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Interview: Coraline’s Henry Selick

/ Art/Animation / 3 Comments

Henry_Selick_CORALINE

Coraline comes out on DVD Tuesday. Scott Essman talks shop with director Henry Selic about his work on Coraline and Nightmare Before Christmas.

Since he burst on the scene with the wildly imaginative 1993 stop-motion animated feature The Nightmare Before Christmas, California Institute of the Arts graduate Henry Selick has been one of Hollywood’s most innovative filmmakers. After his stop-motion followup to Nightmare, the well-received 1996 film James and the Giant Peach, Selick directed the partially live-action film Monkeybone in 2001.

Now, the long-in-the works Coraline, a surreal mixture of animation and fantasy, arrives on DVD on July 21, 2009 after a successful theatrical run that included both traditional and dynamic 3D screenings.

In this interview from his new Portland, Oregon studio base, Laika, Selick reflects on his lauded career and shares special insights into the creation of Coraline, his most ambitious project to date.

You’ve moved around quite a bit – born in New Jersey, but since the 1970s, you’ve lived up and down the West Coast. How has this journey worked creatively for you, and why so many moves?

I started out at CalArts [north of Los Angeles in Valencia] and worked at Disney Studios for about four years. Then I moved to the Bay Area in the early 80s to work as a sequence director on [the animated feature film] Twice Upon a Time. That was my base up until Coraline. There, I did the features, MTV stuff, commercials and short films. For Nightmare and James we got warehouse space right in San Francisco south of Market. I went up to Portland, Oregon four-and-a-half years ago to get Coraline going. For Coraline, we built out our little in-house team and tried to do a lot of practical effects. Some of the main armature components were made in San Francisco, but 99% of the movie was all done in one big warehouse in the outskirts of Portland.

Coraline_DVD_BoxArt How did you decide on Coraline as your first feature since Monkeybone, eight years ago now?

The story comes from the Neil Gaiman book. He sent me the pages as a side project. He’d been working on it to finish for his younger daughter. In the book, the basic story is there. Back in 2000, there was a long period of time where I wrote the screenplay. At that time, I did animated creatures for [Wes Anderson’s feature] Life Aquatic. In all of that time, I’d been living this Coraline story and dreaming the visuals. The expanded version had already been fully formed in my mind. I had written an early draft, but Neil told me to go off and reimagine it. He said that the book was not quite a film.

The second draft of the screenplay is when things came to life. I restructured everything, added characters, and came up with the issue of whether the whole world is a dream. When you are adapting a book, it has to feel like the book and smell like the book. But there are several thousand large changes and a hundred medium ones. I would always come back to the screenplay, do sketches, and do a scrapbook of images. For example, I had come across an obituary of a child star from the 1920s – there was a picture in the paper of her holding a doll that looked just like her that was being marketed to the public. I was collecting images for ideas and had a very long time to assemble the world of the film.

How did you devise the execution of the complicated production process for this film?

There is an order to events but everything overlaps and there are certain things you don’t quite resolve and you go back to. Stop-motion animation is much closer to live action films – you have set construction, lighters, electricians, gaffers, a hair department, and costumes. The difference, of course, is that it’s all miniature with many sets working at the same time with a team of animators.

Some of the first steps that happen are to convince people that you can make a movie from your script – then character design and voice casting. Virtually all animation and effects-heavy live-action films are completely storyboarded with temp voices and temp music. In a sense, you are making the movie once, editing it before you actually do any animation. You don’t have a 10:1 ratio – it’s a very close ratio. Then, people storyboard the entire film to get to the next step. You work out the first and second act, and the third act is loosey-goosey. You have your first scenes figured out, you’ve recorded the voices, start building puppets, and build the world. You experiment with materials and do 3D tests.

Eventually, you are testing puppets – how does Coraline walk, what are her poses, what makes her stand out and unique? You figured out the best sync – full replacement faces where you sculpt hundreds of individual faces. You can’t build all of your puppets at once – you start out with a few characters and ramp up to 30 sets at once. You are re-recording pickup lines a year later. You’re hoping Dakota Fanning’s voice [playing lead performer Coraline Jones] doesn’t change that much for the pickup lines. You hit this sweet spot where you have the whole film mapped out and everyone is making the same film in this very effective machine. You are working with animators who are the real actors, planning shots, having dailies four times a day, and start to work with the composer who sketches out the ideas for themes. You get everything shot and bring in an outside editor who can brutally look over the film with a fresh eye.

18 months is the actual shoot time. The core of the crew working hard every day making the film is 150 people. We have an additional 150 who work for a short period of time. They may have done inspirational artwork or armatures. There is also a big support group and a visual effects team to paint out rigs.

Can you describe your typical day whilst the film is in the throes of production?

