Soooooy...: Angus Scrimm as a priest, (right) pieces of the Meat Monster, and (below) Detective Morgan Freeman (Glynn Turman).
nately we couldn’t pull it together. And then that [pre- viously mentioned] email from Amazon came along, and that’s how it played out.
Naturally, we can’t leave Angus Scrimm out of this. I’ve heard tell over the years that Angus has an aversion to using any profanity onscreen, and yet it would appear he was able to put that aside for John Dies. Did that take much convincing? Hm. I don’t think it did, really. But Angus likes to play his cards close to the vest and when I approached him about this, before I even gave him the material, I warned him that there was a key expletive that his character – a priest – had to say, and it was non-ne- gotiable. But I told him it was an excellent part that he could really have some fun with, and it wasn’t an evil undertaker, so he was expanding his range.
Okay, you got Angus; now, how does one go about commissioning a meat monster? The movie involved collaboration with some terrific artists. Besides Bill Malone, it started with David Hart- man who’s a super-talented animation director. He had just finished supervising the Transformers ani- mated show. I told him about the meat monster and he did an illustration that was my first look at it, and I went, “Oh yeah, this could be a man in a suit!” And it just made life so much easier to do it that way, be- cause you give the actor something to relate to. Then, Robert Kurtzman of KNB – who had created that won- derful mummy for Bubba Ho-Tep – got involved, and did another design of his own and refined it further, and I’m telling you, John, you just have to see this costume in person one day. It’s really a work of art. There’s detailing we didn’t even imagine. We had to keep the lighting kind of dark to keep it creepy and bizarre, but he’s got a dozen wieners on one shoulder, a trout on the back, one hand’s a whole ham with a
pineapple on it. Of course, Kurtzman’s a director in his own right, so when he does these designs he does it with a director’s sensibility. He shoots videos of these effects and sends them to you, and in some cases I just recreated his videos on set.
So you’ve been vegetarian for about – well, how long has it been? Hah! About seven years.
So was the meat monster particularly fearsome for you on a more personal level? Yeah, so there’s some subtle commentary in that re- spect, and I really like how the distributors came up with that tagline in the trailer: “Just stay away from red meat.” [Laughs.]
John Dies is chock full of other monsters, as well. Do you consider it a monster movie? Um... sure! That was what I loved about the book. There are pages when it’s hide-under-the-bed scary, and pages when it’s laugh-out-loud funny. In England, everyone – everyone – describes it as “batshit crazy.”
Actually, that’s not just a UK thing. That’s the exact term I’ve heard used to describe it most often here as well. What? How funny! It’s just got everything in it, really. My favourite review so far was from Evan Saathoff in Badass Digest. He said it was a movie you would judge your friends by. [Laughs.] High praise in my world!
John Dies shares certain basic themes with Phan- tasm, especially in terms of
characters with conflicting notions of reality. Would you say far-out films like these were easier to get financed in the 1970s or today? Oh, I don’t know. I think it’s harder to make independ- ent movies generally now. Funding is drying up be- cause of the demise of the DVD business. Many of us in this business didn’t realize how good we had it when those poor saps out there were willing to pay $20 for a DVD every week. [Laughs.] There was a lot of money in it. With downloading, streaming and boot- legging, that’s come to an end, so less money is com- ing in and unfortunately a lot of distributors have folded. But it’s also a time rife with possibilities, and I’m really enjoying our distributor, Magnolia, and its offshoot Magnet, because they’re really fusing these two worlds.
Drugs loom large in the plot of John Dies, and yet it never comes off as being a particularly pro- or anti-drug movie, maybe because Soy Sauce is fictitious and free from the stigma a real drug would carry. What are your own feel- ings about drugs? [Laughs.] You mean currently? I’m not partaking right now. Soy Sauce is a drug that chooses you – you don’t choose it. Of course, I’m sure there are plenty of junkies who say, “Heroin chose me! I had nothing to do with it!” But I think what John Dies reflects is exploration, à la Alice in Wonderland. Feed your head, as Grace Slick said. The idea of an outside influence that opens up other worlds really attracted me to the story. For me, it’s al- ways been a fascination with what lies beyond. It started with horror movies and strange, psychedelic horror television as a kid – Twi- light Zone, The Outer Lim- its, all of that stuff. I was
looking back to Alice, look- ing beyond the looking glass.
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