S&MAN director JT Petty returns to the Toronto Film Festival with his latest film, The Burrowers, and talks to AMCtv.com about why he traded in the world of snuff films in his last feature for the cowboys and creatures of this one.

Q: When you look at your previous films, particularly S&MAN, The Burrowers is a completely different sort of film for you. What made you want to make a western?

A: It started as much about making a western as making a horror movie. I've always loved the hell out of westerns and a lot of what went into The Burrowers is that when you think about how to try and scare people now, you have to figure out how to break the genre conventions a little bit. It's like how Hostel killed off who you think will be the main character at the thirty-minute mark and let the funny sidekick be the main character. I thought that was a really effective way of throwing you off balance. Or like Audition, which seems to be like a romantic comedy...

Q: ...Until the bag jumps.

Continue reading "JT Petty Talks Cowboys and Monsters in The Burrowers" »

In sharp contrast to her weekly black-and-white comic strip, Ernie Pook's Comeek, Lynda Barry's new book What It Is brims with vividly colorful compositions. But as many filmmakers have discovered, making the leap to color isn't as easy as it sounds. "Sometimes color kills everything. I'm not sure how," says Barry. "Maybe because it makes it look too much like the regular world. The black-and-white world seems to exist some place between being and thinking -- kind of the dreaming area." In Barry's world, movies follow a different set of rules. "For horror movies, color is re-assuring because, at least in older films, it adds to the fakey-ness," she says. "The Gorgon would have been scarier to me in black and white when I was eight. The color made it look fake so I could stand to be scared by it. People complain about the snakes looking so lame in that movie, but real snakes would have messed the experience up. Especially because I liked snakes a lot, and them hitting the ground when the Gorgon's head gets chopped off would have made me worry about them."

Can the person who penned the decadently violent Cruddy really be so squeamish? "What's funny is that I did write Cruddy, but if Cruddy were a movie, I couldn't watch it," Barry confesses, adding that the same goes for most modern horror films. "I don't go to the newer ones because they are too scary for me. Part of a horror movie has to be a bit fakey for me to really enjoy it. The new ones are so realistic that they distract me from the ride through the horror. It's like going on a spook house ride but instead of fake-looking monsters suddenly dropping down from the walls, there is someone actually jumping on the people in the cars in front me, sucking out their eyes and and chewing their jawbones off. It sort of wrecks the ride."

Lynda Barry's Top 10 Horror Movies

Continue reading "Cartoonist Lynda Barry Prefers the Exaggerated Fakery of Older Horror Classics " »

It's been twenty years since Katherine Dunn's novel, Geek Love -- about a sideshow family that manufactures its own freaks in pursuit of fame and fortune -- was published, but it remains as vivid as ever. And thanks to the movies she saw as a child, Dunn has her own traumatic memories. "I think I was four or so when I had to be carried kicking and screaming out of a Western because somebody was being dragged toward a blacksmith's fire where he was either going to be branded or burnt. No idea what the film was," she recalls. "Other than that, I identified first with animals. I still can't forgive Disney for what happened to Old Yeller."

"My first official 'horror' movie was Tarantula in 1955 when I was 10," says Dunn. "It's a classic parental betrayal, reminiscent of Frankenstein and Hansel and Gretel (which is the scariest fairy tale, by far). First they create you, then they try to get rid of you, then they bring in the Air Force with napalm." The poignancy of Dunn's memory is enhanced by its surreal setting. "I saw the flick with my little brother on Christmas Day in a tiny town in the Texas panhandle. When we staggered shaking and quaking out of the theater into the broad daylight, Santa Claus was sitting out front in a buckboard, handing out candy canes," she says. "I never want to see Tarantula again, but I'm extremely fond of Santa Claus."

Dunn has a non-fiction book called One Ring Circus coming out next April from Schaffner Press. "It's a collection of my boxing essays from the last 27 years. I've been writing about the sport of boxing since 1981." However, monsters of all kinds still fire her imagination -- and sympathy. "Most of us probably recognize as much of ourselves in the monsters as we do in the victims or in the good guys fighting the threat," she comments. "That's what makes a great monster. Maybe we believe more completely in our secret monster side than in our good guy side. We hope we're good guys, but we know we're monsters."

Katherine Dunn's Top 10 Horror Movies

Continue reading "Geek Love Author Recognizes the Monsters Inside of Us, but Still Can't Forgive Disney for Old Yeller" »

"When you're an activist, you don't need fictional horror, you see enough real life stuff," says singer Nellie McKay, who has been pushing buttons and boundaries ever since her unconventional album, Get Away From Me, turned critical heads in 2004. McKay gets chills watching documentaries like the Joaquin Phoenix-narrated Earthlings, which chronicles human dependency on animals, or 2006's Manufactured Landscapes, about the wastelands caused by human refuse. "The photographer captures it so objectively," says McKay. "He tries to make these places beautiful -- in a way, he turns horror into art. It just lets you make up your own mind, and that's so powerful."