We have two edit rooms so that I can ping pong back and forth. We do lighting and camera tests and stand-in puppets. Then you work with the animators. There is a lot of time spent in editorial. Then you go out on the sets checking in on shots. The animators shot digitally so that we can play back what we are doing and respond to it. We are still building final characters to the end. In the heat of it, 60% is editorial and 30% of the day roaming set to set and checking the art department and sound. Everyone thinks that stop-motion is watching paint dry.

The actual performance of the animator coaxing performance out of these puppets is slow. But as a director, you are supervising all of the individual animators and supervising and four lead animators. What are the poses, walks and motions for the characters? I am very much talking through performance with the animators, timing, and posing of every scene. That is how I spend the majority of my day.

How is the type of animation that you are doing for Coraline different from what pioneers Willis O’Brien and Ray Harryhausen created in King Kong (1933) and Mighty Joe Young (1949)?

It’s different in that I have a much larger number of people, but at the heart of it, it’s exactly the same – the ball and socket hinge joint puppet posed a frame at a time – 24 times a second – to get the illusion of movement. The process is identical. On top of that, we are shooting digitally. Back on Nightmare and James, we had to send our footage to the lab.

Now, if a puppet breaks in the middle of a shot, we can get the puppet repaired. We have digital assisting. We can put the puppets on a simple metal rig and hand animate and later paint out the rig. We can also program camera moves. At the very center of it, it’s the same. Harryhausen and Willis O’Brien are true pioneers who carried a huge amount of weight on their own. Before Coraline, we had 17 assistants, which seemed like a huge number.

How would your describe your working relationship with Tim Burton, who produced your film The Nightmare Before Christmas?

Tim had developed this basic idea inspired by How the Grinch Stole Christmas and rewrote is as a nightmare. He deserves credit for the clashes of holiday worlds. I partly inspired the character of Jack Skellington. Tim did a drawing of the main characters and Rick Heinrichs sculpted them. We presented them at Disney in the 80s and they thought it was too weird. No one was sticking around. Tim had to leave to make feature films. I did my first stop-motion in 1978 that was funded by AFI. Fast-forward to Tim having huge success. He had seen my work for MTV – station IDs. Rick got Tim and me together to direct. I spent three-and-a-half years growing a team, and I did my films with a very talented team. Then Tim made Batman Returns. The film was called A Nightmare Before Christmas till a month before it came out. It was unsettling for it to be changed to Tim Burton’s A Nightmare Before Christmas. Tim is a genius and gave me my break, but I think he couldn’t stand to not take more credit. With Coraline, I got the creative support that I had before Nightmare.

How did Danny Elfman become integrated into not only the music but songs and story elements as well?

Danny Elfman was chosen to do the music for Tim’s first feature by Paul Reubens, and Tim and Danny hit it off, so that it definitely a Tim choice to work with Danny again. He has done 90% of the music of Tim’s films. Danny is a huge contributor of story – for the songs, Tim would say that we could use a song here and Danny would make up what he felt was right. We started the movie before there was a finished screenplay. Danny wrote three songs. The writer was ill and later the screenplay was written by Caroline Thompson who strung the songs together. Danny deserves a third of the credit at least for the creative spirit of the film.

Aside from your conflict with the release title, how was your experience making your first directorial feature with Nightmare?

It was incredibly joyful experience making the film. We had previously only been able to make 5-6-minute short films. To get to make a stop-motion feature was such a gift. Everyone was so goddamned happy every day. We were also fearless. We didn’t worry about the success or failure – we wanted to make the film as good as we could. It was a low-budget film to lure Tim back to Disney. But the real gift to Disney was Nightmare. We had a lot of fun coming up with those characters and figuring out their personalities. That world was the easiest in many respects. That’s where people had the most fun. There was the real world, and then Christmastown which was Seussian world. Tim has always said that Dr. Seuss is his favorite artist of all time.

Do you shoot tests to see if potential investors/distributors might be interested in making your films?

You do character designs and possibly an animation test. For Nightmare, we did a test – we built a very simple Jack Skellington with a wire armature. The people at Disney scratched their heads. Tim Burton was positive, and they thought the test was a small price for this curiosity.

At Laika, we did shoot tests for Coraline. We used an existing character from another short film. Honestly, most people couldn’t even tell the difference. I took Coraline to the former head of Fox who responded well. It took us a long time to get the film financed. Travis Knight [President and CEO of Laika] wanted to do it as a stop-motion feature, and I wanted to shoot 3D. Even if you get a green-lit film, you are going to do tests for yourself, getting the look of it.

How difficult is it for you at this juncture to launch a new feature film project?

