The Revenant is a horror/dark-comedy set to release in the Fall of 2009. Director Kerry Prior took the time to chat about his new film and his long career with HYB’s Morgan Suszek.

rev⋅e⋅nant   [rev-uh-nuhnt]
–noun
1. a person who returns.
2. a person who returns as a spirit after death; ghost.

Horror Yearbook: Kerry, could you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Kerry Prior: I’m from Cleveland; I’m an Aries; my favorite color is purple no wait, blue; I don’t have any pets; right now my feet are cold, so I think I’ll put on some socks. I just directed a movie called THE REVENANT.

HYB: What’s your favorite scary movie (the ones you’ve worked on do count)?

KP: That’s a tough one. The easy answer would be to say that I don’t have a favorite, and offer a list of ten of my favorites, but that’s a copout, isn’t it? If I had to pick one, I guess it would have to be ROSEMARY’S BABY. No, wait, THE SHINING. I’ll have to think about it. If I had to recommend a movie that I’ve seen recently that would truly have you on the edge of your seat with terror, one that would disturb you for days after viewing it, then I would recommend IRREVERSIBLE, by Gaspar NoÈ with Monica Bellucci, but it’s arguable that that isn’t even a horror movie. But you did say “scary” movie. Oh, wait REFLECTIONS OF EVIL, by Damon Packard; now there’s a scary movie. It paints a picture of society as utterly horrifying; it leaves you feeling ill; it’s hilarious, and frightening and brilliant. And there’s this scene with a young Steven Spielberg . . . Damon Packard is a genius. I met him in an airport once; he was on the way to England to talk to some people about funding a movie or some such thing, so I introduced myself. When it came time to shoot THE REVENANT I called him; he was going to come to the set and do a cameo. We scheduled him in but on the day the 2nd AD couldn’t get a hold of him. He was a no show. No hard feelings. I still think he’s a genius. I didn’t answer your question, did I?

HYB: I’d say that was close enough. Kerry, when it comes to your FX work you’ve got quite the resume: A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: Dream Master, Phantasm II, Phantasm III: Lord of the Dead, Phantasm IV: Oblivion, The Lost Boys, Bubba Ho-Tep the list goes on. What, in your opinion, is the best thing you’ve done FX wise?

KP: I don’t know. I never really worked on that one thing where I’ve had both enough money and enough influence where I can say, that’s really representative of what I can create for this project. That’s something I wouldn’t change. I look back on my days at DreamQuest; that was a really fun time. I was working with people who were at the cutting edge of the industry on some terrific big budget projects NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, TOTAL RECALL, THE BLOB, THE ABYSS. I met Jim Cameron, Michael Jackson, Richard Edlund. And it was a time where the visual effects industry was exploding. DreamQuest, Boss Films, Apogee, and ILM dominated the industry and were all in competition. There were a lot of incredible, creative personalities doing amazing things. I’m best known for my work on smaller films where I had more influence, but less money. I think I created some good stuff for the money. But I look at that work now and think it’s crude and even silly. But technology is completely different now. You wouldn’t approach it the same way at all. We are doing gags on THE REVENANT in ways that we wouldn’ t even have thought of ten years ago. Why use a rubber severed (name your appendage) when you can comp in a real one digitally far cheaper and to better effect?

HYB: When it comes to directing you’re still getting your feet wet, if you will. The Revenant marks your second setting in the director’s chair, and forgive me for not being familiar with your first work Roadkill, but coming from an FX background did you find it difficult to cross-over?

KP: My sights have been set on directing since I was in film school so it didn’t seem like a transition at all. While I love effects work, it was always a way to make a living until I can get my directing career off the ground. I’ve written several screenplays, short fiction, some commercial copy it’s all story telling. I was nervous during pre-production; not sleeping, anxious; but as the shoot approached and everything fell into place, I relaxed, and by the time we turned over I was totally comfortable and at home on the set.

HYB: As a follow up question, did Roadkill ever get a wide release and, if so, where can I get my hands on a copy?

KP: ROADKILL was never released. The financier never finished funding the movie, and it was never completed. It was a long and painful struggle, and a story better told over a drink, or in your (read: my) therapist’s office. I still own the rights to the film, so maybe in the future I’ll scab it together and get it out there.

Is there any director in particular, or directors, that have really inspired you to take on the challenge that is directing?

