Okay, so this episode has nothing to do with Star Wars, but honestly....it's Episode V....when am I going to be able to use that again?
At long last Midnight Cinephile Episode V is upon us. As I mentioned last week when I put up episode 4.5, we've been making some tweeks and adjustments and playing a bit with the format. I think you're gonna dig what we've come up with so far.
In this episode two new segments make their debut:
Pixilated Horrors:
Taking a look at horror in gaming. Could be any console...could be PC....but each week we'll take a look at a spooky little bit of gaming goodness.
This week, I take a look back at an obscure game for the NES called Monster Party. It's a fun little romp with lots of zany monsters and a ton of fun.
Monster Mag Time Warp:
Each episode I take a look at a monster/horror mag from the past and review it's contents.
This week I take a look at Fangoria #12...the April/May issue from 1981! We read Bob Martin's editorial regarding the gore in the magazine as well as take a look at some "Upcoming Movies" reported in the "Monster Invasion" segment. Don't miss it!
On top of these two segments, of course is the meat 'n' potatoes of the mag.....where we talk film! I'm joined this week by my lovely wife as we discuss The Babadook, From A Whisper To A Scream, Cellar Dweller and Lucio Fulci's The Beyond.
Like candy for the ears! You can listen here online or follow any of the following download links!
Stay Spooky!
You can also download from LibSyn HERE
Follow The RSS Feed on the upper right corner of the page
Or listen using the player at the bottom of the page!
Watching Movies Past The Witching Hour
Showing posts with label Fangoria. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fangoria. Show all posts
Monday, May 4, 2015
Wednesday, October 15, 2014
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Video Game - The Saw Is Pixelated
Picture it: It's Christmas Eve 1982. You're sitting in front of a toasty fireplace drinking Hood™ Egg Nog and chowing down on gingerbread cookies while you flip through Issue #24 of Fangoria (ya know the one with Xtro on the cover) which just came in the mail the day before. As you peruse the issue, the rest of the family is watching the Christmas episode of Family Ties that your Dad recorded with the VCR he got for his birthday a few months before. The show finishes and your mother realizes that she has more presents to wrap. So in an effort to keep all the kids occupied and out of her hair, she lets you and your siblings open one present each. She hands you a beautifully wrapped box and you tear it open with fervor. Your heart skips a beat. You are now holding in your hands The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Video Game for the Atari 2600! HOLY CATS!
I would like to believe that the above story happened to someone, somewhere. I know it's Halloween and almost blasphemous to mention Christmas, but ya gotta admit...that's a pretty damn great little Christmas Story, no? Okay, okay...you didn't come here to hear stories of Christmases long ago, you came here to read about more 8-Bit carnage courtesy of Wizard Video Games!
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| Unlike Halloween....this one even has a Title Screen! |
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| Yep. That's you. Leatherface. Look at you all scary 'n' shit...... |
Texas Chainsaw Massacre is the only other video game produced by Wizard (though they did have plans to release a third game based on the 70's soft porn flick Flesh Gordon!!!) Much like Halloween, this is an "endless" game in which your only goal is to rack up as high a score as possible. UNLIKE Halloween, this game has something of a timer on it. I will explain.
In the game, you control Leatherface. The goal is to hunt down and kill as many teenagers as you can. You've got several things working against you however. First off, you're chainsaw runs on gas. There is a fuel gauge at the top of the screen. You're fuel slowly and constantly depletes....when you use your saw the fuel depletes even faster. Secondly the landscape is littered with cow skulls, fences, barbed wire and wheelchairs (In what I can only assume is an homage to poor Franklin). The bitch of it is that if even so much as one pixel of Leatherface's sprite touches even so much as one pixel of one of the obstacles, he becomes stuck on the spot. You can either rev up the chainsaw to get yourself unstuck faster or you can sit there like a jackass for a few seconds. Either way, it's fuel wasted.
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| All right! Time to carve some girl meat! |
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| Um. I don't know exactly what the hell that is supposed to be....other than this game's interpretation of a chainsaw victim. |
When you come up on a teenager they will try to evade you. I don't have it down to an exact science, but it seems that if you come up behind them at an angle, you have a better chance of getting a kill. Many times if you come up behind them straight on they will magically teleport behind you. I'm not kidding! They just vanish and then POOF they're behind you and running the other direction. Apparently you are hunting down David Copperfield's magic assistants. I have only seen two types of teenagers, both female and they are really nothing more than palette swaps. One is wearing a yellow & green outfit while the other is white & pink.
As I mentioned before you are ruled by the fuel gauge. You have tanks of fuel. Each time it runs out you start anew and the screen will clear of any teenagers that may have been in the vicinity. When your last tank of fuel runs out, the screen turns black and one of the teenage girls runs up behind Leatherface and kicks him right in the ass, sending him off screen. Apparently Leatherface is completely defenseless against a girl without his trusty saw. I find that rather hilarious.
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| Wheelchairs! Watch out, they move by faster than the other obstacles and will stop you dead in your tracks. |
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| Ooooh, a different girl to get acquainted with my saw! |
Speaking of hilarious, let's talk about Leatherface's sprite in the game. It's pretty awful. You've got a tan face, which is cool....I get it....kinda looks leatherish. The rest of your body is their weird teal color. Your chainsaw is too. So it looks like it's part of your body. It's kinda positioned over the stomach area, but to me it still looks like he's got a massive mutant dick, running around after girls.
The play area and backgrounds really aren't that great. The game takes place during the day..,...blue skies, green grass and green leaves. There's a tiny house and car in the background, which I assume is the Sawyer house. I think that palette swapping and having the game take place at night would have done quite a bit to improve the atmosphere. There is no music, either. Just the electronic "Grrrr" of the chainsaw and an ear piercing electric beep that is supposed to be the teenagers screaming as you chase them. While we're on the subject of negatives....this game doesn't have the gore that Halloween did either. When you manage to kill a teenager, their sprite inverts (which I'm assuming is supposed to be them falling to the ground) and they turn kinda white and maroon....but I don't know if the maroon is supposed to be blood or if it's just a palette swap to differentiate live teens from dead ones. The bodies also vanish immediately. It would have been really cool if you could leave a trail of dead bodies behind you.
That's really about all there is to it. I would say that this one is a bit less enjoyable than Halloween. Though it's really fun that you get to play the killer, it's lack of atmosphere and wonky hit detection does it no favors. Would I recommend you play it? If you are fan of the movies and a retro gamer than absolutely. This game, just like Halloween, has historical significance and it's fun to give it a go or two around the Halloween season....but this certainly isn't a game that you're going to spend more than five to ten minutes on. After you've gotten yourself stuck on a wheelchair or a cow skull for the umpteenth time you'll want to move on to something else.
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| Aw, nuts I'm completely out of fuel! What was that? I think I heard something behind me. |
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| Talk about getting an ass-kicking! |
Like with Halloween, it's all fine and good to tell you about the game and show you some screen shots, but to really get a feel for it, it's best if you get to see some video. So for your entertainment pleasure, here is one complete go at TCM: The Video Game. It only lasts a couple minutes so watch till the end to see Leatherface get his ass whooping!
Sunday, April 27, 2014
One Man's Journey From Fangoria Reader To Contributor
Of course that wasn't the only mag that I purchased that day, oh no. Sitting right next to Fango was a brand new copy of Gorezone #19! That'd be the one with the She Wolf cover. I was instantly addicted. I couldn't wait for each new issue to arrive. Imagine my heartbreak when Gorezone ceased only seven issues later. Thankfully Fango never went away and has been my constant monthly companion ever since. Wait.....that sounded really weird. Fuck it, you know what I mean.
Here we are, TWENTY TWO years later. I have never missed an issue of Fango since that warm summer day at the mall. Today is one of the proudest days of my life thus far. Today I can officially call myself a contributor to the sacred bloody pages of Fangoria. Two hundred and nineteen issues later, comes my very first article, a retrospective look at Starlog's Fright Show (aka Cinemagic) Why yes, I DID rave about it here on Midnight Cinephile before! I will continue to rave about it until every last one of you has tracked down a VHS tape and watched it!
I got to know Chris a bit after interviewing him for his film Blood for Irina. I am proud to call him a friend and I am forever grateful to him for giving me a chance to be part of something that is so vitally important to me. If this is the one and only time that my name would appear in print under the Fangoria banner, I would still be able to die a happy man, but I am happy to report that I do have more stuff coming!
I am truly humbled and honored to be a part of this amazing publication. It has inspired me to push myself further and see what the future may hold for me. I can tell you that I've got some pretty amazing projects in mind that I think everyone is going to dig. For now though, I am just going to bask in the glow of being a part of something incredible.
Oh yeah, and I'm psyched out of my mind that my first article appears in an issue that features Scarlett Johanssen on the cover! What can I say? Life is good!