I’m at a great point right now. For a number of years, it was very difficult to get funding for stop-motion films. Between Nightmare and James, Toy Story came out. In the ensuing years, it was virtually impossible. No one just wants to make a profit – they want to make a huge profit. Then Aardman animation got another film going. Tim Burton got Corpse Bride, so things circled back and the timing was great for Coraline. People come to visit us and they see several hundred people in the credits. They can’t believe it’s not done in China. It’s still about 1/3 the cost of Pixar and DreamWorks computer-animated films. These films don’t date, because they are already out of time. It’s a good time for me. The major European countries are opening. People send me books and scripts. Right now is the easiest time to get a film set up and made. You can sell one on a pitch and the screenplay. But I haven’t figured out what I am doing next.

What was ultimately your greatest challenge in making Coraline?

There is no one single thing. Getting Coraline made and holding onto the scary elements was a huge challenge. At various times our distributor and main producer, Bill Mechanic, for him, animation has fit into this one type of storytelling. Just trying to make a scary film for kids was quite a challenge for Coraline. I would like to start pushing the boundaries of what animation could be as in Pixar films.

The new film Up is pretty astonishing in the emotional content of the lead character. There is a movement afoot to keep pushing the boundaries. I wouldn’t want to do another scary film for kids, but if I do, there would be a new element. Animated animals have been at the forefront since the beginning. There are new types of stories to tell with higher-level drama and less jokes. I like to make films for kids but something that is for everyone – also appropriate for kids but not safe. I couldn’t be happier with having made Coraline.

Scott Essman has been writing about crafts and craftspeople in the entertainment business since 1995. His book, Tim Burton – An American Original, is due in 2010 from Praeger Publishing.

Comic Book Review: Post Mortem Studios’ Dirt 1, 2

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Dirt Issue One Zombos Says: Good

You don't quite look ready for six feet of cold dirt and hungry worms yet. And I ought to rest a spell, because I got a feeling business is going to be booming directly. So how's about a little story? Just to pass the time (The Digger, Dirt 1)

Scott Nicholson pens the stories for Dirt, the six-issue series from Post Mortem Studios. If you have read Nicholson's short story, The Shaping, in Unspeakable Horror: From the Shadows of the Closet, you already know how he can take a familiar scenario and suddenly veer off in an unexpected and unnerving direction that leaves a chill on your neck or a butterfly in your stomach. Will he be able to capture his terse, poetic, sentence rhythm and narrative point of view within the confining panels and commercially dictated page count of the modern comic book format? Certainly, his penchant for second-person narration provides a natural bridge to using the horror host-styled delivery of story-telling.

For horror comic book fans there is nothing as familiar as the mysterious, often imperious, host introducing each illustrated vignette. Either undead, alive, moldy or loathly, the host helps keep things personal through his or her lively quips and sometimes sardonic observations on the bizarre goings-on and strained social entanglements presented in each story. With Nicholson's North Carolina country-twang writing sensibility potentially loading the shovel-fulls of terror, something unique happening between the panels is possible here as his host, The Digger, turns up each story for us and pats it tightly down when done. Unfortunately, The Digger must have hit pay dirt and quit his day job because, after his appearance in all three stories of issue one, he only appears on the cover of issue two and two panels inside.

…

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[REC] (2007)
When Home Is No Place To Be

/ Movies (Horror) / 3 Comments

REC It's nearly 2 A.M. and we're still sealed in this building that we came to with the firemen earlier this evening, to assist an elderly woman who later attacked a policeman and a fireman. They're both in critical condition. The police won't let us leave and are giving us no explanations (Angela Vidal, [REC]).

Zombos Says: Excellent

 

After the goosebumps I received from Quarantine (2008), I expected watching the original Spanish version of this home-is-where-the-zombies-are, shaky-cam, movie would be a perfunctory exercise in comparing the two. I was wrong.

While Quarantine parallels [REC]'s situations and characters almost completely, [REC] still scared me even though I knew what to expect. It is more energetic–even more shaky–as fluffy-television reporter Angela Vidal (Manuela Velasco) unexpectedly finds the news story of her career in the hallway and rooms of a Barcelona apartment building. The scenes are more brightly lit, the police officers more ineffectual, and the contagion more preternatural in origin, perhaps even supernatural. Even the rapid staccato of Spanish words alternately screamed, cried, or spoken in desperation by Angela, her camera man, and the helpless tenants around them, gives [REC] a personal sheen of terror that comes from having your home, which is normally a place of comfort and security, become the one place you do not want to be.

The home invasion-styled horror movie is a genre staple with various derivations. I will go out on a limb and state, without crunching the numbers properly, that home intruders terrorizing, as seen recently in The Strangers (2008), and earlier in Ils (Them, 2006), are not as prevalent as home sweet home soured as seen in movies like Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and The Uninvited (1944). The main differences lie in the former involving an active, direct, and immediate threat to one's safety–get out now or die!–as opposed to an ongoing, indirect, and future threat–what are those giant seed pods doing in Becky's cellar?– that make the home the least safest place to be.

