Halloween is a week from now, and there’s one very special way to celebrate it in Evans City, Pennsylvania this year, at Gary Streiner’s 2nd Annual Living Dead Festival. Recently, I interviewed Gary about his role in the production of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. Through Gary, I was able to interview another of the key people involved in the film: his brother, the producer and the actor who played Johnny, Russell Streiner.
Russ was an important part of the Latent Image, a commercial filmmaking company which he founded with George Romero. He’s since gone on to work on many films with another NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD collaborator, John Russo. Russ was gracious enough to take some time today and discuss the legacy of the zombie classic with me, for his fans at Icons of Fright.
Phil Fasso: How did you first get involved with George Romero?
Russ Streiner: I started off wanting to be an actor, which I pursued through high school. And after high school, I went to the Pittsburgh Playhouse School of the Theatre, and graduated from their two-year acting program. While I was there, I was working in stage shows at night, and at one of those, I was cast with another fellow. His name was Rudy Ricci, and we shared a dressing room. Rudy had been attending classes at Carnegie Mellon University (back then it was called Carnegie Tech). He was taking art classes there, and he met George Romero in an art class. George was transplanted, from the Bronx to Pittsburgh, to go to Carnegie Tech’s School of Painting and Design. Rudy brought George over to one of our shows one night, and that’s how I first got to meet him. Then, within maybe six or eight months, George called me and asked me if I would be willing to be an actor in a movie that he was putting together, called EXPOSTULATIONS. And I told him I would. I showed up for my very first day of production, and really became intrigued with the whole film production part of the business, which I knew nothing about. I stuck with EXPOSTULATIONS as an actor, and then also helped out on the crew. That’s how George and I first met. And we went on to set up a business and worked together for about 10 years.
PF: How did your experience in commercials and industrial films help you to put together a feature film?
RS: Any time you get a chance to practice your craft, whether it’s in short form like TV commercials or longer form like industrials, all of that goes to help you refine your craft. And that’s certainly how our whole group got helped out, all of which led up to 1967, when we did the actual filming of NOTLD.
Read the rest of this interview with a piece of Night of the Living Dead history click the link below.
From Fear.net: Making a horror movie can be a surreal experience. You spend long hours performing terrifying atrocities in front of the camera. Then the director yells “Cut!” and suddenly you’re headed over to the snack table to have a cup of coffee with the person you just disemboweled.
But sometimes, the line between making a realistic horror film and finding yourself knee-deep inside one gets a little too blurry and bloody for comfort. Here are ten of our favorite examples:
PEEPING TOM (1960). Here’s the good news: you get to star in your own movie. Here’s the bad news: the director likes to film his stars as he kills them, so he can capture their true expressions of fear. Talk about method acting. But hey, a gig’s a gig
DEMONS (1985). This Lamberto Bava/Dario Argento production is an example of how even watching a horror movie can get you in trouble. A late night crowd enters a cavernous Berlin movie theater to enjoy a special midnight screening of a new horror film. However, thanks to the presence of a cursed mask from the set of the movie, the monsters of the film come alive inside the theater itself, where they bypass the popcorn and start gnawing their way through the audience.
WES CRAVEN’S NEW NIGHTMARE (1994). ”One, two, Freddy’s really coming for you!” While filming the next installment of the lucrative “Nightmare on Elm Street” franchise, the actual actors and crew members (Heather Langenkamp, Robert Englund, John Saxon, director Wes Craven, etc. all playing themselves) discover they’re being stalked and killed by what appears to be a real life Freddy Krueger in Craven’s mind-bending twist on the creative process.
From ShockTillYouDrop: While just about every major horror franchise has gotten a videogame (NES gave us the legendarily hard Friday the 13th and “4 Player” Nightmare on Elm St. games in the late ‘80s; Atari had Halloween and Texas Chainsaw Massacre… things they called games), Saw is possibly the only one that would contextually make sense in video game form. Half of the genre games released nowadays start off with someone trapped somewhere without knowing why (like most of the Saw films have), and the series’ locales are the same sort of burnt out warehouses, dungeons, and dilapidated houses that most survival games take place in anyway. In short, it’s no surprise Saw: The Video Game exists, only that it took this long to hit consoles.