As for entertainment, she favors the old, spooky, and outrageous, like Bette Davis as Baby Jane. "She's not afraid to be ugly," explains McKay. "I love any female actor who's not afraid to be ugly -- I mean emotionally -- not just physically. That movie shows the horror that happens to us all, the physical aging, the rivalries you hold onto and the bitterness that accumulates." Another favorite: King Kong. "A tragedy, and an epic. But once again, I don't think the horror is King Kong, it's what people do to him -- the horror of modern technology, those planes firing at him," she says. "I thought the '70s version is wildly underrated, the actors are so good in it, and Naomi Watts was so good in the newer one. But if they're going to keep updating King Kong, we should change the ending. Maybe next time he manages to kill all of them!

Nellie McKay's Top Ten Horror Movies

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In novels such as Days Between Stations and Our Ecstatic Days, Steve Erickson's characters pursue eerily normal lives despite truly apocalyptic conditions. "L.A. buried in a sandstorm, Paris frozen over, the canals of Venice run dry -- this was written in the early '80s, before most people knew anything about 'climate change,'" says Erickson.

The author is also acutely aware of Armageddon in the movies. "It's almost as if when the Soviet Union existed and the world was on the nuclear brink, nuclear apocalypse was too unthinkable, even for the movies," Erickson explains. "Nobody wanted to make that kind of movie, nobody wanted to see it. The apocalyptic floodgates really seemed to open with the millennium -- for all the horrific ways the apocalypse keeps getting imagined, I think not so deep down, there's something liberating about the prospect."

His most recent novel, Zeroville -- named one of the best books of 2007 by Newsweek -- is set in the '70s. "A time, nonetheless, when major filmmakers -- the Kubrick of Clockwork Orange, the Lynch of Eraserhead, even, say, the Aguirre of Herzog -- began thinking in terms we might consider apocalyptic," says the author. "By the early '80s, the future-noir of a movie like Blade Runner, which I think is the single most influential movie of the last quarter-century, made the apocalypse look glamorous."

Horror includes so many kinds of films that crafting a list required Erickson to draw some heavy distinctions. "Jump-out-at-you-from-nowhere is one kind of scary, but the terror of one's dread or dreams or obsessions, which characterizes almost all the movies on my list, is another," he says. "Like any movie list this one is a Rorschach test -- but I think that's going to be more true of a list of horror films."

Steve Erickson's Top 10 Horror Films

Continue reading "Novelist Steve Erickson's Favorite Horror Movies Are a Reflection of His Own Fears" »

"When I was a kid, I loved to go to horror movies to release some tension and also to bring attention to myself by screaming a lot," says Lypsinka, the alter ego of writer-performer, John Epperson. "Looking back now, I see all of that as a release from Southern small town repression."

Even if it didn't begin that way, these days Epperson has a more sincere appreciation of pop culture. "When I moved to New York in 1978, irony and camp were definitely on the upswing," he recalls. "I went to a wacky club in the East Village to see movies -- this was before the predominance of cable TV and home video. Tuesday night was Monster Movie Club, and we saw the tacky horror films we'd all seen as kids in a brand new light -- Ed Wood movies like Plan 9 From Outer Space. Fifteen years or so later, Disney made a movie about Ed Wood -- and now Club 57 is the subject of a documentary I'm working on."

Epperson's recent play My Deah -- a retelling of the gory Greek Tragedy Medea that's set in the Deep South -- owes its horrific and comic elements to many over-the-top movies. "Hurry Sundown, a tacky Otto Preminger movie about the South, Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte, which is now regarded as a campy horror film, Reflections in a Golden Eye starring Elizabeth Taylor and Marlon Brando, and To Kill a Mockingbird, to name a few." As for his favorite horror movies, it's a ten-way-tie.

John Epperson's Top 10 Horror Movies

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After creating The Ren and Stimpy Show in 1988, John Kricfalusi's rambunctious style of animation became recognized (and imitated) worldwide. Having made music videos for Björk and Tenacious D, as well as a whole slew of bizarre independent cartoons, Kricfalusi now runs a blog on the finer points of cartooning. When it comes to horror, he prefers the classics, choosing the monster movies of his childhood over the modern gore of today. "My parents would always tell the babysitter, 'Whatever you do, don't let Johnny watch Horror House Theater. I don't care if he begs or bribes, don't let him, because he always has nightmares, and then we have to shut him up,'" he recalls. "And then they'd leave and the babysitter would give in... The Deadly Mantis or something would come on, and the special effects were things like a grasshopper walking up a photo of a skyscraper -- but I'd be crapping myself."