Of course, when both are combined into the more inclusive home intruders laying siege scenario, such as in Night of the Living Dead (1968)–-where they're coming to get you inside while keeping you from going outside –the horror generates more from ongoing threats that are direct and indirect, and present and future perfect for terror, usually all rolled into a tidy, unrelenting, mayhem in a confined space.

[REC] falls into the home intruders laying siege category, but with a twist: laying siege within the building are the tenants themselves. While the military and police lay siege from without, keeping everyone, infected or not, locked up tight together. The growing number of infected tenants force the desperate survivors to seek temporary safety within the various apartment rooms as control of the hallway gives way to pandemonium.

While Quarantine adds more of the American sensibility for terror-filled gory moments–annoying man caught in elevator with zombie-dog; menacing zombie-fireman standing on sickeningly, bone-cracked legs; noisy drilling into brain moment (how many times have you seen those?)–[REC] keeps gore a little more subdued and spends more time with Angela interviewing the tenants as a real news reporter would do. It does slow the movie, but [REC] maintains a better sense of realism because of it.

A major difference between both movies involves the cause of the contagion. Quarantine shows its American-influenced zombie provenance by using the more scientifically explained and popular–for today's fiction and cinema–biohazard outbreak. [REC]'s virus stems from the isolation of it from the blood of a possessed girl, giving its explanation elements of religion, exorcism, and an old-world folklore creepy charm.

Within the context of an evolving news story shot from the camera man's perspective through his lens, [REC] and [Quarantine] remain the best use of the shaky-cam, found-footage, school of filming along with the Blair Witch Project (1999). And even if you have seen Quarantine, I urge you to see [REC]; not because it is the original story, but because it will still scare the daylights out of you.

The movie spawned four sequels: Rec 2 (2007), Rec 3 (2012): Genesis, and Rec 4: Apocalypse (2014). While Rec 2 continues the found-footage style, Rec 3 begins with it but then switches over to a more traditional story-telling style. Rec 4 moves the action to a ship and goes off the rails in doing so.

Your Dying Wish Is?

/ Reflections / 2 Comments

At around two in the morning I suddenly woke up from an odd dream. I do not recall much of it, but one thing did stick fast between those fleeting moments bridging the unconscious and conscious worlds. Seven words that, when taken together, do not mean much…

A box of Twinkies would do nicely.

…but were so vivid, as if casually spoken as an afterthought, but given in answer to a very seriously important question.

While I cannot be ultimately certain as to what that question was, at least this one popped immediately into my head as I lay there with eyes wide open: “What is your dying wish?”

So there I lay in the dark, pondering the answer to a question few of us spend much time pondering for fairly obvious reasons. Why I would have answered it with a box of Twinkies I am not sure; but then again, given life’s enumerable physical and mental strictures, why not? I like Twinkies. They taste devilishly sweet and are not all that good for you, which makes them even more desirable. But that is me. How about you?

What is your dying wish?

Book Review: 23 Hours by David Wellington

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23 Hours

Zombos Says: Good

Knives. Always with the knives. Half-deads loved knives, hatchets, cleavers, anything sharp. This was a hunting knife, six inches long and painted green–so the white-tailed deer wouldn't see it glint when you pulled it out in the woods–and had a nasty serrated edge and a wicked curved point. The half-dead brandished it with obvious pleasure and stepped inside the cell.

Laura Caxton, David Wellington's vampire-hunting Special Subjects Unit agent, is neck-deep in it again in 23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale. Not only is her vengeful nemesis Justinia Malvern, the world's oldest vampire (with decrepitude to match her age), looking to put the bite on her for good, she also has to deal with being locked up in maximum security while dozens of half-deads, those killed by Malvern and revitalized to do her bidding, take over the penitentiary. Complicating things further, Clara Hsu, Caxton's lover, turns up just in time to become a hostage, and persausive bargaining chip, for Malvern. With a jailhouse cliffhanger-styled pace and Caxton backed up against all four walls with only the questionable help from her stimulant-loving celly, Gert, the situation moves from bad to worse and then really bad.

Wellington's preamble wastes little time before mixing it up from page one. Caxton is reluctantly pulled into a discussion of the local pecking order by Guilty Jen, a martial arts trained gangbanger with a mean side kick. After Guilty Jen and her cronies receive some nasty topical points of contention from Caxton, the fight is broken up and Caxton is moved to special housing for her trouble. Meanwhile, Clara Hsu, Caxton's love interest, is knee-deep in the aftermath of a Tupperware Party that was crashed by Malvern, and torn between ending their relationship or hanging onto it as best she can.

She was surrounded by bodies, corpses, drained of their blood and then discarded like old ragged dolls. The women around her ranged in age from thirty-five to fifty, but with some it was hard to tell–their arms and throats had been torn at, savaged by vicious teeth, by a vampire who needed their blood and didn't care how much pain she had to cause to get it.