KP: If you mean, are there directors who inspire me or inform my work, yes I love Polanski, Kubrick, Scorcese the usual lineup. Paul Verhoven is terrific. I think Michael Haneke is incredible; brilliant, intense, dark, and sometimes hilarious. If you mean, was there one particular person I know who encouraged me to direct it would probably be my old friend Gerald Hughs, who I met in Film School.

HYB: Independent films rely on support from those involved as well as the audience the film is geared towards. Compared to your directorial debut would you say The Revenant has earned more of a following?

KP: Well, ROADKILL had no following. I also directed another movie in the interim, which met a similar unfortunate end, and it did gain a bit of a following mostly on college campuses around LA. But already, on the Internet, THE REVENANT has gotten an incredible amount of attention. People write and say they can’t wait to see it; rumors are passed around about release dates and such; we’ve had several distributors approach us already without having seen the film. We have a leg ion of fans and nobody has even seen it yet.

HYB: Not only are you directing The Revenant but you’re stretching your writing wings as well. May I ask what inspired this black comedy of undead proportions?

KP: I always thought the vampire was a terrific creature, a great macabre monster. But the common vision of the vampire is largely a construct of Hollywood. It is a creature that slowly evolved over the last hundred years starting where Bram Stoker left off with every new movie, a new permutation. Now vampires can fly and have super powers, and they burst into flames when hit with sunlight, and explode into dust clouds when tagged with a wooden stake they have evolved into super heroes that drink blood. And of course, they are sexy. That started with Bram Stoker or arguably Polidoris Vampire. So, movie audiences want to relate to this sexy, all-powerful PVC wearing goth-emo superhero. But that means that the hero has to be sympathetic so the he can’t possibly drink human blood so it’s always a situation where the vampire has to abstain from drinking blood, or he is a vampire cross-breed who doesn’t need blood and has the superpowers and sexy rock-star costumes but doesn’t need blood some contrivance to make the vampire friendly and safe–likeable. It’s like when they made The Terminator into a little boy’s pet robot, forever emasculating one of cinema’s great monsters. Kinda gay.

But if you go back before Stoker and Polidori, there was a time in history when the general public was terrified of vampire plagues. In the early eighteenth century the Roman Catholic Church was so wound up about it that they hired a Benedictine monk, Dom Augustine Calmut, an intellectual who had written several famous treatises on the Old and New Testaments, to investigate and dispel rumors of a vampire plagues. In 1754 A Treatise on Vampires and Revenants was published, but rather than dissuade belief in vampires, it fanned the flames, because suddenly the Church was legitimizing vampires.

Those vampires or revenants I think there is a distinction–were creatures that were dead, but got up at night to harass folks. Eventually, they would call in the authorities and exhume the body and if it was uncorrupted i.e.: not rotting, then it was deemed a vampire and they would lop off its head, or any number of regional rituals including stakings and/or burnings, and that was the end of it. These creatures weren’t the glamorous raven-haired rockers of Hollywood; they were moldy corpses, tottering about, sucking blood, infecting folks. And there was little agreement on how they returned from death, or how to dispatch them.

That seemed like a good basis for a movie.

HYB: Directing, writing, producing, and editing, The Revenant is sure keeping you busy. Did you still find time to get down and dirty with the FX team?

KP: Hell, no. I was tempted to interfere with everyone on set at some point, but I’m sure they were happiest when I was bothering some other department. I had some strong opinions about how we should approach the different gags, (makeup effects) but we had folks who are way better FX artists than I ever was.

The visual FX are a different story; I’m basically acting as the visual FX supervisor, so I have a hand in all of that. But aside from shooting some plates and elements, and doing a couple of digital matte paintings, I have real artists putting together the VFX.

HYB: It looks like The Revenant isn’t short on acting talent around the set. Was there any actor/actress in particular that you enjoyed working with above the others?

KP: We have a terrific cast on this flick. There’s no way I can choose one person above any of the others. At one point or another each of the leads surprised me—exceeded my expectations. Jacy King was just solid. You watch a scene with the group and she’s just totally on point. In editing we’ll watch a cut of a scene and I’d say, what’d you think of that? and someone will say, “I don’t know. I was watching Jacy the whole time.” She was terrific.

We were shooting a scene with Louise, and she just nailed it. Blew us away. I was going to cover the scene, but we were breaking for lunch so we just watched the scene again, and said, “what are we going to cut that up with? So we blew off the rest of the coverage.

David is a terrific talent, obviously. He has a lot of potential. And I think he does his best work in THE REVENANT.

And then there’s Chris Wylde . . .