Sunday, February 17, 2013
Chris Alexander - An Interview With The Man Behind "Blood For Irina"
I've had several people ask me where I came up with the name Midnight Cinephile. This is the perfect time to tell you. As you more than likely know by this point in our relationship, I'm a horror geek and have been most of my unnatural life. Thirteen years ago this month I came across Issue #14 of Rue Morgue Magazine, which featured The Toxic Avenger with a couple of barely clad purple haired girls. Needless to say, I was immediately hooked. My monthly Fangoria fix now became a double dose ever other month. Then in January of 2004, there was a new column in Issue #37: The Mad Musings of a Schizoid Cinephile. It was the first column I read that month and every month after until it's end in 2007's Halloween Issue (#72) featuring John Carpenter's The Thing.
Reading that first column, I felt like I had found a kindred spirit. A fellow warrior in the never ending war for trash cinema rights. Though I'd never met Chris, I felt that I had, as he once said of fellow Rue Morgue scribe, Stuart F. Andrews, had a brother-in-bad-movie-arms. He didn't just write up a movie review....oh no. He put his heart and soul into that review and if you didn't come out the other end with a new found love, respect and burning urge to watch the films he wrote about, then you are clearly not a cinephile!
That column was hugely inspirational and this little corner of the web is my little soapbox, if you will. It's my homage to Schizoid Cinephile, trash cinema, nostalgia and a love letter to the unsung films, TV shows, music, books, video games, etc. This website is put together with duct tape, bubble gum, a lick and a prayer, but it's mine damnit. A place that I can call home.....and maybe someday a home for other kindred spirits.
Okay, enough about me. You're here because you wanna get the goods on Chris' new film Blood For Irina. I was fortunate enough to catch Chris in between his busy schedule (and a surprise visit to the Emergency Room for me.....) to chat about his film, his life and all the stuff in between. This conversation was truly nothing short of epic, so sit back, grab some pizza rolls and a Dr. Pepper.....ladies and gentlemen.....Mr. Chris Alexander!
Midnight Cinephile: I haven't seen Blood For Irina yet, but I understand that it won awards at Pollygrind and Buffalo Screams. What was that like winning those awards on your first film?
Chris Alexander: Well it won, awards at Pollygrind, Buffalo Screams and this festival in Toronto called Blood in the Snow as well as Best Horror Film at Philip K. Dick Metaphysical, Horror, Science Fiction Festival in Brooklyn, which is weird. It's strange because I don't consider the film terribly horrific, but it's a matter of subjectivity, I guess.
But what was it like? It was incredible, man! I mean, I made this movie very quickly. It was exactly the movie I wanted to make within the parameters I had which were none....I mean I made it between editing two issues of Fangoria, and I had a little bit of time and we shot it in - I think if you calculate it in the amount of hours, it was forty-eight hours or something like that - not straight, but little bits and drips and drabs here and there....a lot of pick up shots in between. You know, I wrote it, I edited it, I shot it, I produced it and I did the whole score for it too. It's a silent film....a real art piece....and it's wall to wall sound. I did the music and the complete sound design for it....everything. So it's like my little baby......again it's an art piece, it's more like and installation than a traditional movie. So the fact that it's been embraced by some people is really cool. I don't know if it's a good movie or a bad movie, but I know if you look at other indie horror films out there right now, there's nothing like it, I do know that. I will say that with pride...for better, for worse there's nothing else like my movie out there to compare it to.
MC: I know it also screened at Times Scare, in New York. How was that as opposed to an audience at a film fest? Was there a different reaction in that kind of environment and mentality?
CA: Yeah, it's all about the venue. This movie - I mean, it's funny...I went into it, again we had no money, but it was financed through Autonomy Pictures (which is owned by TLA releasing) which is pretty cool and they let me have complete carte blanche and I asked for very little money because I had never made a feature film before and I didn't want any risk and I wanted to do it exactly like this. I wanted to create an immersive experience and I think it really plays well if you're trapped by it. It's about the last two days of this dying vampire and the two people who surround her, that are just as fucked up as her, in this little shitty motel by the sea. The intention was the trap an audience in this environment as well and really kind of batter them down with sound and depressing, repetitive imagery. It's not a fun movie....it's not an explicit film, it's quite romantic, really, but it's definitely not a lot of fun....you don't come out of there clicking your heels and saying "That movie was awesome!"
So it does work really well in the theater, I find, when the sound is really complex and you have a really great sound system, it really does give you this feeling that you're wandering around in this environment for seventy minutes or whatever. So, festival crowds are interesting because it's kind of like people wander into the movie blind and it is the kind of movie where you'll really like it, or you won't. You need a bit of patience for it and you need to have a certain leaning towards European films of a certain vintage to really gravitate towards it. I've had walk-outs at festivals, and I'm totally fine with that, I've walked out of a million movies...so you don't have to love the film. Times Scare was cool because everybody who was there, kinda wanted to be there, which was interesting. It was this play date....it was not part of a festival....you had to get off your ass specifically to go see this movie. We had a nice crowd and a huge venue.Times Scare, I don't know if you've been there, but it's unbelievable. It's a four floor haunted house, it's got a bar, restaurant, a theater.....it's freakin' amazing! So the venue was great, the people were great and it was kinda like a homecoming because Fangoria is based in New York so all my compadres were there, so I got to see some people I don't always see all the time, you know I run Fango from Toronto, so it was nice. It was a great experience and seeing my name and the movie....taking a cab back to the hotel and seeing the huge marquee in Times Square....there's the name of the movie and my name in blood, you've gotta laugh at how surreal it is! I spent nothing on this movie, it's so small...this little private hobby movie and next thing you know, there it is! It's pretty outrageous, really!
MC: I know you are a huge fan of Jess Franco and Jean Rollin. Their films are stylistically very beautiful and very challenging. I think it's a very interesting style to choose as a first feature film. Can you tell us about the genesis of the film and the thought process behind it?
CA: It's funny, I edit Fangoria and I always tried to draw the line in the sand saying "This is not a Fangoria movie" and make sure we know that....and people sometimes expect because you've got the name Fangoria floating around it in orbit that it's going to be some landmark blood and guts horror masterpiece, which was never my intention to make. I wanted to make one of those longing, romantic, meditative movies coming out of Europe that I've loved. I've always loved those movies because usually I would catch them on television when I was a kid at certain points...and sometimes I was bored by them, sometimes I fell asleep, sometimes I'd wake up in the middle of them and see bits and pieces. They had a certain haunting, REALLY haunting atmospheric quality that would make me keep revisiting and revisiting. For better or for worse, they were auteur pictures....I mean these guys like Franco and Rollin and I'll throw Werner Herzog though he's on a different level, but he's still an inspiration. They were making these very personal, lower budgeted films that, especially with Rollin and Franco, were horror movies but took place in the natural world. So, a lot of natural locations and they held their shots for long periods of time so it almost felt like you were watching a series of moving photographs.
I really appreciate that studied, meditative quality that you don't see anymore. People are afraid, especially in horror, to lose the interest of the audience. So they have to completely inundate you with as much image and information as you can. It doesn't give the audience any time to breath or think. So I went the other way....some criticisms are that the movie are that it's too slow, so maybe I went too far off one end, but that was by design what I wanted to do. I love all movies, but these are films that specifically appeal to me because they felt so alien and so beautiful and so exotic and I really wanted to try and capture that quality.
MC: Did you use any of those famous "Franco Zooms"?
CA: No, I didn't, you know the thing about Franco and Rollin......I love their bodies of work and I love their sensibilities and I love them as, again, auteurs or artists. Rollin was incredibly intelligent and a real poet...and Franco is a genius, really. Sometimes that's not evident in their work. You know, sometimes their sloppy and somethings are rushed and they were also tied into the sexploitation market, so, sometimes they had to throw in all this explicit sex and money shots that really felt like they didn't necessarily belong - they're cool - but they didn't really belong in the movie. If anything it kinda ruins some of the poetry of the film. So I was very disciplined in my zoom lenses. There are zooms in it, but they are very sloooow zooms. There's that opening of Jess Franco's Female Vampire, or Erotikill, or Bare Breasted Countess....whatever you want to call it, where Lina Romay walked towards the camera completely stark naked - big bush of a vagina - and Franco filming her, she's walking, and she walks right into the camera and her vagina bounces off the lens! I always found that really amazing and stupid. No one's vagina bumps off the lens in Blood For Irina, but I love the fact that Franco was SO into that shot, that he let it linger for so long, that it it becomes absolutely absurd. There's stuff like that, there are moments in this movie where the shot goes on for so long, that you feel trapped by it and you're kind of frustrated by it that it goes on and on, but if you stick with it, eventually it becomes trans-formative like that. But no, there aren't those crazy ass Wakka Wakka Bang Bang zooms in Blood for Irina, it's a little more disciplined, I think.
MC: I know you're no stranger to music, having released four or five albums at this point. Was music ever something you thought of taking a career path in, or was it always films?