Taking place between the first and second films, you play as Detective Tapp (Danny Glover in the first film, but looking/sounding like a much younger guy here thanks to Glover’s refusal to lend his likeness), who Jigsaw apparently took the time to save from his seemingly fatal wounds at the end of the first film. You wake up with a trap on your head, and once you get it off (not very hard), you begin a six to eight hour journey through the halls and rooms of an abandoned insane asylum, avoiding as many traps as you can while pursuing Jigsaw (whose identity is still unknown at this point in the Saw narrative) and occasionally rescuing other characters.
More of the night Horror Etc came home (sorry, can’t help it).
Continuing our retrospective of the Halloween franchise we cover the immediate sequel Halloween 2 (1981), the failed anthology experiment of Halloween 3: Season of the Witch (1982), the Return of Michael Myers in Halloween 4 (1988) and the jumbled mess of Halloween 5 The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989).
Through the course of these films we discuss the evolution of the Loomis character from a stalwart defender against the evil of The Shape to the brink of utter madness. Musical scores, shifting cinematography, character motivations and many more elements play into a truly eclectic film franchise where the central figure of Michael Myers was arguably lost in translation.
The presentation of our retrospective purposefully avoided trivia bits and production anecdotes in favour of general interpretations and impressions of the films themselves and as such…
Spoiler Warning: throughout our conversation the assumption is that the listener has seen the films in question. No attempts are made to suppress story elements and major plot points are discussed freely. Please be warned in advance.
A brief Schlock Corner caps of this week’s Halloween talk (thank you Natalie), and we catch up with Anthony to hear about his UK odyssey.
We always welcome your comments: horroretc@gmail.com
From Fear.net: Some say that clowns get a bad rap. Theory being that a few bad apples have used the guise of the otherwise trustworthy buffoon for their own maniacal missions, trading in red noses and balloon animals for killer candy and deadly ice cream.
So what do you think? Are they misunderstood friends to children and favorites of circus-lovers everywhere or rainbow-clothed jesters of Satan? Check out our list of the most evil clowns around and you be the judge. But beware when they knock you dead, they really knock you dead.
Violator – Spawn
Short on height, but big on girth, this demon-turned clown wants nothing more than to enlist some souls into Satan’s army.
How is this entry going to pick up the pieces five, frankly, left behind?
Patrick Melton: This is our third one out. With fourth and fifth film we were getting our footing on what the fans want. What makes a really good Saw movie, so I think with our third, we have a good grasp on that. It comes down to the “A” story. Not necessarily what John’s doing, or what Hoffman’s doing or what Amanda’s doing. It’s that “A” story that’s going to pull everyone together, the emotional hook. So there’s this new character and he’s going to bring us through to the end. With six, we put effort into it with Kevin to get a really good “A” story. It’s Peter Outerbridge, as William, and he has a connection with John and you’ll understand that early. You’ll understand the journey he has to take. When a trap starts, there’s a much more emotional connection and you’ll be rooting for this guy a bit more than you have rooted for anyone in the past.
Marcus Dustan: In terms of horror movies, Saw has been a nice introduction for four filmmakers so far. James Wan has hit it out of the park. Darren Bousman who is, right now, on Mother’s Day. Then, David Hackl is coming back and introducing a new format to these stories. Kevin Greutert, who has been a storyteller since day one, and he has crafted a tremendous visual story to go along with whatever we could have pounded out on the page. He’s a caring storyteller and he wants every audience member to feel the hit.
Melton: What he does well is, through the script process, he pays attention to the minutiae. That pays off. Especially in horror movies, there are the little things that get you. There are a bunch of little moments that set up the bigger moments.
Dunstan: It’s very emotional, too. For example the traditional Saw score didn’t quite fit this ending. It had to go in a new direction. If you were watching the endings of the previous entries, they have that Charlie Clouser score and on this, when we saw the first testing screening, Kevin was temporarily using other scores like [Requiem for a Dream]. It was building to a bigger moment emotionally. Clouser has busted his ass on this score and it’s aiming for the stands.