Twilight this is not. Wellington prefer's his vampires to be mean, armed with rows of sharp teeth, disposed to be very inconsiderate of the living, and gives them decrepit, zombie-like henchmen, the half-deads–who love to tear their faces off and fondle knives–to do all the heavy lifting. Not that Malvern is averse to sticking her thumb deeply into an eye socket or two when she cares to, but due to her age, she could use all the help and blood she can get. Spouting quaint T'is's and Ye's with a deceptive and condescending gentility, Malvern exploits the prison population to supply her with the large amount of blood she needs to replenish her faded good looks. In Wellington's vampire universe, vampires age badly and need more and more blood to bring them back to health. Malvern is the antithesis of Rice's Lestat; at her age of 300 plus years, she's moody, mug-ugly–patches of boney white shine through her parchment skin–and enjoys every minute of pursuing her sadistic needs; no crisis of conscience or philosophical discussions for her. Not a one. And she is very thirsty.

This time around, she has enlisted the aid of the prison warden, Augie Bellows. As the novel's chapters quickly alternate between Caxton's fight against the half-dead army Malvern has sent to find her, and Clara's visit and subsequent captivity by the warden, Wellington writes tight, no-frills, sentences and lots of action. Do not look for characters with deep thoughts here or flowery descriptions. In the best tradition of the pulp writer, Wellington locks you into the cell with Caxton, forces you to watch her back as she fights against the odds, and makes you wonder what Caxton will find next, waiting for her around the next corner, and how she will handle it.

Malvern has given her only twenty-three hours to surrender or try freeing Clara; after that, Clara's confusion over whether she should break up with Caxton will be a moot point: Clara will be dead.

Interview With Mr. Lobo

/ Horror Hosts / Leave a Comment

Cinema Insomnia These days, it is hard to pin the popular Mr. Lobo down. What with his involvement in one of the upcoming Plan 9 From Outer Space remakes (believe it or not, there are two remakes in the works), hosting of the documentary Virginia Creepers: The Horror Host Tradition of the Old Dominion, and his incessant verve as he guides us through all those bad movies we just misunderstand on Cinema Insomnia, I was lucky to get a few questions in edgewise. Of course, the first thing I had to know was how Miss Mittens, his houseplant, was doing…

I must ask you, how is Miss Mittens doing these days?

She’s working with a private gardener and her leaves have “filled out”…she’s looking better.

She’s was transferred to a new planter after getting out of rehab. She also still has some personal problems that she’s working out. She blames me for a lot of it. We’re spending some “time apart”. We almost thought she wasn’t coming back to the show as my co-host. She wants to come back to work. To her credit she’s willing to set that aside our differences for the sake of the show. She doesn’t want to negatively effect the 10th Anniversary stuff and the new syndicated season.

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What Lives on Zoc’s Desk
Kong, Teddy, and More

/ Desktop Stuff / 4 Comments

King Kong bust There is always something endlessly waiting for attention in my attic office, or sitting, sadly neglected, on my cluttered desk, or just collecting dust; so let's see what's interesting today, shall we?

I found this bust of King Kong irresistible when I came across it at my favorite comic shop, 4th World Comics, recently. It is not elegant, nor is it an exemplary piece of sculpting, but it still charmed me enough to snatch it up, even though it is not accurate: the flared nostrils and eyes are more Mighty Joe Young than King Kong, and the forehead is too small for either of them. But I like it nonetheless. It is heavy, made in Thailand, and, according to the sticker on the bottom, licensed by Turner Home Entertainment.

Christopher Zenga at The Day After has an artistic thing going for zombears. While I am not a big teddy bear fan in general–sure, stick some neck bolts on it, paint it green, and put a sound chip that growls in it and I am hooked–I am a big fan of his work. Here's a print of one of his pieces, Tedd the Ripper, which I purchased a while back. Eventually I will have it framed, but eventually I will do everything I plan, eventually, to do.

His art is unpretentious, fun, and captures the essence of both teddy and monstrous character in charcoal grays or fairly muted colors. It would be interesting to see his illustrations captured in plush. Too many zombears and frightful teddies padding around on store shelves are either bleeding, blotched with puss, or wielding chainsaws. Zenga's more restrained approach keeps it fun and whimsical. Not all horror needs to be horrible, you know.

Tedd the Ripper As you can see in the photo, I keep Tedd the Ripper next to Cousin Huet. And as you all know, he certainly did do it. Cousin Huet loved to wear his top hat, too. We buried him in it, though it was a tight fit.