CA: To me everything is music. All the great writers are musicians, even if they're not by trade, you have to have an ear for music to understand how the rhythms of dialog work. Movies are the same way. Everyone is making movies these days. I see tons of independent films and not necessarily everyone should be. To me the editing is music, so the way you're cutting the film can sometimes be atonal and drag you right out of the movie because it's just tone deaf, it's terrible. To me, music is everywhere, I'm always plugged into the way a movie sounds, but even a silent movie.....if you watch certain silent films, like Potemkin or something like that, and you watch it without any kind of orchestral backup, it's still cut like music. The scene of going up the steps, in Potemkin, particularly is basically a symphony in itself of just metric cuts. So, you know, to me film music, writing, it's all part of the same deal....it's something primal, really. It's image, it's sound, it's communication, it's completely primal to us as a species.
So blah, blah, blah, long story short, when I went to film school, which was in the mid 90's- this was before digital had taken over everything- it was very expensive to make movies. We would use Bolex, 16mm, and it would cost thirty bucks to buy a roll of two minute film, you don't use all of that film, you try your best and try not to fuck up, but you know you'll only be using a few seconds in the final cut. Then it costs another thirty bucks to develop that roll, so you've got sixty bucks for two minutes of film that you're not going to necessarily use all of it. It was a very expensive concept to make independent films for me when I was broke and in college. Music, however, was something that I could do for free because I had all the instruments, I had the ability and I had the creativity. When I quit film school, I started a band, it was an experimental music band, I did film installations with the performance and came into this whole beat from that angle and that's what lead to journalism. I was a publicist at Warner Brothers Films in Canada and became a writer for About Movies for many years and still progressed the music at the same time and all those roads kinda came together when it came to making this movie.
MC: I was first introduced to your writings in Rue Morgue Magazine, my favorite column was your Schizoid Cinephile column. I really latched on and identified because I've always been a huge fan of trash cinema....the babies nobody loves so to speak....movies like Beast of the Yellow Night, which I love so much. How did you come to write for Rue Morgue?
CA: It was very simple. I've always loved this stuff, I always say since I was three years old, and that's true. My Dad liked weird movies...well he was always accused of not liking good movies. So he always had a strange sensibility. I remember him going to see the movie Somewhere in Time, based on Richard Matheson's Bid Time Return, with Christopher Reeve, and him rhaphsodising for a decade that it's the greatest fucking movie ever made, like forget Gone with the Wind or King Kong or anything like that....this is the greatest movie ever made...and yet everywhere you looked it was bad reviews. But he was adamant that he could defend exactly why he loved that film, it was very personal. I always appreciated that. So since I've been three I've loved horror movies, the macabre and KISS and subversive looking things and things that look like they should belong in the natural world and it's just always been what I do. Comic books, all that shit and it's always been embraced, I was always allowed to like that, so it was never really taboo.
As far as how I came to write for Rue Morgue.....Rue Morgue was a free magazine in Toronto, it was Issue #2, I think and Rod Gudiño would write the whole mag under various pseudonyms....and I found it free at a Goth clothing store- when I was a dopey little Goth teenager guy- and there was an article on Tomb of the Blind Dead. This is really before the Internet took the choke hold....to me it was like "Who the hell has seen Tombs of the Blind Dead, besides me?" I remember it was on Big Box VHS when I was a kid and I actually spent thirty-five dollars on a used copy at a mom and pop video store because no one else wanted it...but the guy charged me thirty-five bucks and I held onto it with a death grip because it was just a masterpiece....and it was a great essay on what a masterpiece this movie was. So I was so excited I almost got hit by a car, because I was reading it walking down the street. I called the number that was on the masthead and it was Rod's number and I left this long verbal diarrhea message about how much I loved this little magazine and he transcribed it for the next issue and we had a relationship based on that.....and I started working at Warner Brothers and then I started working at Rue Morgue when they were in their infancy on that level for promotions. Then I just said listen, let me write for the mag....he gave me a bunch of movies to review, I reviewed them, he loved it and within a year, I had my own column and I was six or seven years with Rue Morgue, did the radio show, DJing their parties, writing extensively and again it was just following the passions and following up with the passions too, I didn't just let it go. I didn't just want to be a reader of Rue Morgue, I wanted to be a part of it.
MC: One day it seemed like you just disappeared from Rue Morgue and then next thing I knew, Tony Timpone stepped down from Fangoria and I see your name on the masthead as Editor in Chief. How did that come about?
CA: Well it's strange. I read an interview with John Carpenter recently where he was talking about working with Charles Band in his early career and how "after the nuclear war, there will be cockroaches and Charles Band left" because Charles Band never practices failure. He never fails....and he flunks non-stop, but he never personally fails because ever time he's about to flunk with a project, he's got about ten others in the pipeline ready to rock. So, he's always working, he's always moving, always busy and whether you like Band or not, or his work, you gotta appreciate that sensibility. I've always appreciated that sensibility, so I've always had a lot of things on the go at any given time.
The gulf between leaving Rue Morgue and getting the job at Fango, is actually about three years. With Rue Morgue, it was simply the concept of wanting the moon and not wanting to settle with the little condo on the space station. I really loved the stuff, I really wanted to be a part of it....in this short finite period of life I really wanted to pursue what I can do with it and Rue Morgue wanted to keep the foot on my head, which is the truth. They wouldn't pay me- and I've said this openly several times, with no ill will towards Rod Gudiño anymore, but it was a bit disparaging at the time- they wouldn't pay me any more to stay at Rue Morgue, but they wouldn't allow me to write for Fangoria or any other horror magazines because it was the competition and I was a columnist and on the radio...I was one of their featured guys. I said, "You know, I have a child now and I gotta live. There aren't many horror magazines out there, man, and this is what I do, so if you wanna keep me exclusively, you're gonna have to make it work for me a little more too." Basically he said "No, you're gonna have to make a choice." and I said "Well, that's not fair, I'm making my choice and I'm walking away from this." It was scary, because I'm in Toronto and Rue Morgue was horror in Toronto, so everyone was basically saying "You're gonna isolate yourself from the horror community." and that made me wanna leave more, because I hate scenes. Despise them. I was like, "You know what, the love of this stuff has nothing to do with being part of a scene. Conveying your passion articulately for this has nothing to do with making the scene or showing up to the bar on a Friday night with the Rue Morgue crew." So I said "Fuck that" and I left them and I went to Fangoria which was great because Rue Morgue never did set visits or anything, suddenly Fango letting me do all that and I became the Canadian Guy up here. I was doing all the set stuff for Fango, which was amazing. Big opportunities to meet people and see how the magic works of film making and it was a real education and just a real life changer.
As far as taking over Fango, I don't know, I just stuck with it....I stuck with it, I was always there, I was always pitching ideas, I was always showing up and I was very resourceful. At the same time I was also freelancing for Metro News, The Toronto Star and Dark Side out in the UK and Wired Magazine. My fingers were in a lot of pies, I was always moving and so I had a lot of connections. I could get basically anybody on the phone at any time so a lot of the pieces I was bringing them were pretty neat, you know, hanging out with Nicolas Cage and getting him to imitate his character from Vampire's Kiss and being able to post that on the site without being assigned that just being able to go out and do it. So, I think after a couple years of doing that, the Powers-That-Be wanted to switch things up there anyway, because Fangoria was getting a bit stale and one day they just asked me. There's so much detail in this story and I'm trying to be as quick as I can, but I"m still talking your head off!
MC: NOOO! That's fine!
CA: I had just two children at the time- I make a lot of babies- I have three boys. I was so tired...I was teaching at the same time as writing. I was driving back from teaching film history at the film college here, and I was so tired that I wasn't paying attention to the road and somebody hit me and knocked my car in the air and flipped it. My arm went out the window and rode on it's side. I was thinking I was gonna die and all the skin on my arm was completely like Hellraiser, it de-gloved me and ripped me up. I had to pull my arm back in, I ejected myself from my seatbelt rolled onto the ceiling and rolled out the passenger window, ran away from the car while it was upside down rolling the street and it was a shocker and real wake up call to screw my head on a little bit tighter. Lost on the skin on my arm....it was not pretty. But I was right back on the horse, got out of the hospital and off I went. So, like a week later, I was in a used record store picking up some DVD's and shit and I was completely bandaged up, my arm is oozing all this puss, it was disgusting, right out of a horror flick. I got a call on my cell out of nowhere and it was Scott, who was part of Fango at the time, he's not there anymore, he basically just said "I don't know what you do for a job outside of this, but do you want a job?" I said "Well, what job is that?" He said "Do you want to edit Fangoria?" and I almost fuckin' fell down!
Here I had this traumatic, like near death experience where, again I feel like Uncle Frank in Hellraiser....no fun. I don't know what my next moves going to be and the suddenly the next move just lands in my lap....and it was just as easy as that. Obviously I didn't need any time to think about it, I said yes! Tony moved on to other things.... the
VOD stuff for the company on a different level and I took over the mag. Over three years now, and I think three very successful years by many fan reactions that people are fairly satisfied with some of the changes I've made and the energy I'm putting into it, so I think it's going okay!
MC: It was around the same time that you released your first book, Chris Alexanders's Blood Spattered Book. What was the thought process behind that?
CA: Again, I love what I love and it's not always popular. Schizoid Cinephile, that's what it was all about. Defending the indefensible to some degree. Watching Ghosts of Mars after everyone tells me it's a piece of shit and going "Wait a minute!" Yeah I guess if you're going to the multiplex on a Friday night and looking for an action movie that's going to be comparable to Die Hard 2, it's going to be a piece of shit to you. But if you look at it as a John Carpenter movie, you know....listen to the music for Christ's sake! It's a western in space! There's a fucking train running around Mars....it's Planet of the Vampires on crack! Wake up a little bit....look at the subversive cast of this movie. There is so much to really embrace and revisit and it works really, really well on a small screen at home and really, it improves on multiple viewings. So knowing that...and wanting to talk about that with people. Schizoid Cinephile was my little soapbox and my platform to get up there and say "Look! Take another look....there's some really cool shit hiding there!" I don't think any horror movie- it goes with anything...any kind of pop art- you don't know what it is until you wait about twenty years. You need some time to mellow and season and be removed from it's point of creation and the rest of the pop culture zeitgeist at the time. Especially the weird shit....all cult films are made that way. So what Blood Spattered Book was, was a series of personal essays about movies I saw at various impressionable points in my life that I always thought of as masterpieces, sometimes unsung masterpieces, or had some really interesting subversive elements that make them special. Then I managed to track down some of the people that were involved with the films too and throw some interviews in there. So it's a personal kind of link about the movies I love....it's basically it is the Schizoid Cinephile column blown up a little bit. A lot more space and more room to breath, but the same gig.
MC: Very Cool! And you have a new book coming out: The Twilight Zone Legacy, which is an episode by episode breakdown of the series?
CA: Yeah, in fact that's what I'm doing right now. This book is giving me a great excuse to do what I love, and I would do it anyway, but now I feel like I have a purpose to do it instead of just leisure....and that's watch The Twilight Zone over and over, read everything I can about The Zone and that's what I'm doing right now, while I'm working on the mag is just watching The Twilight Zone in the background. There's a handful of things that I love. That I love, I love, I love. I am a man of passion, if you will and I don't hide any of that, I wear it on my sleeve. Horror Films, KISS, Twilight Zone. I think that's the Holy Trifecta right there. The three major non-living things, that I will love until my dying day and obsess over because they have done so much for me, personally and have been there as friends for me my whole life and has transformed my outlook on humanity, on....on everything! Again, education is where you find it. The smartest people I know, have never stepped foot in a University. So long story short, I love The Zone. I love KISS too, I managed to do The Official KISS Magazine for a while there too, which is great, but this is another level because The Zone is such a big part of my life and Serling, to me, is one of the greatest of writers of all time of any period. There's a great melancholy about his work........just really beautiful stories of people, masked in this science fiction and fantasy and horror sheen. There have been, obviously, a million books written about The Zone and Marc Scott Zicree's episode guide is indispensable and he's been such a force, but I think he's been the "go-to" guy for a long time when it comes to The Twilight Zone and I do have some issues with his assessments of each show. I sometimes find him very dismissive, especially when it comes to Season Five, which is largely booed upon by the purists and I think it's just a fantastic final act to the show.....and he's very dismissive of it. I'm not. There are so many elements that are at work in The Twilight Zone that are interlinked and that reflect other things that were going on at the time, with Hollywood and Television. Whether it be actors that showed up and repeatedly showed up in the show or some of the themes that were going on. Some of the music, the musicians, the scores the sound effects libraries that were exploited in some episodes. I've watched these things to death and I think I'm ready now to analyse from stem to stern each and every episode in there as well as round up some of my "famous friends"- who love the show as well- from every corner of the pop culture universe and call on them to tell me what their favorite episode is- or episodes are- and how it's influenced their work. I think if you're a Zone fan, that's a huge part of it: Saying "Remember that one where....." and "And then at the end it turns out it's a cook book..." You know, everyone loves to do that. So this is a two fold book. On hand, it's an episode guide, an intelligent, articulate episode guide for the show and then on the other hand, it's a big, huge party with all kinds of crazy guest stars sitting around waxing nostalgic on why they love the show and which episodes they love.
MC: That's awesome!
CA: I hope so! I'm in the process now and it won't be out until next year, but I think it's going to be good!
MC: That's a massive undertaking...there's one hundred and fifty six episodes! Here on Midnight Cinephile, I'd started a similar project a while back....going episode by episode and not so much review them as writing my feelings on them. I had to take a break because I started watching so many, I got backed up!
CA: It is massive, but again, I've been watching Twilight Zone obsessively since I was a little boy and I have every episode on VHS, I have every episode on DVD and I have every episode on Blu Ray. I have scads of books and technically I never need to watch The Twilight Zone again because each and every one, even the minor ones, are branded onto my brain. But now I'm approaching this from a different angle, where I'm looking for the elements that maybe I missed the first time around and I can revisit it. And I never get tired of it, you know? I've seen every single on multiple times and I will never, ever get sick of this show. Ever. So it's a massive undertaking, but it's a joy, it really is.
MC: Back to Blood For Irina, I heard it was coming out on Blu Ray and DVD in May, is that correct?
CA: Yep. That's right! May 13th, I think, is the target release date in North America, France and the UK.
MC: And who's handling the release on that?
CA: Autonomy Pictures put it out. Autonomy was created by TLA so they could release The Bunny Game. This is their second release, but the first one that they actually funded, which is interesting. It is radically different than The Bunny Game, it's funny, it's just as cheap but....well The Bunny Game starts with a blow job and continues on for the next hour with screaming....and the basement and my film is not that at all, it goes the complete other direction. So they're interesting companion pieces to each other as far as low budget independent genre film making goes. I think both are interesting sides of perhaps the same coin. But it is Autonomy putting it out, or if you will TLA Releasing, the parent company.
MC: Are there going to be any special features?
CA: Yep. I wrote the movie around the fact that there's this grungy motel from the thirties that had not been changed at all that they were ripping down, so I figured "I have this much money, what can I conceivably sell?" It has to be a single character piece, really, you have a really interesting single character piece and use the local areas around this motel. To have the motel be like Dracula's Castle, have the death of the motel mirror the death of this character, who's trapped in this motel, which is very heavy handed that way. So we shot a lot in this motel and in the Special Features are the destruction of the motel. The motel was destroyed after we shot, so it's kinda like the end of this location, the end of the movie, and it's kind of an interesting coda to the film. We also have commentary with the stars as well as myself....a real fun commentary....so in a way, it's kind of like film school, because we tell you everything that we did. From using iPhones to shoot stuff, to everything we did in a guerrilla way.....we never shot with any kind of permit of any kind, to make an entertainment. So it's an interesting, fun commentary. We've got deleted scenes, because originally I had a lot more footage in this thing, you know like every movie, it comes down to the crunch and certain things don't work but they're still nice shots, so I threw all that stuff in there for fun....as well as stills. We have thousands of beautiful still from the movie, there's some real beauty in this film, I think. They'll be put together in a way, with all my music...basically the alternative to sitting through the film, you can actually just sit back and watch the still gallery put to the music, which is kind of interesting. And finally, the music itself is available in an isolated track, so you'll be able to just enjoy the great diverse, in depth music I created for the movie, by itself.
MC: Are there any more films in your future?
CA: Yeah, there's one right now and hopefully Autonomy will be backing it. I think they will. It's going to cost more than Blood For Irina, but you know there's a lot of waste, and I've been on a million film sets and there are wasters in Hollywood. I'm not a Hollywood filmmaker, I never want to be. I want to make personal films and I don't want to waste anything, I want all the budget to be amplified on screen and I think you can do that. If you take control of it, and because I can do it all, I might as well keep doing it. So the next movie is kind of a companion piece to Blood For Irina, but it's expansive. It's much bloodier, it's much darker, it's much more surreal and it's called The Queen of Blood, with no relation to the Curtis Harrington movie...well sort of it is, in some respects, but I don't want to spoil it. It's kind of an homage to that film, in a way. I'm fully prepared. I love Jean Rollin, I love the fact that he made these female vampire movies over and over and over again. Revisiting themes and expanding them with many of the same cast members and I love that idea of doing this casual thing and making these kind of sensual vampire films with many of the same cast members. So that's what this next one will be....a new expansive companion piece to the first one, with kind of a wild west theme. I don't want to get too much into it, it's kinda weird, but there's definitely another one coming!
MC: That sounds awesome!
CA: I hope so! The music too! With Blood for Irina, I wrote the music first and then kinda built the movie around the moods of the music so this is gonna have to be the same way, with a lot fuller score, I think, but I'm going to write all the music first and then invent the movie, to some degree, some of the images will be invented around the music.