HYB: Is there any performance that we should look out for?

KP: Chris Wylde is a comedian he’s actually Zakk Wylde’s little brother; used to have his own show on comedy Central. He played “The Beast” in the Dell Taco commercials. So, we knew he was right for funny stuff. But his character takes a dark turn as the story goes on. And Chris totally brought it. He had this underlying anger; the cadence of his voice changed’ he was really great. He show-boats, of course, loves being center stage, but he was great to direct. If I’d say, “Chris, you gotta pull back here. You’re being funny with this,” and Joey would be believing it not making a joke out of it, the next take he’d nail it.

We were shooting a scene, and we’d rehearsed it, but the cameras rolled and he did something totally different, totally unexpected. But it was exactly right he was Joey, intuitively. And I thought, “Shit, he knows this character better than I do.” And I wrote it. Chris steals the show.

HYB: Alright, now I don’t think I’ll be too far off if I say pretty much everyone in the HYB fan base is a big fan of boobs and blood, will The Revenant satisfy our cravings?

KP: Does anything really satisfy our cravings? I will say that, in number, we have more nudity in THE REVENANT than most movies you’ll see. But that’s a misleading answer. The nudity is not portrayed in a typically prurient way it’s meant to be creepy and unsettling not sexy. But, taken out of context, maybe you’ll have some material. Especially if you’re a little unbalanced.

HYB: About how much blood would you say you’ve used throughout the making of this film?

KP: You mean fake blood, right? I wasnt personally involved in mixing up the blood on this one (although I’ve certainly mixed up my share). I’d be guessing. The undead in THE REVENANT have a darker, more corrupted looking blood than regular bleeding folks. So there were two mixtures. I think I saw at least a couple of five-gallon buckets twenty, twenty-five gallons maybe?

HYB: Now, The Revenant is a mixture of horror and dark comedy. In all honesty I can say that mixing those two genres can be a risky operation. I know you wrote it so you may be a little biased, but, in your honest opinion, do the horror and the comedy balance each other out in this offering?

KP: Yeah, I have no idea. I’ve been living with it too long. I hope so. My goal was to keep things true to the story. It’s easy to break the tone if you aren’t vigilant. And with this story especially there’s a delicate balance of tones. It’ll go from being ironic or funny to (hopefully) truly terrifying, or even heartbreaking, in the same scene. I stopped thinking of it as a horror movie–or a comedy—a long time ago. It’s definitely a black comedy.

HYB: As a final question I thought I’d give you a real thought provoker. If there was one thing you could do over or change about the production of The Revenant what would it be and why?

KP: I really can’t answer that. That’s what post is for fixing all the mistakes you made during production.

Kerry, it’s been a pleasure. I look forward to seeing the film and best of luck in the future.

Owner and visionary behind Ghoul-Girls.com, Candace Miller was brave enough to visit Horror Yearbook not once, but twice. First she took on a very inebriated WIL Keiper live on HYB Radio, then stopped by to chat with Morgan Suzek about horror movies and her Ghoul Girls on HorrorYearbook.com.

Ghoul-Girls.com is a free website that features different women dressed up as your favorite horror icons and reenacting your favorite scary moments with a “tantalizing twist.” It seems almost like the perfect thing for HYB readers and maybe one day we can even get our own Molly Celaschi featured…Hmmm!

Horror Yearbook: Alright, just as a formality, what’s your favorite scary movie?

Candace Miller: Typically I am not afraid of scary movies, but I do find some of the intense gore filled ones make even me cringe at times. Some of my favorite horror flicks are Shaun of the Dead, From Dusk Till Dawn, The Lost Boys, American Werewolf in LondonJu-on, Ringu and Recycle are some favorites.

HYB: Now that that’s out of the way, let’s focus on Ghoul Girls. Could you tell us what your site’s all about?

CM: We call it “Horror with a Tantalizing Twist,” it’s a mix of modern pin-up with classic and modern horror icons. Sort of a sexy tribute to our favorite things in horror. We post photosets of the girls along with video sets of each photo shoot. The website includes forums, blogs, articles, interviews and a great amount of original content, like our very own comics drawn by a good friend of mine who goes by Foth. People are responding to it in a positive way and seem to appreciate what we are doing.

HYB: Okay, so now we know what you’re about, but how did you come up with the idea? What inspired you?