This DeJur projector is one of my cherished treasures still remaining from childhood. As I grow older, I find myself thinking about those days more and more, which, for me, were in the 1960's. Back then–

Editor's ALERT! The following stroll down memory lane may be unsuitable for children under the age of thirty, and anyone who grew up with video, DVD, downloadable audio, CDs, NetFlix, Amazon.com, eBay, WalMart, Best Buy, King Kullen, 90210, and Twitter. It may contain prolonged scenes of maudlin nostalgia, violent tearful reminiscences, unsuitable "good old day" dialog, and questionable recollections.

DeJure Projector –the only way to watch a movie when you wanted to was with a projector and an 8mm or 16mm Castle Film. Sure, they were abbreviated versions of classic (and not so classic) movies, but like seeing those first flickering magic lantern images projected onto walls, drapes, and wisps of smoke, it was special and thrilling and empowering to possess and watch Frankenstein or Dracula or The Wolf Man on a Saturday night, after the pool hall or bowling alley had closed, with your friends. Toss in a a bag of White Castle slyders and there you had it; more fun than watching goofy and overweight Wipeout contestants repeatedly bounce off big red rubber balls, head first, for a chance to win a measly fifty grand. With DVDs a dime a dozen these days, and digital downloads at your fingertips, it is just not so special anymore.

Wipeout just started! Got to go!

The Burrowers (2008)
Not Deep Enough

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The burrowers

Zombos Says: Fair

It came to this; a setting sun lingering at the warm edge of approaching night, watched from three rocking chairs indecisively teetering back and forth on their compass tips, saddled by three bored and restless riders of the stiff-slatted pines.

In between a dot and a dash rode Zombos, Lawn Gisland, and me, to nowhere in particular as we traded silences and hiccups on the terrace. The footfalls of summer could be heard bounding up the steps, bringing with them the sizzle of barbecues, giggly splashes from pools, and the monotonous drone of air conditioners humming through hot, molasses-sticky, nights where forgotten candy bars melted in jean pockets, mosquitoes danced to the crackling of ice cubes in sweaty glasses of
lemonade and iced tea and soda, and texting fingers Keystone Copped their slippery grasp on hot cell phones.

“I am not looking forward to estivating by the seashore or anywhere near a barbecue,” said Zombos, absently swirling the iced tea around in his
glass.

“Mind chewing on that a bit more for me?” asked Lawn Gisland, lazily swatting a fly off the pitiado floral rose on his right boot. He yawned larger than a barn door opens and stretched his long legs out in front of him. Former movie cowboy and now traveling circus rodeo star, he was never one for estivating in all his long ranging years.

“Pass the summer,” explained Zombos. “Estivate means to pass the summer.”

We stared off into the waters of Long Island Sound as it grew dark. Zimba brought us another round of iced tea. Lawn took the half-lemon, cut just for him, and squeezed it between his massive fingers. We often joked that if he wanted so much lemon in his iced tea he should be drinking lemonade.

“Oh, I almost forgot, this came today,” said Zimba. She held up The Burrowers DVD.

I jumped up faster than Zombos. “Last one in is a really bad egg!” I said, snatching the DVD. Zombos and Lawn quickly followed me as we hurried to watch this Western horror tale.

 

Lurking monsters spoil the tranquil Western Plains in J.T. Petty’s The Burrowers; an almost refreshing mix of creature-feature, saddle-sores, and the American Old West. I say almost because, while Petty mines the bitter social climate between Indian and settler after the Trail of Tears and the demise of the bison—a once plentiful food source for the Indians—he doesn’t dig deep enough into his characters or embellish their actions to make this a definitive terror on the range Wild West story.

Homesteaders are massacred during the night. A search party is quickly formed to go after the Indians who everyone assumes butchered the men and kidnapped the womenfolk. While you may be tempted to draw comparisons to John Ford’s The Searchers, that would be a bad trail to follow. Ford composed an emotionally-charged journey that eventually forces one man to confront his prejudicial demons, and shot it against sumptuous vistas of sky and land where the deer and the antelope play. While Petty uses his budget-lens quite well to show the desolation across vast distances and makes his assembled posse just as calloused with similar prejudices, its riders and their intentions pale in comparison. No one worth a tinker’s damn stands out from the tumbling tumbleweed to take the bull by the horns or, in this case, the ugly as a mud fence Burrowers by their withers through his shallow direction.

Clancy Brown’s tall and sure character, John Clay, is not given enough dialog or motivation to sink his spurs into. The brash relationship between the slow moving cavalry, wanting to treat every Indian as hostile and hang them high, the lovelorn Coffey (Karl Geary) wanting to move with more urgency to get his kidnapped fiancé back, and Clay’s impatience with the cavalry’s youthful commander never heats to branding iron hot in this story. And as soon as the riding gets rough, the Indian-hunting cavalry and the more determined group of rescuers, led by Clay, go their separate ways after a brief confrontation, splitting the tension, but not intensifying it. Also left behind is any hope of recalcitrance, growth in characters, or mighty clashes of egos to move this period piece beyond the more contemporary getting picked off, one by one, formula.

Petty makes the horror palpable through brief glimpses of the hungry quadrupeds skulking in the bushes, waiting for the cowpokes to fall asleep. The way in which the Burrowers paralyze their victims, bury them, still conscious, in shallow graves to ‘season the meat’—you will know what I mean when you watch the movie—and then chow down after a few days wait is gruesome. But he never moves beyond the lazy horror movie tempo of stalking and dying. If you have watched a few contemporary horror movies, you know how often it always seems to boil down to one frenetic encounter after another, leading to one victim after another being killed, with emphasis on how creatively or gorily that kill is done. For Clay and his search
party, you can break it all down to when an attack will take place—at night—and who will be next; place your bets on the annoying guy who can’t shoot straight. This approach fills the running time; suspense and chills don’t, even when the rescuers find their bullets aren’t effective in holding the Burrowers at bay.

In-between encounters, the cowboys learn a little more about the Burrowers, who mysteriously show up every twenty years, chow down hardy, and then
disappear until the next time. When Clay and his party hear that another tribe of Indians knows how to fight these mysterious Burrowers, they go looking for members of that tribe to help them. The method that tribe uses, however, is not quite what the rescuers had in mind, which leads to the only nail-biting showdown with the Burrowers. If only the rest of the movie could have shown more of this.

At one point I hoped the cavalry would show up with a Gatling gun; but maybe the budget squelched such ideas.

After the initial attack on the homestead in the opening minutes, the pace becomes leisurely with little verve to distinguish the proceedings from the usual horror movie situation. When a young survivor from another attack is dug up, she’s quickly packed up and sent away with Dobie (Galen Hutchinson), a young man whose mom sent him along with the search party hoping it would make a real man out of him. Not much happens between the paralyzed girl, who can only wiggle her toe against her boot, and Dobie after he is sent back with her, hoping to find a doctor who can help; except for an encounter with the Burrowers that ends on the expected down note.

Eventually you start to wonder how many people are buried in shallow graves lying a few feet away from the riders as they make their way along the trail. At one point, a horse’s hoof breaks through the ground—and something more—but Petty keeps his riders moving unawares. The beautiful views of the Plains take on an ominous tone after this, especially when you realize the Burrowers bury their living victims close to where the attack takes place.

The Burrowers fails to use, play with, or dance around the wealth of tropes, clichés, and thematic conventions most of us are familiar with after watching Gunsmoke, Wagon Train, Unforgiven, Dances With Wolves, and many other Western shows and movies.

While not exactly a hanging offense, it would have given the story more true grit.

Interview With Jonathan Maberry
Vampire Hunters and Other Things

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Maberry 2009 It is always a pleasure to speak with Jonathan Maberry, one of the hardest working authors on the scene today. He stopped by the closet recently to discuss comic book writing and his other projects…and pay close attention to that brief mention about a novelization in the works for an upcoming movie. It’s something to howl with delight about…

I was all set with a bunch of questions regarding your Marvel Comics scripting, but you’ve answered them already in another interview. There is one thing I’m curious about, though: how did you handle the panel by panel flow of the comic story, and how detailed were your scripts for the artist?

In the gap between Marvel reaching out to ask me if I wanted to write for them (world’s dumbest question) and getting my first assignment, I read a boatload of comics and studied the modern form. Comics have evolved since the days when I first read them. I took a few and practiced writing the scripts for them. Kind of a retro-engineering approach. Then Marvel sent me some sample scripts. Turns out I was pretty close to the mark.

But there’s more to it than that, of course. Like anything there are tricks to the trade that the most experienced comic book writers know. Guys like Garth Ennis, Steve Niles and Alan Moore make it look effortless, but there’s a lot that goes into it.

WolverineAnniversary It’s also a team process. The writer pitches a story to the editor, who usually makes a few changes to more smoothly fit it into the long-range plans for that title and to work it into the overall continuity of Marvel. Then the writer hands in a beat sheet that outlines the story based on where the story points will fall on the pages. When that’s approved, the writer does the script. My first story was a 32-page special (Punisher: Naked Kill), my second was an 8-page Wolverine short (Ghosts, the back-up feature in Wolverine: The Anniversary).

The writer decides on the number of panels per page and gives the artist an idea of what should be in the panels. That sounds simple, but it isn’t. For some panels you can be very simple, like:

Tight on Black Panther as she reacts.

Some panels require much more direction, like:

Inside Deadalus Tower MICKEY FANE is introducing the place to some prospective customers. He’s tall, handsome in an oily way. A Tony Stark on the Dark side of the Force. Nicely dressed, big smile, rings, expensive watch. He’s center stage talking to two Middle Eastern-looking men in dark suits. Behind him we see Frank and Dirtbox coming through the revolving door. The lobby of Deadalus Tower is polished marble, brass, huge windows. Lots of people, a security desk with guards.