MC: Horror films seem to emerge with a different theme in each decade, The Fifties Monster Movies, The Eighties Slasher Boom....the first decade of the new millennium was labeled as the Torture Porn decade. Where would you like to see the genre go in the next decade? It seems to me it's still trying to formulate itself and doesn't really know what it is.....
CA: Well, it depends what we're talking about. That's always a question that I don't really have an answer for. Everywhere you look, every corner of the globe, everyone's got their own style from a cultural stand of making a horror film. We're at the point now where there's so many different sub-genres. If we're talking about what's leading the pack, commercially in Hollywood....well it's pat and parcel with what's going on in the world. Torture Porn films emerge after the Internet, and what's freely available and how hard it is to shock people and disturb them anymore. People don't want the cerebral shocks, they want the visceral shocks. Saw and Hostel did very well, so off you go. I think we're at the level where these movies have become kind of laughable. If I see another movie where a girl is duct taped to a chair.....ugh, I can't do it anymore. Brutality is not amusing to me, it's just lazy. It's just lazy fucking shit and when I see independent films, especially, that exploit that ad nauseam, all I see is unimaginative film making. If I see people dropping the "F Bomb" every two minutes in that same context, again I see unimaginative film making....and people that don't understand what makes horror films special.....just trying to be "hardcore"....and not understanding that they're not being "hardcore" at all, they're being very safe and boring.
So for me, commercially in Hollywood, it's interesting. I don't know, I like all movies, all over the place. If a trend isn't appealing to me, I'll just look somewhere else. I just saw the Mexican/Argentinian film Here Comes The Devil, and that blew my fucking mind......but that's my kind of movie. There's certain kind of movies I like, I like slow burning, surreal, dark, minimalist films.....those are the horror films that really, really speak to me and have an emotional kind of heft to them as opposed to a narrative one. So Here Comes The Devil, just fit perfectly, but it would bomb if it ever played or came to Hollywood, right? Though someone would remake it and radically change it. So, I don't know where horror movies are going, I know that the technology is such that anyone now can make a horror movie and I think that's a double edged sword. So there's going to be a glut of films on the market place, which could be a good thing, it might not be. I think the most important thing we can say is that people will keep dying and as longs as people keep dying and The Powers-That-Be will keep fucking up the world enough that people are paranoid and anxious at all times about their demise and their lifespans and the fate of the planet, we'll keep seeing horror films. Horror films that will echo that anxiety and kind of diffuse that anxiety too. So horror movies will always, always be here and some way, shape or form.
I'll say this: I'm getting sick of zombies. The Walking Dead is a masterpiece, but hopefully independent filmmakers will stop making zombie movies, because I'm tired of people running around with ketchup and putty on their face, chasing each other around their back yards.
MC: Here, here! It's about time those end.
CA: Yeah, I'm done. World War Z looks fun. I read the book....they didn't run around like mad men in the book, but that's okay. But that's a different movie....that's a big Hollywood apocalypse movie and the zombie thing will take a backseat to the contagion element of it. Other than that, yeah. Zombies....you don't need this many zombie films anymore. Please. Go away.
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Many thanks to Chris for taking time out of his insanely busy schedule to chat with me! Fangoria Issue #321 is currently out, so chiggity check it out....and make sure you check out Blood for Irina when it hits DVD and Blu Ray on May 13th!
Reading that first column, I felt like I had found a kindred spirit. A fellow warrior in the never ending war for trash cinema rights. Though I'd never met Chris, I felt that I had, as he once said of fellow Rue Morgue scribe, Stuart F. Andrews, had a brother-in-bad-movie-arms. He didn't just write up a movie review....oh no. He put his heart and soul into that review and if you didn't come out the other end with a new found love, respect and burning urge to watch the films he wrote about, then you are clearly not a cinephile!
That column was hugely inspirational and this little corner of the web is my little soapbox, if you will. It's my homage to Schizoid Cinephile, trash cinema, nostalgia and a love letter to the unsung films, TV shows, music, books, video games, etc. This website is put together with duct tape, bubble gum, a lick and a prayer, but it's mine damnit. A place that I can call home.....and maybe someday a home for other kindred spirits.
Okay, enough about me. You're here because you wanna get the goods on Chris' new film Blood For Irina. I was fortunate enough to catch Chris in between his busy schedule (and a surprise visit to the Emergency Room for me.....) to chat about his film, his life and all the stuff in between. This conversation was truly nothing short of epic, so sit back, grab some pizza rolls and a Dr. Pepper.....ladies and gentlemen.....Mr. Chris Alexander!
Midnight Cinephile: I haven't seen Blood For Irina yet, but I understand that it won awards at Pollygrind and Buffalo Screams. What was that like winning those awards on your first film?
Chris Alexander: Well it won, awards at Pollygrind, Buffalo Screams and this festival in Toronto called Blood in the Snow as well as Best Horror Film at Philip K. Dick Metaphysical, Horror, Science Fiction Festival in Brooklyn, which is weird. It's strange because I don't consider the film terribly horrific, but it's a matter of subjectivity, I guess.
But what was it like? It was incredible, man! I mean, I made this movie very quickly. It was exactly the movie I wanted to make within the parameters I had which were none....I mean I made it between editing two issues of Fangoria, and I had a little bit of time and we shot it in - I think if you calculate it in the amount of hours, it was forty-eight hours or something like that - not straight, but little bits and drips and drabs here and there....a lot of pick up shots in between. You know, I wrote it, I edited it, I shot it, I produced it and I did the whole score for it too. It's a silent film....a real art piece....and it's wall to wall sound. I did the music and the complete sound design for it....everything. So it's like my little baby......again it's an art piece, it's more like and installation than a traditional movie. So the fact that it's been embraced by some people is really cool. I don't know if it's a good movie or a bad movie, but I know if you look at other indie horror films out there right now, there's nothing like it, I do know that. I will say that with pride...for better, for worse there's nothing else like my movie out there to compare it to.
MC: I know it also screened at Times Scare, in New York. How was that as opposed to an audience at a film fest? Was there a different reaction in that kind of environment and mentality?
CA: Yeah, it's all about the venue. This movie - I mean, it's funny...I went into it, again we had no money, but it was financed through Autonomy Pictures (which is owned by TLA releasing) which is pretty cool and they let me have complete carte blanche and I asked for very little money because I had never made a feature film before and I didn't want any risk and I wanted to do it exactly like this. I wanted to create an immersive experience and I think it really plays well if you're trapped by it. It's about the last two days of this dying vampire and the two people who surround her, that are just as fucked up as her, in this little shitty motel by the sea. The intention was the trap an audience in this environment as well and really kind of batter them down with sound and depressing, repetitive imagery. It's not a fun movie....it's not an explicit film, it's quite romantic, really, but it's definitely not a lot of fun....you don't come out of there clicking your heels and saying "That movie was awesome!"
So it does work really well in the theater, I find, when the sound is really complex and you have a really great sound system, it really does give you this feeling that you're wandering around in this environment for seventy minutes or whatever. So, festival crowds are interesting because it's kind of like people wander into the movie blind and it is the kind of movie where you'll really like it, or you won't. You need a bit of patience for it and you need to have a certain leaning towards European films of a certain vintage to really gravitate towards it. I've had walk-outs at festivals, and I'm totally fine with that, I've walked out of a million movies...so you don't have to love the film. Times Scare was cool because everybody who was there, kinda wanted to be there, which was interesting. It was this play date....it was not part of a festival....you had to get off your ass specifically to go see this movie. We had a nice crowd and a huge venue.Times Scare, I don't know if you've been there, but it's unbelievable. It's a four floor haunted house, it's got a bar, restaurant, a theater.....it's freakin' amazing! So the venue was great, the people were great and it was kinda like a homecoming because Fangoria is based in New York so all my compadres were there, so I got to see some people I don't always see all the time, you know I run Fango from Toronto, so it was nice. It was a great experience and seeing my name and the movie....taking a cab back to the hotel and seeing the huge marquee in Times Square....there's the name of the movie and my name in blood, you've gotta laugh at how surreal it is! I spent nothing on this movie, it's so small...this little private hobby movie and next thing you know, there it is! It's pretty outrageous, really!
MC: I know you are a huge fan of Jess Franco and Jean Rollin. Their films are stylistically very beautiful and very challenging. I think it's a very interesting style to choose as a first feature film. Can you tell us about the genesis of the film and the thought process behind it?
CA: It's funny, I edit Fangoria and I always tried to draw the line in the sand saying "This is not a Fangoria movie" and make sure we know that....and people sometimes expect because you've got the name Fangoria floating around it in orbit that it's going to be some landmark blood and guts horror masterpiece, which was never my intention to make. I wanted to make one of those longing, romantic, meditative movies coming out of Europe that I've loved. I've always loved those movies because usually I would catch them on television when I was a kid at certain points...and sometimes I was bored by them, sometimes I fell asleep, sometimes I'd wake up in the middle of them and see bits and pieces. They had a certain haunting, REALLY haunting atmospheric quality that would make me keep revisiting and revisiting. For better or for worse, they were auteur pictures....I mean these guys like Franco and Rollin and I'll throw Werner Herzog though he's on a different level, but he's still an inspiration. They were making these very personal, lower budgeted films that, especially with Rollin and Franco, were horror movies but took place in the natural world. So, a lot of natural locations and they held their shots for long periods of time so it almost felt like you were watching a series of moving photographs.
I really appreciate that studied, meditative quality that you don't see anymore. People are afraid, especially in horror, to lose the interest of the audience. So they have to completely inundate you with as much image and information as you can. It doesn't give the audience any time to breath or think. So I went the other way....some criticisms are that the movie are that it's too slow, so maybe I went too far off one end, but that was by design what I wanted to do. I love all movies, but these are films that specifically appeal to me because they felt so alien and so beautiful and so exotic and I really wanted to try and capture that quality.
MC: Did you use any of those famous "Franco Zooms"?
CA: No, I didn't, you know the thing about Franco and Rollin......I love their bodies of work and I love their sensibilities and I love them as, again, auteurs or artists. Rollin was incredibly intelligent and a real poet...and Franco is a genius, really. Sometimes that's not evident in their work. You know, sometimes their sloppy and somethings are rushed and they were also tied into the sexploitation market, so, sometimes they had to throw in all this explicit sex and money shots that really felt like they didn't necessarily belong - they're cool - but they didn't really belong in the movie. If anything it kinda ruins some of the poetry of the film. So I was very disciplined in my zoom lenses. There are zooms in it, but they are very sloooow zooms. There's that opening of Jess Franco's Female Vampire, or Erotikill, or Bare Breasted Countess....whatever you want to call it, where Lina Romay walked towards the camera completely stark naked - big bush of a vagina - and Franco filming her, she's walking, and she walks right into the camera and her vagina bounces off the lens! I always found that really amazing and stupid. No one's vagina bumps off the lens in Blood For Irina, but I love the fact that Franco was SO into that shot, that he let it linger for so long, that it it becomes absolutely absurd. There's stuff like that, there are moments in this movie where the shot goes on for so long, that you feel trapped by it and you're kind of frustrated by it that it goes on and on, but if you stick with it, eventually it becomes trans-formative like that. But no, there aren't those crazy ass Wakka Wakka Bang Bang zooms in Blood for Irina, it's a little more disciplined, I think.
MC: I know you're no stranger to music, having released four or five albums at this point. Was music ever something you thought of taking a career path in, or was it always films?
CA: To me everything is music. All the great writers are musicians, even if they're not by trade, you have to have an ear for music to understand how the rhythms of dialog work. Movies are the same way. Everyone is making movies these days. I see tons of independent films and not necessarily everyone should be. To me the editing is music, so the way you're cutting the film can sometimes be atonal and drag you right out of the movie because it's just tone deaf, it's terrible. To me, music is everywhere, I'm always plugged into the way a movie sounds, but even a silent movie.....if you watch certain silent films, like Potemkin or something like that, and you watch it without any kind of orchestral backup, it's still cut like music. The scene of going up the steps, in Potemkin, particularly is basically a symphony in itself of just metric cuts. So, you know, to me film music, writing, it's all part of the same deal....it's something primal, really. It's image, it's sound, it's communication, it's completely primal to us as a species.
So blah, blah, blah, long story short, when I went to film school, which was in the mid 90's- this was before digital had taken over everything- it was very expensive to make movies. We would use Bolex, 16mm, and it would cost thirty bucks to buy a roll of two minute film, you don't use all of that film, you try your best and try not to fuck up, but you know you'll only be using a few seconds in the final cut. Then it costs another thirty bucks to develop that roll, so you've got sixty bucks for two minutes of film that you're not going to necessarily use all of it. It was a very expensive concept to make independent films for me when I was broke and in college. Music, however, was something that I could do for free because I had all the instruments, I had the ability and I had the creativity. When I quit film school, I started a band, it was an experimental music band, I did film installations with the performance and came into this whole beat from that angle and that's what lead to journalism. I was a publicist at Warner Brothers Films in Canada and became a writer for About Movies for many years and still progressed the music at the same time and all those roads kinda came together when it came to making this movie.
MC: I was first introduced to your writings in Rue Morgue Magazine, my favorite column was your Schizoid Cinephile column. I really latched on and identified because I've always been a huge fan of trash cinema....the babies nobody loves so to speak....movies like Beast of the Yellow Night, which I love so much. How did you come to write for Rue Morgue?
CA: It was very simple. I've always loved this stuff, I always say since I was three years old, and that's true. My Dad liked weird movies...well he was always accused of not liking good movies. So he always had a strange sensibility. I remember him going to see the movie Somewhere in Time, based on Richard Matheson's Bid Time Return, with Christopher Reeve, and him rhaphsodising for a decade that it's the greatest fucking movie ever made, like forget Gone with the Wind or King Kong or anything like that....this is the greatest movie ever made...and yet everywhere you looked it was bad reviews. But he was adamant that he could defend exactly why he loved that film, it was very personal. I always appreciated that. So since I've been three I've loved horror movies, the macabre and KISS and subversive looking things and things that look like they should belong in the natural world and it's just always been what I do. Comic books, all that shit and it's always been embraced, I was always allowed to like that, so it was never really taboo.
As far as how I came to write for Rue Morgue.....Rue Morgue was a free magazine in Toronto, it was Issue #2, I think and Rod Gudiño would write the whole mag under various pseudonyms....and I found it free at a Goth clothing store- when I was a dopey little Goth teenager guy- and there was an article on Tomb of the Blind Dead. This is really before the Internet took the choke hold....to me it was like "Who the hell has seen Tombs of the Blind Dead, besides me?" I remember it was on Big Box VHS when I was a kid and I actually spent thirty-five dollars on a used copy at a mom and pop video store because no one else wanted it...but the guy charged me thirty-five bucks and I held onto it with a death grip because it was just a masterpiece....and it was a great essay on what a masterpiece this movie was. So I was so excited I almost got hit by a car, because I was reading it walking down the street. I called the number that was on the masthead and it was Rod's number and I left this long verbal diarrhea message about how much I loved this little magazine and he transcribed it for the next issue and we had a relationship based on that.....and I started working at Warner Brothers and then I started working at Rue Morgue when they were in their infancy on that level for promotions. Then I just said listen, let me write for the mag....he gave me a bunch of movies to review, I reviewed them, he loved it and within a year, I had my own column and I was six or seven years with Rue Morgue, did the radio show, DJing their parties, writing extensively and again it was just following the passions and following up with the passions too, I didn't just let it go. I didn't just want to be a reader of Rue Morgue, I wanted to be a part of it.
MC: One day it seemed like you just disappeared from Rue Morgue and then next thing I knew, Tony Timpone stepped down from Fangoria and I see your name on the masthead as Editor in Chief. How did that come about?
CA: Well it's strange. I read an interview with John Carpenter recently where he was talking about working with Charles Band in his early career and how "after the nuclear war, there will be cockroaches and Charles Band left" because Charles Band never practices failure. He never fails....and he flunks non-stop, but he never personally fails because ever time he's about to flunk with a project, he's got about ten others in the pipeline ready to rock. So, he's always working, he's always moving, always busy and whether you like Band or not, or his work, you gotta appreciate that sensibility. I've always appreciated that sensibility, so I've always had a lot of things on the go at any given time.
The gulf between leaving Rue Morgue and getting the job at Fango, is actually about three years. With Rue Morgue, it was simply the concept of wanting the moon and not wanting to settle with the little condo on the space station. I really loved the stuff, I really wanted to be a part of it....in this short finite period of life I really wanted to pursue what I can do with it and Rue Morgue wanted to keep the foot on my head, which is the truth. They wouldn't pay me- and I've said this openly several times, with no ill will towards Rod Gudiño anymore, but it was a bit disparaging at the time- they wouldn't pay me any more to stay at Rue Morgue, but they wouldn't allow me to write for Fangoria or any other horror magazines because it was the competition and I was a columnist and on the radio...I was one of their featured guys. I said, "You know, I have a child now and I gotta live. There aren't many horror magazines out there, man, and this is what I do, so if you wanna keep me exclusively, you're gonna have to make it work for me a little more too." Basically he said "No, you're gonna have to make a choice." and I said "Well, that's not fair, I'm making my choice and I'm walking away from this." It was scary, because I'm in Toronto and Rue Morgue was horror in Toronto, so everyone was basically saying "You're gonna isolate yourself from the horror community." and that made me wanna leave more, because I hate scenes. Despise them. I was like, "You know what, the love of this stuff has nothing to do with being part of a scene. Conveying your passion articulately for this has nothing to do with making the scene or showing up to the bar on a Friday night with the Rue Morgue crew." So I said "Fuck that" and I left them and I went to Fangoria which was great because Rue Morgue never did set visits or anything, suddenly Fango letting me do all that and I became the Canadian Guy up here. I was doing all the set stuff for Fango, which was amazing. Big opportunities to meet people and see how the magic works of film making and it was a real education and just a real life changer.