From Lunch.com: Takashi Miike is a very inexhaustible and prolific director; the man has directed many different films in different genres that I believe that he is one of the most versatile filmmakers around. He is also arguably one of the most darkly audacious director in contemporary Japanese cinema. “GOZU” (a.k.a. “Cow-head”, Gokudo Kyofu Dai-gekijo: Gozu, 2003) is arguably one of his most mystifying, wanton, provocative and demented displays of Miike’s imagination. Miike re-teams with Sachiko Sato, who adapted “Ichi The Killer” for him. Miike seems to be drawn to the Yakuza gangster themes but believe me when I say that “Gozu” is anything but your standard Yakuza film. I’ve always said that the best way to approach Miike’s films is to have no expectations and the less that you know, the better. The reward into Miike’s films is the journey itself.
Minami (Hideki Sone) is a member of the Azamawari Yakuza crew. He highly respects his Aniki (brother) Ozaki (Sho Aikawa) to whom he is greatly indebted to for his life. However, when Ozaki becomes paranoid and eccentrically imbalanced, Minami is asked by their elder (Renji Ishibashi), to escort him to the yakuza dumping site in Nogoya, Minami becomes torn between his loyalty to Ozaki and following the orders of their boss; but instead Ozaki appears to peg out in the car as soon as they approach their destination and to make matters worst, the corpse goes missing. Now in his quest to authenticate Ozaki‘s death, Minami must find the body; this quest brings him to a nightmarish journey that brings him face to face with several creepy characters from a transvestite restaurant owner (cameo by its writer Sato himself), to Nose, a man with a skin condition (played by Shohei Hino), to a hyper-lactating woman (Keiko Tomita) and her brother (Harumi Sone), a demonic half-human half cow, and mysterious beautiful woman called Sakiko (sexy Yoshino Kamiya).
We all remember the movies that scarred us for life. From killer clowns to ghost tales to Willy Wonka’s trippy tunnel of terror, these sinister villains and monstrous creatures sprang from television sets and theater screens to wreak havoc in our nightmares. Some of them still do. Face your dormant childhood fears by revisiting ten of our favorite scary kidcentric flicks, and tell us if they still keep you up at night.
It (1990)
As if clowns weren’t scary enough on their own, Stephen King had to go and make them even worse. Enter Pennywise the Dancing Clown, a shape-shifting, ubiquitous and all-powerful being that dwells in the sewers and devours children by feeding on their greatest fears. This two-part miniseries scared the bejeezus out of the children (and adults) of the ‘90s. Let us remind you why:
“Cat people” and “dog people” will argue until the end of time about which make better companions; cat people think dogs are dumb, dog people think cats are sneaky, untrustworthy jerks. When it comes to horror movies, though, there’s no debate: Dogs win, paws down. Cats may have a spookier reputation in real life, but on screen the canine competition gets all the glory; they’re louder and their teeth are bigger, after all. Here are some fiendish Fido-flavored flicks (I can’t believe I just wrote that) that may cause you to switch sides in the pet wars.
The Breed
Though riddled with stereotypical (and largely stupid) characters, corny one-liners and a bad case of explaining-too-much-itis, The Breed is still a better movie than you’d expect. A group of college students are spending the weekend on an island that happens to be home to a research laboratory… and here come the angry, genetically-mutated doggies! A familiar setup, sure. But the action is fierce and the dogs are 100 percent D-O-G. CGI be damned!
Cujo
Based on the novel by Stephen King, Cujo is the mack daddy of all killer dog movies, in no small part thanks to the fact that it stars scream queen Dee Wallace. Even though — or, perhaps, because — the action is largely confined to the area in and around the car in which one big, slobber hell hound has trapped Donna Trenton (Wallace) and her young son, Tad (Danny Pintauro), it’s tense and horrifying all the way through.
Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell
No, the titular Devil Dog isn’t a delicious chocolaty snack cake — he’s the canine spawn of Satan! Or something like that, anyway. See, a bunch of Satanists decide the best way to take over the world is to unleash a pack of German Shepherd puppies infused with devil-tastic badness. When smitten families bring home the adorable little buggers, the pups will hypnotize people into becoming Satanists! What can I say? It’s a complicated and clumsy plan… but who cares? This 1978 made-for-TV flick stars the kids from the Witch Mountain movies and is every bit as silly as you’d expect.
Welcome to Mutantville Productions MVP Blog. Join Streebo, Brento, Geo & the rest of the Mutantville Players as they set sail on the high seas of guerrilla filmmaking in their ongoing quest to bring you the finest in genre entertainment.
from Icons of Fright:
