There’s a man made of cockroaches in the book, who didn’t make it into the film... Yeah, that would have had to be a totally animated thing that might have taken weeks, maybe months of 3-D art. Anything like that just wasn’t possible to put into the screenplay.
Your First Hit Is Free: Dave examines a syringe full of Soy Sauce.
figure out a way to do this stuff,” and I did have some vague inclinations, but it took a lot of effort and some kind assistance from certain people, [namely] my friend William Malone, who made the House on Haunted Hill remake, and the Masters of Horror episode “The Fair-Haired Child.”
That was one of my favourites in that series! Oh, yeah, that was great! He started as a makeup effects guy back in the day. And Bill was kind enough to go through my script with me while I was doing the adaptation. So I’d take him out for Mexican lunch and say, “Okay, I’ve gotta do this meat monster. How do I do this meat monster? A man in a suit? A digital construct? How would you do this?” So I would run these scenarios with him and a couple of other friends of mine who have done digital effects. Kerry Prior, who did the sphere ef- fects on the later Phantasm films and recently directed a film called The Revenant, was very helpful in talking me through the process and what I might or might not be able to do. And there were a couple of other folks like that, so I pretty much got a game plan, but I still never knew whether it would work in the end. It’s funny how certain effects that at first just seemed so elusive, so impossible to do, were actually pretty simple and came out just great. And then there were also some very difficult scenes that we just struggled and struggled with.
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As far as things like that went, were there any that were really serious heart- breakers for you? Yeah, there was one sequence that we got halfway done, and it was really looking cool, but to complete it was just going to take too long. Plus, I was always dealing with length issues. There was a very cool scene where our junior gangster, Justin White, kidnaps our heroes and has them in the van. And when he arrives at the Mall of the Dead, our heroes are ready to confront him with Molotov cocktails and burn his ass, as it says in the script. And the door opens and he’s standing there, except his eyeballs are on stalks about three inches out from his head like in a Tex Avery cartoon. We started down that path, and it looked pretty good but we had a lot of other major effects and just couldn’t allocate the money and the time.
You’ve spoken of taking a gamble on these two unknown actors as leads and it appears to have paid off. How did you connect with them – just the standard audition process? Yes, it was. The director is the first audience, and believe me, there are days and weeks of tedium when you’re watching people come in and butcher your script. Actors of all different stripes who can’t do anything with your material. And you’re going, “This script is terrible! This is gonna make for a lousy movie!” Then one day somebody walks in and starts doing a scene and it’s “Oh! This could really be good!” [Laughs.] And those were the moments I had with Chase and Rob. With Chase, he came in and as part of the audition I had given him this page of narration because his character Dave essentially narrates the movie. And I thought, “I’m actually enjoying this. Read that
again!” It was so freakin’ good! It’s an amorphous mystery when you’re making these movies, and suddenly there’s a mo- ment of clarity when an actor will say a line right or you’ll see an effect that’s working or some little bit of vio- lence that really works and it suddenly le- gitimizes the whole process. And that’s what happened with Rob and Chase.