As far as taking over Fango, I don't know, I just stuck with it....I stuck with it, I was always there, I was always pitching ideas, I was always showing up and I was very resourceful. At the same time I was also freelancing for Metro News, The Toronto Star and Dark Side out in the UK and Wired Magazine. My fingers were in a lot of pies, I was always moving and so I had a lot of connections. I could get basically anybody on the phone at any time so a lot of the pieces I was bringing them were pretty neat, you know, hanging out with Nicolas Cage and getting him to imitate his character from Vampire's Kiss and being able to post that on the site without being assigned that just being able to go out and do it. So, I think after a couple years of doing that, the Powers-That-Be wanted to switch things up there anyway, because Fangoria was getting a bit stale and one day they just asked me. There's so much detail in this story and I'm trying to be as quick as I can, but I"m still talking your head off!
MC: NOOO! That's fine!
CA: I had just two children at the time- I make a lot of babies- I have three boys. I was so tired...I was teaching at the same time as writing. I was driving back from teaching film history at the film college here, and I was so tired that I wasn't paying attention to the road and somebody hit me and knocked my car in the air and flipped it. My arm went out the window and rode on it's side. I was thinking I was gonna die and all the skin on my arm was completely like Hellraiser, it de-gloved me and ripped me up. I had to pull my arm back in, I ejected myself from my seatbelt rolled onto the ceiling and rolled out the passenger window, ran away from the car while it was upside down rolling the street and it was a shocker and real wake up call to screw my head on a little bit tighter. Lost on the skin on my arm....it was not pretty. But I was right back on the horse, got out of the hospital and off I went. So, like a week later, I was in a used record store picking up some DVD's and shit and I was completely bandaged up, my arm is oozing all this puss, it was disgusting, right out of a horror flick. I got a call on my cell out of nowhere and it was Scott, who was part of Fango at the time, he's not there anymore, he basically just said "I don't know what you do for a job outside of this, but do you want a job?" I said "Well, what job is that?" He said "Do you want to edit Fangoria?" and I almost fuckin' fell down!
Here I had this traumatic, like near death experience where, again I feel like Uncle Frank in Hellraiser....no fun. I don't know what my next moves going to be and the suddenly the next move just lands in my lap....and it was just as easy as that. Obviously I didn't need any time to think about it, I said yes! Tony moved on to other things.... the
VOD stuff for the company on a different level and I took over the mag. Over three years now, and I think three very successful years by many fan reactions that people are fairly satisfied with some of the changes I've made and the energy I'm putting into it, so I think it's going okay!
MC: It was around the same time that you released your first book, Chris Alexanders's Blood Spattered Book. What was the thought process behind that?
MC: Very Cool! And you have a new book coming out: The Twilight Zone Legacy, which is an episode by episode breakdown of the series?
CA: Yeah, in fact that's what I'm doing right now. This book is giving me a great excuse to do what I love, and I would do it anyway, but now I feel like I have a purpose to do it instead of just leisure....and that's watch The Twilight Zone over and over, read everything I can about The Zone and that's what I'm doing right now, while I'm working on the mag is just watching The Twilight Zone in the background. There's a handful of things that I love. That I love, I love, I love. I am a man of passion, if you will and I don't hide any of that, I wear it on my sleeve. Horror Films, KISS, Twilight Zone. I think that's the Holy Trifecta right there. The three major non-living things, that I will love until my dying day and obsess over because they have done so much for me, personally and have been there as friends for me my whole life and has transformed my outlook on humanity, on....on everything! Again, education is where you find it. The smartest people I know, have never stepped foot in a University. So long story short, I love The Zone. I love KISS too, I managed to do The Official KISS Magazine for a while there too, which is great, but this is another level because The Zone is such a big part of my life and Serling, to me, is one of the greatest of writers of all time of any period. There's a great melancholy about his work........just really beautiful stories of people, masked in this science fiction and fantasy and horror sheen. There have been, obviously, a million books written about The Zone and Marc Scott Zicree's episode guide is indispensable and he's been such a force, but I think he's been the "go-to" guy for a long time when it comes to The Twilight Zone and I do have some issues with his assessments of each show. I sometimes find him very dismissive, especially when it comes to Season Five, which is largely booed upon by the purists and I think it's just a fantastic final act to the show.....and he's very dismissive of it. I'm not. There are so many elements that are at work in The Twilight Zone that are interlinked and that reflect other things that were going on at the time, with Hollywood and Television. Whether it be actors that showed up and repeatedly showed up in the show or some of the themes that were going on. Some of the music, the musicians, the scores the sound effects libraries that were exploited in some episodes. I've watched these things to death and I think I'm ready now to analyse from stem to stern each and every episode in there as well as round up some of my "famous friends"- who love the show as well- from every corner of the pop culture universe and call on them to tell me what their favorite episode is- or episodes are- and how it's influenced their work. I think if you're a Zone fan, that's a huge part of it: Saying "Remember that one where....." and "And then at the end it turns out it's a cook book..." You know, everyone loves to do that. So this is a two fold book. On hand, it's an episode guide, an intelligent, articulate episode guide for the show and then on the other hand, it's a big, huge party with all kinds of crazy guest stars sitting around waxing nostalgic on why they love the show and which episodes they love.
MC: That's awesome!
CA: I hope so! I'm in the process now and it won't be out until next year, but I think it's going to be good!
MC: That's a massive undertaking...there's one hundred and fifty six episodes! Here on Midnight Cinephile, I'd started a similar project a while back....going episode by episode and not so much review them as writing my feelings on them. I had to take a break because I started watching so many, I got backed up!
CA: It is massive, but again, I've been watching Twilight Zone obsessively since I was a little boy and I have every episode on VHS, I have every episode on DVD and I have every episode on Blu Ray. I have scads of books and technically I never need to watch The Twilight Zone again because each and every one, even the minor ones, are branded onto my brain. But now I'm approaching this from a different angle, where I'm looking for the elements that maybe I missed the first time around and I can revisit it. And I never get tired of it, you know? I've seen every single on multiple times and I will never, ever get sick of this show. Ever. So it's a massive undertaking, but it's a joy, it really is.
MC: Back to Blood For Irina, I heard it was coming out on Blu Ray and DVD in May, is that correct?
CA: Yep. That's right! May 13th, I think, is the target release date in North America, France and the UK.
MC: And who's handling the release on that?
CA: Autonomy Pictures put it out. Autonomy was created by TLA so they could release The Bunny Game. This is their second release, but the first one that they actually funded, which is interesting. It is radically different than The Bunny Game, it's funny, it's just as cheap but....well The Bunny Game starts with a blow job and continues on for the next hour with screaming....and the basement and my film is not that at all, it goes the complete other direction. So they're interesting companion pieces to each other as far as low budget independent genre film making goes. I think both are interesting sides of perhaps the same coin. But it is Autonomy putting it out, or if you will TLA Releasing, the parent company.
MC: Are there going to be any special features?
CA: Yep. I wrote the movie around the fact that there's this grungy motel from the thirties that had not been changed at all that they were ripping down, so I figured "I have this much money, what can I conceivably sell?" It has to be a single character piece, really, you have a really interesting single character piece and use the local areas around this motel. To have the motel be like Dracula's Castle, have the death of the motel mirror the death of this character, who's trapped in this motel, which is very heavy handed that way. So we shot a lot in this motel and in the Special Features are the destruction of the motel. The motel was destroyed after we shot, so it's kinda like the end of this location, the end of the movie, and it's kind of an interesting coda to the film. We also have commentary with the stars as well as myself....a real fun commentary....so in a way, it's kind of like film school, because we tell you everything that we did. From using iPhones to shoot stuff, to everything we did in a guerrilla way.....we never shot with any kind of permit of any kind, to make an entertainment. So it's an interesting, fun commentary. We've got deleted scenes, because originally I had a lot more footage in this thing, you know like every movie, it comes down to the crunch and certain things don't work but they're still nice shots, so I threw all that stuff in there for fun....as well as stills. We have thousands of beautiful still from the movie, there's some real beauty in this film, I think. They'll be put together in a way, with all my music...basically the alternative to sitting through the film, you can actually just sit back and watch the still gallery put to the music, which is kind of interesting. And finally, the music itself is available in an isolated track, so you'll be able to just enjoy the great diverse, in depth music I created for the movie, by itself.
MC: Are there any more films in your future?
