Kaden Leos) and wife to a sympathetic jailbird, Standard (Oscar Isaac), poised to make his return from prison. This imminent family reunion puts a stop to any blossoming romance, but when Standard’s debts from ‘The Big House’ look as though they may threaten his wife and child, our Driver agrees to help him settle the score.

For lovers of cinema, Drive is like finding the mother lode – an elegant action film that pits moments of stillness against moments of extreme – yet tightly and clearly choreographed – frenzy and violence. In terms of its drama, Drive can be (almost) frustratingly slow; the characters sinking into each others’ eyes and thoughts for unpalatably long durations of time with shards of light skewering them like fingers from heaven. Say something, people – why don’t you! (That’s my internal dialogue, by the way). But as a stylistic device, this works to the film’s advantage and gives extra weight to any counter scenes.

Shots, too, are held until their dying moments, such as when Gosling slips behind a door jamb with gun in hand; the shot holding steady on his cat-stalking stealthiness until the last of him – the tip of his nose – has disappeared. And, sometimes, the two jarring elements of stillness and violence collide as one, like Gosling’s visit to a strip club to ‘acquire’ information, which sees the topless ladies poised like mannequins in a Kubrickian tableau while some guy has the crap beaten out of him.

Nicolas Winding Refn has taken a brave stance, potentially alienating all audiences for his film – too ponderous for action fans, too violent for Gosling’s love story followers – but that gives Drive a voice all of its own and one that speaks loudly to us people who enjoy all sorts of cinema, especially when they’re thoughtfully combined as a unique, tasty recipe. Throw in one of the best opening sequences ever committed to screen and excellent performances from all its cast – including Bryan Cranston as the loveable loser, Albert Brooks as the loveable bad guy and Ron Perlman as the bad guy bad guy – and you’ve got one of the best movies of the year.

Just to put you off the scent, I’d like to draw your attention to the following quote from Refn as found in the film’s press notes: “Since I was a teenager, I was a big fan of Sixteen Candles. I’ve always wanted to remake that film one way or another and, in a very unlikely way, I’ve done that in Drive. Carey [Mulligan] has all the intelligence and charm of a young Molly Ringwald. The romantic scenes she has with Ryan [Gosling] make for a very delicate and beautiful contrast to the brutality of the rest of the film.”

Aha! So that’s where the font in the opening credits comes from…

Drive is in cinemas (Australia) from 27th October 2011

Note: This trailer does not accurately represent the film. It is included here as an example of poor advertising – nothing more.

This new venture enables Emma Westwood to broaden her wordsmithing reach to sports organisations, which is where Steve Baker Media’s talents lie as an accomplished broadcaster and blogger.

It has been reported Westwood personally approached Baker with the proposition during ‘Steak Night’ at the Union Hotel a few weeks ago.

“Yes, it’s true,” said Westwood in an email confirming the decision. “After years of going it alone and having stretched my resources in terms of ‘woman power’, it seemed a no-brainer to ask Steve if we could pool our talents to create something bigger. After all, there’s only so much I could do by myself.”

Having worked as a freelancer for approximately 15 years, Westwood has consolidated a core clientele that crosses from media and journalism to corporate publications. She has a reputation for providing attention to detail, strong lines of communication, always meeting deadlines and producing “surprising results from seemingly vague or mundane briefs”.

Westwood’s extensive writing and editing skills are expected to be of great benefit to Stephen Baker Media in making the move from sports commentary into creating internal publications and communications for sports organisations.

As well as taking on the responsibilities of this new partnership, Stephen Baker Media claims Baker will remain committed to his obligations as a sports and racing broadcaster on Sky Sports Radio.

“I can’t wait to draw from the immense sports knowledge of Stephen Baker Media,” says Westwood. “This is a very exciting for me, in terms of moving into new arenas, but also in offering an even better service to my existing clients.”

When asked for a statement, Baker said: “Giddy up.”

For further information, visit www.emmawestwood.net or stephenbakermedia.wordpress.com

The great man speaks

For the billions of people out there who have not purchased a copy of my book, Monster Movies, here’s something for free – the chapter contributed by horror filmmaker John Carpenter.

To put it in context, the book is divided into monster ‘types’ (eg. Infectious Monsters, Monsters from Outer Space, Monsters from the Deep and so on) in which I flesh out a few of my favourite monster films in detail. Then between each chapter are these musings by various filmmakers who’ve dabbled in the monster sub-genre – the likes of Roger Corman, Larry Cohen and, as presented in full below, John Carpenter, who is a great interviewee for his enthusiasm, frankness and knowledge in equal measures.

There was a portion of this John Carpenter interview censored by my publishers for fear of litigation by a certain ‘horror writer’. I very nearly included the whole interview with Carpenter’s contentious words here in this blog, but then thought the better of it in case I got myself in some hot water. John Carpenter, by the way, said ‘cool’ when I told him it was going to be removed – he’s a low maintenance kind of guy.

Before I hand this blog post over to the great man himself, I noticed on Amazon.com that John Landis is releasing a book called Monsters in the Movies that comes out on 19th September 2011. Seeing this gave me a giggle as I’d originally pitched my book under the same title, but was told the resellers thought ‘Monster Movies’ was more marketable. They may be right, but I’m guessing John Landis will still sell a few more copies than me. I envy his book in all its full colour glory.

John Carpenter

In his own words, August 2007

“There are times when we seem to be sticking our heads right down into the bloody, stinking maw of the unknown, as the Thing transforms itself into creatures with the body parts of dogs, men, lobsters, and spiders, all wrapped up in gooey intestines” – review of The Thing by Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun Times
(1 January 1982)

Growing up in the ‘50s, that’s the time I remember and love the most as a moviegoer. I think you always love the movies you see when you’re young. Always. They make this gigantic impression on you.

In the United States, they just released a DVD of old monster films during the 1950s. Watching this DVD is like taking my favourite drugs. I love it. There are four movies in there and they’re just awful… The Gigantic Claw (1957), The Werewolf (1956), Zombies Of Mora Tau (1957), and The Creature With The Atom Brain (1955). They’re terrible but fabulous. God, yeah.

The ‘50s was a great time for monster movies and science fiction movies. That was the time of the giant bug movies ­– Them!, Tarantula, Beginning Of The End. My love of monster movies goes very, very deep. During the ‘50s, they were re-releasing the classics – Universal classics like Dracula, Frankenstein, The Wolf Man – on television. It was just wonderful. When the occasional film came along that purported to be a monster movie, but was really not, it pissed me off.

Monsters are glorious because, first up, you want to know what they look like. That was the big thing when I was a kid. If they made a great-looking monster, it was so fabulous. “Show me my monster, guys. I want to see it. I don’t want it to be in the dark. I want it to come out in the light. I want to see this fucker. I want to deal with it on the screen. I don’t want it to be a dog in makeup like The Hound Of The Baskervilles. Give me my monster and give it to me now!” That was my attitude. Just as long as you give me a glimpse of the monster, then I’m a happy camper.

Monster movies have been with us since the beginning of cinema. They’re nothing new. Monster films keep getting, essentially, reinvented with every generation. Each time there’s a change in calendar, we’re all getting older, and a monster movie will come out and we think we’re seeing something new.

Monster tales are ancient. Go back to the time when we climbed out of the trees, formed tribes and were hunter-gatherers. We’d sit around campfires and talk about evil, and get worried about those terrible monsters out there in the dark – monsters that may come and get us.

Monsters are manifestations of us. They can be us in different terms. They can represent things as they do in fables and myths and fairytales. They keep evolving throughout time. They’ve always been important in terms of any type of cultural myth that’s going on – the monster is us in a different way, they’re part of us. They could be our conscience, the dark part of humanity. You can see this from the very beginning, the earliest writings.

Monsters also come from peoples’ knowledge of the world that they live in, and their ability to explain that world to others. Monsters are a way of putting it in symbolic and visceral terms so we can all understand.

Look at the myth of Dracula. Vampires have been around in one form or another for a long, long time. Dracula was a gothic romance about the end of the aristocracy in Europe. Vampires crumbled and they were bloodsuckers. They fed on people. They were corrupt. They hid in the dark. You see all these things and you say, “I know what this is about”. The myth is basically talking about the end of aristocratic culture.

Now we keep reinventing vampires, over and over and over again. Bela Lugosi – he was Dracula and generally followed the idea of Dracula from the Stoker book. He was the embodiment of a 1930s swooning silent movies sexuality. It was the ‘30s, he had this thick accent… It looks cheesy to us now, right? But at the time, it was like, “Oh my, what a sensation”. But now look at vampires… Vampires don’t really change, they just change their costumes. We add a few details, like day-walkers and all that crap, but they do exactly the same things – that never changes. They’re a durable myth. They’re wonderful.

Monstrous behaviour in humans is what monsters represent in movies. Monsters themselves are, essentially, mythical creatures that are non-human creatures. Human beings that display monstrous behaviour, as in Wolf Creek, they’re even more terrifying sometimes. They hit closer to home in terms of the horror. I mean, it’s harder to understand the darkness in each of us.

A monster movie has a monster in it – a mystical creature, whether that comes from outer space or whether it’s created by a doctor with lightening or it’s an ancient legend like the vampire or a wendigo (a malevolent cannibalistic spirit into which humans can be transformed) or all sorts of things. But they’re supernatural in one way or another. They’re above nature. They’re not a part of every day nature. A man walking down the street might be monstrous, but he’s not a monster – he’s human.

There have been quite a few monsters in my movies. Prince of Darkness… In the Mouth of Madness has a bunch of fucking monsters in it. They Live… well, they’re aliens, but I guess you can call them monsters. My first film, Dark Star, had a cheeseball monster in it.

The Thing was offered to me as an assignment by Universal and it was my first studio film. I was a big fan of the original movie – The Thing from Another World – it terrified me. Oh God, it was scary. I had mixed feelings at first because of my love for the original film, but it was vastly different to the novella upon which it was based – Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell – about a creature who imitates humans perfectly so you can’t tell who is imitation and who is real.

The Thing is a purely evil monster, but on the other hand, all it’s trying to do is survive. So it’s about survival instinct, which we all hopefully have. It’s evil in our world. It’s evil to us because it hides in us.

How did I conceive a monster like the one in The Thing? I found someone able to design and build it – Rob Bottin. He came up with how to do it and the idea behind it, which is a great idea – it can look like anything. It comes along and imitates, then it shows you every life form it’s ever imitated, on however many planets it’s ever been on. So it’s not one Thing we’re looking at, it’s not one creature that looks like ‘this’. It’s not like Frankenstein who never changes. It looks like a hundred million different things.

Essentially, the challenge was to design something that can be executed with special makeup and effects, which are right in front of camera. They’re not computerised. They’re rubbers operated by people. They’re very effective because a computer does not animate them. The real life movement is so disturbing. When the art of it, the sculpting, is realistic, it really looks like a human face. Really disturbing.

When it comes to CG effects, if you look at Jurassic Park, that’s extremely successful. That film moved the art way beyond what was possible before. I mean, those dinosaurs running… all that stuff was incredible and, at the time, it was jaw-dropping. CG can be quite incredible, but they can also be quite ridiculous. It’s just like anything else. I would pay a lot of money to see a special makeup effects person create a giant monster that moved around. It can’t be done.

In the ‘80s in the United States, there was an enormous body culture starting up. People started to exercise. There was this worship of the body and an unease with the body too – that you might get fat and you might not be as attractive anymore. Well, what we did with The Thing was throw it in peoples’ faces – take the human body and rip it apart as an attack on the body culture. That was there and also the virus and all that.

While Rob Bottin had a bunch of great ideas, he hadn’t figured the whole thing out. He sort of figured it out as we went along, which is an extremely terrifying thing to do as a director. We didn’t know what it was going to look like until the whole film was shot and we were shooting insert effects.

I don’t know if I’d ever do that again as a director. I was young and stupid, I guess. When you don’t know, you’re just taking a big leap of faith, so it was like a religious experience – it was all about faith. I had faith that we would work it out, that we would find a way to go through it. And often times, the designs would not work, so we’d have to go back and re-conceive them. This was going on as the movie was being shot. It was insane.

As far as Rob Bottin working himself into exhaustion, let’s say he was aided by certain controlled substances. When you’re working, you just don’t want to sleep – you want to keep going. So there are various substances you can take to keep yourself awake. There was a time he needed to go to hospital – or rehab – however you want to look at it.

No one’s really imitated The Thing, which is really interesting to me, because I don’t know why. I agree that it’s been really influential. It’s so different. It’s not like any other monster movie that I’ve ever seen. When shooting, I was just hoping we’d get something. We were walking in the dark.

Christine came about because The Thing was a pretty big failure in box office terms. I was attacked for doing awful things because of the violence. The fans hated me, which serves me right for going down that path. They turned against me because they thought I had soiled the original. I should’ve realised because they’ll turn on you like bad pets – they’ll bite you.

I needed a job and I’d missed out on a movie because of The Thing. And then along came Christine. It was a Stephen King book about a haunted car and I thought, “What can we do with this?”. If you love cars and you’re a car culture sort of person, then it’s OK.

Village of the Damned came about because I had to finish off a contract with Universal. Once again, that was an assignment. I’d seen the original film in 1960. I think I had a thing for one of the little blonde girls – a 12 year-old thing, not an adult thing. I liked the original movie. There are a lot of great things about it, but there are a lot of stupid things about it too because it was of its time.

I went back to the original movie as much as possible – the brick wall ending and the design of the kids is pretty much out of the original film. One of the issues, however, that I noticed about the original movie was that pregnancy was dealt with hilariously, like the wife (Barbara Shelly) had indigestion. It was so bizarre. The husband and wife live in this big mansion and she kind of goes off into another drawing room and comes back a bit later with a kid. It was hilarious so I thought we could update this a little. That was a fun movie to do – that was Christopher Reeves’ last movie before his accident.

With my film Vampires – like I said before – they just have new clothes. Vampires never change, but the business around them changes. In terms of the monsters, I don’t know what you can do to change that. That was good fun to make.

The one vampire film that stands out in my mind was a film I saw when I was ten. It was called The Horror of Dracula – a Hammer film. Christopher Lee played Dracula and it was just sensational. It sexualised the vampirism more than it had been done before. The girls wanted ‘it’, if you know what I mean. She’d be in bed and she’d rip her bodice a bit in anticipation of his bite… It was great stuff. I’m telling you, for a young kid who was ten years old, that was hot and heavy, man. It’s great. Plus the British, they love to have low-cut dresses. That was always a plus for us as kids.

I’m a big Godzilla fan. I believe I have all the movies. Every Godzilla film is brilliant. He’s a perfect example of a monster who changes depending on his time. He began as, sort of, the A-bomb – this evil creature. Then he becomes a hero. Then he fought for the environment. Then he came back in the ‘80s as a terrible monster.

Godzilla is always changing – it’s fabulous. He saves Japan, he destroys Japan. He’s all-purpose. There are no bad Godzilla movies. Maybe the movie with the son of Godzilla wasn’t that great, but my son loves it. The end of the movie where they freeze him – my son cried. Godzilla speaks a universal language. He speaks to all of us.

Want to read more about monster movies? Buy the book.

Pollyanna McIntosh & the eyes of horror correspondent Michael Helms

My introduction to the films of Lucky McKee came by way of the chilling May, which I stumbled across in a midnight session at the Melbourne International Film Festival quite a few years back.

May is one of those films I crave – a simple, psychological horror that can say so much without bludgeoning you over the head with it, except for when blood-letting is required. So that clandestine viewing on a cold, dark Melbourne night kick-started a love affair of sorts with the McKee-style, of which I felt hadn’t been authentically propagated since May until now with the release of his most controversial film yet, The Woman.

Starring McKee muse Angela Bettis (she of the outstanding titular role in May) and the mighty Sean Bridgers (Al Swearengen’s goofball lackey in Deadwood) as the parents of an American-as-apple-pie-family, The Woman charts the unfortunate happenings when supposed civilised humans decide to tame a feral female they find in the woods near their rural home.

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve had the pleasure of watching The Woman three times – once via an inferior DVD duplicate, another on the silver screen with an audience (all waiting for something far more shocking than what was actually delivered, I must say) and another following a casual chat over martinis with the divine Ms Pollyanna – ‘The Woman’ herself.

As opposed to her on-screen huntress persona, Pollyanna proved a smiling and highly enthusiastic conversationalist – and a wee bit lily-livered when it came to horror. She said she traditionally steered clear of the genre until such parts came her way (first Headspace, 2004) and, since then, she has been pleasantly surprised by the kind of love only horror fans seem able to afford. After shooting the breeze with Pollyanna, it was only fitting to watch the film again and attend the Q&A session to reconcile this amiable ‘blonde’ with the hissing, scowling wild thing of the film. With The Woman, Pollyanna exacts quite the transformation, including a vocal tone that she believes came to her “quite naturally”.

Pollyanna 'wouldn't hurt a fly' McIntosh & Emma 'on her best behaviour' Westwood

Pollyanna was already familiar with the character in The Woman after playing her in the Andrew van den Houten-directed Offspring (2009) based on a novel by Jack Ketchum. Ketchum called upon McKee to create another film with the woman character, Van den Houten stepped into producer shoes and, consequently, this very different ‘cannibal’ film was borne, and one that walks to the beat of its own drum as a standalone feature. All reports suggest Offspring is the lesser film, and one that may douse any sympathy a viewer has for the woman character, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but something that could impact on her mystery for some.

Lucky McKee confesses to writing The Woman to be a repeat-watcher, so you could say, my obsessive viewing over the last couple of weeks could (possibly) be justified. Whatever may have been said of the film’s ending in post-screening eavesdropping, no one boasted at prematurely picking the surprise conclusion, despite a number of hints being dropped throughout the film. Viewing number two enabled me to catch those clues that had previously slipped my grasp, and then viewing number three offered even more clues. That’s how I prefer my filmed entertainment – it may appear straightforward at first, but only truly discloses its hand over time. A great example of this is George A. Romero’s forgotten masterwork, Martin (1977). First viewing, I concluded he was a vampire. Second viewing, I changed my mind. Third viewing, I’m back to thinking he’s a vampire. And so it continues.

The Woman presents thematic material that is universally uncomfortable – misogyny, physical and mental abuse, and domestic violence. Light humour acts as a counterpoint offering a little levity to the overall viewing experience; most notably through the family’s youngest daughter (Darlin) and even the excessive use of gore, which never fails to raise a titter from audiences. Why gore makes people laugh is the subject of a far lengthier appraisal.

Sean Spillane’s music is treated with great reverence and informs the film from start to finish, often with songs played in their entirety. Pollyanna received the music from Lucky before shooting commenced, which suggests how important these tracks/ditties were in moulding the atmosphere, peppering it with pathos and contemporising the setting. It is an audacious filmmaker who chooses to incorporate poetic songs into a horror film rather than Psycho-like strings, Tubular-esque bells or the kind of audio ‘stabs’ and ‘stings’ that elicit scares due to the sheer shock of their volume more than anything else.

The Woman is a queen among pop horror movies, joining a family of modern marvels that includes Teeth, Ginger Snaps and even Todd Solondz’s Happiness. More please.

The Woman is in cinemas (Australia) from 18th August 2011 

Given the opportunity to faff about film, the dedicated panel of five – incorporating yours truly, Rachael Cotra from Hello Darkness Film Festival, Neil Foley from Monster Pictures, Lee Gambin from Fangoria, filmmaker and feature panelist Ti West (The House of The Devil, The Innkeepers), and moderator-with-the-mostest Guy Davis – largely refrained from talking over each other to come up with the answer: ‘No, horror has not gone too far.’

For those of you who couldn’t make it, this is what we looked like:

Guy gesticulates (far left). We are awestruck by his dominating presence – (l to r) Neil Foley, Lee Gambin, Emma Westwood, Rachael Cotra, Ti West

Neil 'so waddya want' Foley, Lee Gambin & Emma Westwood

Ti West tells it as it is

Emma 'now listen' Westwood

The family shot – (l to r) Rachael, Ti, Emma, Neil, Lee, Linda and Guy

'A Serbian Film'... ARGGGGGGGGGGGHHHH!

A slavish barometer of social paranoia, the horror movie genre has a tendency to tap into certain trends dependent on what tweaks the public fancy – or, more appropriately, rattles the public consciousness.

When the Cold War was at its height, ‘nuclear threat’ horror, in the form of chemically mutated monsters, dominated B-movie output and sent teens jumping into the laps of their sweethearts in drive-ins the world over. In this climate of international terrorism, the menace from within – zombies – continues to lumber and dominate. Who is the enemy? It could be any one of us.

Horror has a duty to remain… horrible; to undergo transformation with every seismic shift in world consciousness and push boundaries, so in effect, horror never really goes too far. Venturing where no one else is game to venture is the responsibility the horror genre shoulders. It’s not necessarily the gross-out factor that is important here; it’s whether a particular film is encouraging you to think and move beyond your comfort zone.

At this point, I should come clean with some wares I have to peddle: I’ll be taking part in a panel on Monday 25th July as part of the Melbourne International Film Festival’s Talking Pictures Express series, where Rachael Cotra from Hello Darkness Film Festival, Neil Foley from Monster Pictures, Lee Gambin from Fangoria, Guy Davis and myself will be discussing this very subject, ‘Afraid of Everything: Has Horror Gone Too Far?’ Filmmaker Ti West (The House of The Devil, The Innkeepers) will also be offering his insider perspective on horror, although interestingly, his own films sit somewhere outside the current zeitgeist.

One film that is sure to come up in our discussion is the malign A Serbian Film, which still struggles in half-release limbo across the world, having been severely censored, as well as being the centre of legal controversy with the head of the Sitges Film Festival facing criminal charges in child pornography for screening the film. (Let me just say, despite the repugnant nature of the content, this accusation of child pornography is totally ludicrous).

I watched a screener of A Serbian Film almost one year ago and have hesitated in writing a blog post about it, for no apparent reason, except this movie kinda makes you want to run far, far away from it – it is the film that cannot be unwatched. A Serbian Film portrays a former pornstar-turned-family-man who is lured back into the trade with a pay cheque too good to be confused. The hitch? He can’t see the script; he just has to turn up to the set everyday and do as he is told.

Filmmaker Srdjan Spasojevic defends his work as being a commentary on the horrific war crimes of his country’s recent history, but A Serbian Film really does straddle the boundaries of acceptability. Has horror gone too far? I suggest you come along to the panel, hear what everyone has to say and maybe even pipe up with your own thoughts on the subject. Opinionated ‘so-and-so’s are welcome.