CM: I am a huge fan of movies, especially horror flicks. The amount of effort, time and man power that goes into them just astounds me. I wanted to do a sort of tribute, coffee table book of my own modeling dedicated to the men and women of horror portraying classic and modern pinup forms as horror monsters. I decided it was something I wanted to get other models in on and the rest is history.

HYB: What’s the one thing that you feel sets Ghoul Girls apart from other pin-up style sites?

CM: Well we aren’t gore porn or strictly pin-up we are tease and horror. What sets us apart from all others is that the style we shoot has never really been done on a large scale like Ghoul Girls before. Sure you have other sites with hot women dumping blood on each other, but it just seems to repetitive. Ghoul Girls has a theme with the gore and a theme with the classics. I mean, recently we started dumping a lot of blood on our models, but it goes without saying that your looking at the models and not just the blood.

HYB: When did you make the website official?

CM: The site was launched on October 31st, 2007.

HYB: About how many models have you featured since the site began?

CM: As of now we are at lucky thirteen models, including myself (VampireKitten) and one who has yet to be added to the site.

HYB: Making my own site made me realize starting a website is tough, did you see a lot of support while Ghoul Girls was under construction?

CM: Honestly, not a whole lot of support came in when we started. I am a self taught web and graphics designer so I built the site myself and had no problems doing it. However, when I brought up the idea to people who I wanted to be apart of the project, as a whole, a lot of them weren’t sure about the idea of mixing horror with pinup. I found a core crew of people interested, who have helped from the beginning, but other than that it was a hard process.

HYB: Do you feel that being a woman in the horror industry has made it harder for you to accomplish something legitimate like Ghoul Girls?

CM: I am part of two growing industries, gaming and horror, and both are very weird toward women. I can’t seem to understand why, maybe it’s just that my brain can’t seem to comprehend the fact that in a male dominated industry women can do it just as well as the men. I have not had any problems other than trying to market us, it’s difficult when some companies don’t even want to hear us out because we are predominantly women. Yet when they need models for clothing or booth babes they are always ready to call us. At Ghoul Girls we want to show people we are more than that.

HYB: Disregarding the models, about how many people do you have working for Ghoul Girls?

CM: There are five core people who have run the site and our efforts since day one. Joshua Even does all of our video and video editing. Chrissy Lynn has done all the makeup and hair for all the sets starting with Frankenstein’s monster, before I was struggling with it. Kurt, my fiancé, steps behind the camera and video sometimes and helps getting set up at locations. MacabrI, who is also one of the models, has recently started doing a lot of our PR work and myself as a photographer, some special effects makeup, and web designer. With that, a huge thanks to our model Stormie Psi who is starting to become more involved with the process, Moomooch Clothing, Medusa’s House of Dread and our other models who have all helped in some way to make it a success.

HYB: Is it hard to find models for this type of work?

CM: It can be difficult at times, believe it or not, a lot of models aren’t into horror. It takes a special type of model to sit for hours at a time in a makeup chair then be put under hot lights in latex applications and demand that blood is poured over them.

HYB: The horror genre is rich in ideas, do you ever find yourself stuck trying to figure out a theme for a photo shoot?

CM: Yes, actually, but the road block is in a different way. I often find myself stuck trying to figure out how to make horrific, sometimes grotesque and very masculine characters into sexy women. To this day I am still stuck on how to make a sexy Michael Myers and Pennywise (It).

HYB: Out of the photo shoots so far what was you favorite theme?

CM: That is a hard question because every time a new set goes online I like it more than the last, not to say that the last one was terrible, but you can really see how much better we are all getting at this with each set. Every set is almost like a new practice session, whether it’s makeup, lighting or video. If I had to choose one it would be the “Jason Voorhees” set with the runner up being “Barbara” (Night of the Living Dead).

HYB: Alright let’s talk merchandise. You just recently put out a calendar, congratulations. Are there any other items that the men reading this might be interested in?

CM: The calendar was a big undertaking, that should be reason enough to check it out. Right now we have loads of little things in our store from designer shirts to a few posters. We are working on getting our prints together and those should be available in time for Fangoria 2009.

HYB: What’s do you see in the future for Ghoul Girls?

CM: We have a DVD coming out soon, some of it will include a lot more risqué and some topless material. You can probably count on a few more DVD’s and an art book or two. We really don’t know where we are going with this, we are just kind of going with the flow of things and watching it grow.

HYB: Anything else you care to add?

CM: Keep an eye out for some cool contests and check out the website, we have everything from videos, photosets, forums, blogs and more. Stay spooky!

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