As he grew older (and braver), Kricfalusi grew to appreciate the camp value of these films. "Even my favorite horror movies, I laugh all the way through them. Like Strait-Jacket -- it makes every storytelling mistake that you can think of. And they do it so boldly! The ending is one of the best endings to a movie ever, because it's so wrong." Would Kricfalusi ever try making one himself? "I wouldn't mind making my own live-action horror movie, if I had another lifetime to live. I'd make up for all the things that pissed me off about monster movies when I was a kid -- get rid of all the filler and give them what they want!"

John Kricfalusi's Top 10 Horror Films

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The show Scare Tactics places unsuspecting everyday people in situations straight out of scary movie hell -- like investigating mutant-infested laboratories or being chased by vampire bikers. With setups and special effects far more elaborate than anything Candid Camera ever dreamed up, creators Scott Hallock and Kevin Healey have found a way to wring fresh shock and entertainment from the films they grew up with. "The first horror movie I got to go see without anyone knowing was Halloween," recalls Healey. "I was a little kid, probably about seven -- too young to see it -- and man, it kept me up for three straight nights! Horror films became a way of life for me." Hallock had a similar experience: "I remember seeing Jaws and being scared out of my mind," he says, "My brother and I had put up a tent out in the yard, and even though we lived out in the woods, miles from any ocean, I was too scared to sleep in the tent for fear that Jaws was going to get us."

Recreating convincing cinematic scenarios without a film-sized budget has been inspiring, says Hallock. "We do a lot with a little. At the end of this year, we plan to open up our division to horror films," he notes. "Scare Tactics is really all about storytelling, so it only makes sense that we flex our muscles and make the transition to a longer format." Healey and Hallock have assembled a list of the films they found the most inspiring for the show's new season, debuting July 9 at 10 PM on Sci Fi.

Scott Hallock and Kevin Healey's Top 10 Horror Films

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Coney Island strongman Eak the Geek (aka Eduardo Arrocha) is currently in the middle of getting his law degree, but he fondly recalls his his stint in in the famous sideshow. "It was the single most influential thing in my life," he says, "I wound up working there longer than anyone else... but after a while you have to let go of it." Eak hasn't given up sideshows entirely -- he's taking a term off to tour the country and perform at private events. "I still have my bed of nails, and all my props," says Eak. "The open road beckons, and I'm going crazy to get out there."

While Eak is more comfortable on a bed of nails than most of us are in our office chairs, a scary movie-- "Preferably from the 1970s!"-- will still give him ferocious nightmares. He became intrigued with the macabre during his childhood in Mexico City. "They had all these low-budget vampire and werewolf movies that were very melodramatic and scary, where the good guys are redeemed and the bad guys go to hell," he recalls. It's not surprising that after all these years, he still can't get enough of the 1932 movie Freaks. "In the time of that movie, people wanted to see freaks but not hear them, so the film humanized them quite a bit. A movie like that could never get made now, though," believes Eak. "Even if they did it with Hollywood types, it just wouldn't be right."

Eak the Geek's Top 10 Horror Films

Continue reading "Coney Island's Eak the Geek Can Handle a Bed of Nails, but Is Still Scared of Freaks" »

Whether or not horror fans disdain the bloodlessness of Twilight, at least Kellan Lutz got plenty of thrills while filming it. "I love to do my own stunts," says the actor, who plays vampire Emmett Cullen, "as dangerous as they get... before the producers step in and say, 'Well Kellan, you could potentially die.'" Lutz will always look back on Twilight as a test of his physical limitations. "On one of my last days, I was on top of a moving truck going 35 miles an hour on this winding mountain road, and had to jump back into the bed of it," he recalls. "It was crazy, it was 4 in the morning and freezing outside and I couldn't see anything. But I just love that stuff, and learning the secrets of stuntwork."

Lutz looks forward to even bigger, badder, and darker roles, having inherited his dad's taste for scary movies. "My father didn't really get that kids shouldn't watch PG-13 movies until they're 13, or R-rated movies until they're 17," he says. "He'd rent horror movies and watch them with us. He took me to see Scream when I was about 8 -- and I loved it! My mother, on the other hand... when I did Prom Night. she swore if I ever did something scarier than that, she wouldn't go see it. And that was just a PG-13 thriller," he laughs. "If I ever do something like Saw 8, I guess she'd just disappear for a while." His love of horror must be pretty democratic -- he has his favorites, but no one outranks the other.

Kellan Lutz's Top 10 Horror Movies

Continue reading "Twilight's Kellan Lutz Likes Making Movies His Mom Can't Watch" »