CA: Yeah, there's one right now and hopefully Autonomy will be backing it. I think they will. It's going to cost more than Blood For Irina, but you know there's a lot of waste, and I've been on a million film sets and there are wasters in Hollywood. I'm not a Hollywood filmmaker, I never want to be. I want to make personal films and I don't want to waste anything, I want all the budget to be amplified on screen and I think you can do that. If you take control of it, and because I can do it all, I might as well keep doing it. So the next movie is kind of a companion piece to Blood For Irina, but it's expansive. It's much bloodier, it's much darker, it's much more surreal and it's called The Queen of Blood, with no relation to the Curtis Harrington movie...well sort of it is, in some respects, but I don't want to spoil it. It's kind of an homage to that film, in a way. I'm fully prepared. I love Jean Rollin, I love the fact that he made these female vampire movies over and over and over again. Revisiting themes and expanding them with many of the same cast members and I love that idea of doing this casual thing and making these kind of sensual vampire films with many of the same cast members. So that's what this next one will be....a new expansive companion piece to the first one, with kind of a wild west theme. I don't want to get too much into it, it's kinda weird, but there's definitely another one coming!
MC: That sounds awesome!
CA: I hope so! The music too! With Blood for Irina, I wrote the music first and then kinda built the movie around the moods of the music so this is gonna have to be the same way, with a lot fuller score, I think, but I'm going to write all the music first and then invent the movie, to some degree, some of the images will be invented around the music.
MC: Horror films seem to emerge with a different theme in each decade, The Fifties Monster Movies, The Eighties Slasher Boom....the first decade of the new millennium was labeled as the Torture Porn decade. Where would you like to see the genre go in the next decade? It seems to me it's still trying to formulate itself and doesn't really know what it is.....
CA: Well, it depends what we're talking about. That's always a question that I don't really have an answer for. Everywhere you look, every corner of the globe, everyone's got their own style from a cultural stand of making a horror film. We're at the point now where there's so many different sub-genres. If we're talking about what's leading the pack, commercially in Hollywood....well it's pat and parcel with what's going on in the world. Torture Porn films emerge after the Internet, and what's freely available and how hard it is to shock people and disturb them anymore. People don't want the cerebral shocks, they want the visceral shocks. Saw and Hostel did very well, so off you go. I think we're at the level where these movies have become kind of laughable. If I see another movie where a girl is duct taped to a chair.....ugh, I can't do it anymore. Brutality is not amusing to me, it's just lazy. It's just lazy fucking shit and when I see independent films, especially, that exploit that ad nauseam, all I see is unimaginative film making. If I see people dropping the "F Bomb" every two minutes in that same context, again I see unimaginative film making....and people that don't understand what makes horror films special.....just trying to be "hardcore"....and not understanding that they're not being "hardcore" at all, they're being very safe and boring.
So for me, commercially in Hollywood, it's interesting. I don't know, I like all movies, all over the place. If a trend isn't appealing to me, I'll just look somewhere else. I just saw the Mexican/Argentinian film Here Comes The Devil, and that blew my fucking mind......but that's my kind of movie. There's certain kind of movies I like, I like slow burning, surreal, dark, minimalist films.....those are the horror films that really, really speak to me and have an emotional kind of heft to them as opposed to a narrative one. So Here Comes The Devil, just fit perfectly, but it would bomb if it ever played or came to Hollywood, right? Though someone would remake it and radically change it. So, I don't know where horror movies are going, I know that the technology is such that anyone now can make a horror movie and I think that's a double edged sword. So there's going to be a glut of films on the market place, which could be a good thing, it might not be. I think the most important thing we can say is that people will keep dying and as longs as people keep dying and The Powers-That-Be will keep fucking up the world enough that people are paranoid and anxious at all times about their demise and their lifespans and the fate of the planet, we'll keep seeing horror films. Horror films that will echo that anxiety and kind of diffuse that anxiety too. So horror movies will always, always be here and some way, shape or form.
I'll say this: I'm getting sick of zombies. The Walking Dead is a masterpiece, but hopefully independent filmmakers will stop making zombie movies, because I'm tired of people running around with ketchup and putty on their face, chasing each other around their back yards.
MC: Here, here! It's about time those end.
CA: Yeah, I'm done. World War Z looks fun. I read the book....they didn't run around like mad men in the book, but that's okay. But that's a different movie....that's a big Hollywood apocalypse movie and the zombie thing will take a backseat to the contagion element of it. Other than that, yeah. Zombies....you don't need this many zombie films anymore. Please. Go away.
*********************************************************************************
Many thanks to Chris for taking time out of his insanely busy schedule to chat with me! Fangoria Issue #321 is currently out, so chiggity check it out....and make sure you check out Blood for Irina when it hits DVD and Blu Ray on May 13th!
Thursday, August 16, 2012
Fangoria Poster #4
Hell yeah! It's Gaiking from the excellent anime Demon Dragon of the Heavens Gaiking
(大空魔竜ガイキング Daikū Maryū Gaikingu)
It was also shown in America as part of Force Five.
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Fangoria's 300th Issue!
This month marks a pretty amazing landmark for horrorphiles. This month marks Fango's 300th issue!
A brief history of Fango's humble beginnings......
Fango started it's life as a fantasy magazine. Originally conceived to be the "fantasy sister" to Starlog magazine. It was originally to be called Fantastica, it was changed after Fantastic Films brought suit on an "unfair trade" basis. stating that consumers would be confused by the two magazine titles. Thus it was rebranded Fangoria. The first six issues were considered to be failures, loosing the publisher about $20,000 per issue! That's not a small chunk of change! However, there was a great response to an article in issue #1 about Tom Savini's Special FX work on Dawn of the Dead. Also, with the publisher sure that failure was imminent, they allowed editor Robert "Uncle Bob" Martin to reshape the magizines focus in a direct that he belived would work......which was focusing on horror. Issue #7's cover featured Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, with ol' Jack's face glaring at us!
This is where Fango really started to take off! Thank God Uncle Bob listened to the fans who wrote in tellin' him what they wanted! My first issue of Fango was #113, which sported the Alien3 cover. It was love at first sight! I'll never forget browsing through that issue for the first time. Being a video game geek as well, I went nuts over the article Horror In Gaming. As a matter of fact, a recent conversation with my brother in law spurred me to break out my back issue collection and re-read that article. Subsequently, I've been trying to track down many of the games mentioned in that article. But that will be a blog for another time!
Fango started it's life as a fantasy magazine. Originally conceived to be the "fantasy sister" to Starlog magazine. It was originally to be called Fantastica, it was changed after Fantastic Films brought suit on an "unfair trade" basis. stating that consumers would be confused by the two magazine titles. Thus it was rebranded Fangoria. The first six issues were considered to be failures, loosing the publisher about $20,000 per issue! That's not a small chunk of change! However, there was a great response to an article in issue #1 about Tom Savini's Special FX work on Dawn of the Dead. Also, with the publisher sure that failure was imminent, they allowed editor Robert "Uncle Bob" Martin to reshape the magizines focus in a direct that he belived would work......which was focusing on horror. Issue #7's cover featured Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, with ol' Jack's face glaring at us!
This is where Fango really started to take off! Thank God Uncle Bob listened to the fans who wrote in tellin' him what they wanted! My first issue of Fango was #113, which sported the Alien3 cover. It was love at first sight! I'll never forget browsing through that issue for the first time. Being a video game geek as well, I went nuts over the article Horror In Gaming. As a matter of fact, a recent conversation with my brother in law spurred me to break out my back issue collection and re-read that article. Subsequently, I've been trying to track down many of the games mentioned in that article. But that will be a blog for another time! Since that fate ful day in June, 1992 I've been hooked on this magazine. Ninteen years and 187 issues later, I still anxiously await each new issue. Especially now that the reigns have been shifted again, this time to one Chris Alexander. The Schizoid Cinephile himself....the man who faced Dr. Uwe Boll in a boxing match and lived to tell about it! See before Chris took over the magazine was feeling a bit strained....and was getting perhaps a bit wonky. Not that wonky is a bad thing....some of my favorite movies are wonky........Killers From Space, anyone? I digress. After Mr. Alexander took over, he started to breath new life into the mag. He brought in some new ideas that not only made the magazine seem fresh and new yet also brought a warm nostalgia back to the magazine. All your favorites are still there....Monster Invasion, Dr. Cyclops, Nightmare Library.....but there are also some new columns in "The Gravy". The Trash Compactor, Sound Shock and The Monster of the Month are all excellent new additions that remind my why I fell in love with the magazine in the first place!
What can you expect from issue #300? It is crammed from cover to cover with the 300 greatest horror films ever......as composed by the Fango staff as well as some guest writers from the genre world. I'm only about halfway through the mag (been a bit busy lately) but I can tell you that ever title listed is indeed a fantastic movie. It's not meant to be a list of definitive all time great movies....but rather a list of the movies that these folks hold near and dear to thier hearts. I respect that. That is why I continue to love Fangoria and I'll be eargerly awaiting the next 300 issues!
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