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Interview With Stephen Lindsay Hates Zombies

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Jesus Hates Zombies Vol 2

In Those Slack-Jaw Blues, writer Stephen Lindsay and various artists explored the outrageous, seemingly impious, mixing of one baseball bat swinging Son of God with legions of the undead. Two volumes later, Jesus is searching for believers among the survivors, trying to find an elusive congregation supposed to help him, and hooking up with the only zombie that recognizes him, Laz, and a beefy, thong-wearing male stripper named King. Together they continue the good fight, not only against the ravenous undead, but also against an unholy army raised by a zombiefied angel, and time-traveling werewolves. Lucky for them, honest Abe Lincoln joins the battle, wielding a mean axe.

I admit, at first, I had my doubts. What could have easily become a blasphemous cavalcade of bad art and profanity-filled dialog has risen to a stylish–classy but cheeky–story of strong-armed salvation, unlikely faith found in the worst places, and one tall log of a president skipping through the ages to aid in mankind’s salvation. The simple but effective power of Lindsay’s straightforward narrative, exhuberantly visualized in frenetic panels by artists Steve Cobb in volume one, and Daniel Thollin in volume two, compels you to keep reading. While I wait for volumes three and four, I asked Stephen Lindsay to confess to a few questions.

How did you come up with the idea for Jesus fighting zombies?

I knew I wanted to do a zombie comic, but there were so many great zombie survival horror/drama comics out there that I knew I had to do something different. So I decided to take more of a B-Movie approach. And as with everything I do, I instantly went back to my Catholic School upbringing for inspiration (my therapist says it’s good to let it out…). The title instantly popped into my head and made me chuckle. From that moment on, it was off to the races to try to get the ideas out of my head and onto paper!

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Helena the Hussy of Horror Strikes

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Helena_Swamp_Thing_PR

Helena, Hussy of Horror has launched her new monthly web series with Drinks with the Swamp Thing, a brief look at finding the perfect cocktail for your spring party as well as a review of the 1982 cult classic, Swamp Thing.

Originally done as a one shot for last fall’s Miss Horrorfest contest, Helena soon found new life by shooting an introduction for the festival run of the upcoming Anthem Pictures DVD release, Deadlands 2, Trapped. New Videos will be posted monthly. On the docket are shows about the original Friday the 13th and Jaws 3.

For more go to www.HussyOfHorror.com or https://vimeo.com/hussyofhorror.

Interview With Robot 13’s Hall and Bradford

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Robot 13 issue 1On the surface, the comic is about a skull-headed robot who fights giant monsters from Greek Mythology. From a storytelling standpoint, however, it’s somewhat a reworking of Frankenstein meeting Homer’s Odyssey- it’s the story of a thing created by Science who goes on a Hero’s journey of sorts to find out who he really is…(Thomas Hall, co-creator, Robot 13).

Thomas Hall and Daniel Bradford bring their talents together to create Robot 13, a slightly Gothic, somewhat mechtorian-styled robot with amnesia and a purpose. With meticulously drawn illustrations that would give Hellboy a run for the money, precise panel narrative, and enough mystery to keep even Sherlock Holmes happy, this series looks promising. After reading issue 1 I was left disappointed that it was only 24 pages long. I wanted to read more. To assuage my depression until issue 2, I asked Hall and Bradford a few questions.

You’ve taken mythological elements, blended in a bit of steampunk, and added a quest for identity. What led you and Daniel Bradford to choose these elements for your storytelling?

Thomas: When Daniel showed me his sketches of what eventually became Robot 13, I knew we needed to do something really unique with him, but I wasn’t sure exactly what. At the time, we were pitching a story including a version of that robot for a CGI project, and when that didn’t work out we decided to do something totally different with a comic than we did that pitch.

I have always loved giant Japanese monsters and anything Ray Harryhausen did, so I wanted to see our robot fight some BIG creatures. Daniel drew a shot of the robot having just killed a Kraken, so I jumped at that. Daniel mentioned Frankenstein as a point of reference for our story, and we talked about that a lot. Both of us have a love of the old Gothic literature and art, and adding those elements with a modern spin on them was an attractive idea to us. For a while, it seemed like we had too many ideas, so we thought about it a lot and I did some research to try and find some common ground in it all.

Around that time, I was flying out to Arizona to the Phoenix Cactus Comic Con to do the show with Daniel, and I brought a notebook with me that had everything we had talked about and Daniel’s sketches and other notes. During that 4 hour flight, I worked out what wound up being the basis to the Robot 13 back story. Sure, we have tweaked a few things and it’s evolved over time, but during that flight I found a way to incorporate everything that we both wanted to try in a comic. When we had a moment, I told Daniel what I had come up with, and with only a few minor changes we pretty much had our direction.

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