LARRY VAN DUYNHOVEN AND THE GUTS IT TAKES TO MAKE HORROR GREAT AGAIN

You would not know it by looking at his normal-in-every-way Aussie male exterior, but Larry Van Duynhoven creates movie moments that remain seared in your memory. From the infamous head drilling in Sean Byrne’s The Loved Ones to the battlefield carnage of Mel Gibson’s Hacksaw Ridge to the man-machine mayhem of Leigh Whannell’s Upgrade, the special effects make-up and prosthetic wizardry of Van Duynhoven is legendary, both in the Australian production sector and to horror fans the world over.

His latest masterwork can be seen in The Furies, director Tony D’Aquino’s all-or-nothing homage to the stark, splattery slasher pics of the 70s (notably, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) and the 80s (Friday the 13^th, et al). Following the film’s recent screening at Fangoria x Monster Fest in Melbourne (where it won Best Australian Film), Larry Van Duynhaven spoke with SCREEN-SPACE’s Simon Foster before an enthralled crowd about creating horrible, beautiful viscera for your viewing pleasure…

VAN DUYNHOVEN: “When Tony came to Melb and we started talking about it, one of the first things I said to him was, “Can we get an R-rating?” And he said, “Sure, why not?” And I was frank, letting him know that so many horror films have been made over the last few years that don’t really hit a mark. I wanted to go a bit more crazy with the gore, otherwise we were only going to get three people in the cinema – you, and the producer and the projectionist. I told him, “Don’t think about Australia, think about the world” and he agreed and we kind of got on straight away.”

VAN DUYNHOVEN: “It was a $1.5million film, which is not a lot of money, but it forced us to really go for practical effects. And that was good for me. These days, you’re on-set a lot, and there’s a lot of just (overseeing) the CGI, that attitude of ‘We’ll put a bullet wound in later.’ There’s so much green everywhere, it’s just taken over. So, yeah, we got to do pretty much all of it practical, with just a couple of CG shots to clean things up later.”

VAN DUYNHOVEN:  “I don’t normally get to blow up heads myself. We make it, give it to the special effects guy who then get to put their explosives in, do all that fun stuff. But there was no affording that on this budget, so we had to build the rigs. So me and my team got to do almost everything, which was nerve-wracking. I had another effects make-up artist called Sheldon Wade and a young assistant Rachel Scane on-set, so it was just the three of us, plus Helen Magaleki doing make-up and hair, who helped us a lot. It was a bit crazy, but a lot of fun.”

VAN DUYNHOVEN: “In the six weeks pre-production time, I worked with a conceptual artist called Seth Justice. He’s a good friend, so I rang him and had him on board right from the start, thinking up some cool designs; Seth’s quite smart, not like me. Tony came with some ideas, which were terrible (laughs). No, not really, but we’d sort of seen them before – bunny rabbits, stuff like that, from Donnie Darko and You’re Next, a bit jumbled. I was trying to persuade him to go in another direction. And he was very open, he’s very good like that, but coming up with an idea that suited (the premise) of the film was hard to do.”

VAN DUYNHOVEN: “Seth came up with some very cool ideas that we ran with. The guy that’s wearing human skin, we tried to make him resemble ‘The Scarecrow’ in The Wizard of Oz. Tony wanted this babyface-type of character, so we modelled that a bit on Pinocchio. It was fun to take well-known characters from different films and stories and interpret them in this way.”

THE FURIES will screen Thursday October 31 at 9.30pm in Sydney, Adelaide, Brisbane, Canberra and Perth as part of Fangoria x Monster Fest Takes on Australia 2019. Visit the event’s official website for full details.  

Photo credit: Jordan Hayne, ABC News.

MONSTER FEST MUTATES INTO MEGA HORROR MARATHON

Friday the 13^th under the glow of a full moon seemed an entirely appropriate time for the Monster Fest team to launch the final wave of films in their mammoth 2019 program. The official program of the 8^th annual horror hoedown dropped to excited gorehounds at Cinema Nova last night, most of which hung around for a special event screening of Travis Steven’s cult-hit-in-the-making, Girl on The Third Floor.

The announcement that Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillett’s Ready Or Not (pictured, above) and Richard Stanley’s Color Out of Space – two of the hottest horror properties of the year – will have their Australian debuts in Melbourne meant that not enough hours in the day exist to accommodate the expanded roster of first release features, industry events, short-film sessions and retrospective celebrations.

After the Opening Night carnage on October 10, when director Rob Zombie’s 3 From Hell is unleashed, the newly-monikered Fangoria x Monster Fest Part VIII: Monster Takes Melbourne will blow out to October 18. This will allow ample time for the six World Premieres and 20 Australian Premieres on offer amongst the features, as well as four short-film showcases, four retro-sessions, two industry panel chats and a VHS swap-meet.

Richard Stanley’s return to the director’s chair with Color Out of Space is one of the most highly anticipated resurrections in recent cinema history. Best known for being fired from his ill-fated 1996 reimagining of H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau, Stanley’s adaptation of the H.P. Lovecraft alien-invasion classic is his first narrative feature since 1992. Starring Nicholas Cage and picked up for US distribution by the team who backed the actor’s most recent cult-hit Mandy, the film bowed in the Toronto Film Festival’s Midnight Madness strand last week. Trade bible Variety noted that the film, “sports a directorial personality distinct enough to make one grateful for Stanley’s return.” (Pictured, above: l-r, Cage, co-star Joely Richardson and Stanley, on-set)

Featuring a star-making turn from Australian actress Samara Weaving, Ready or Not is the blood-soaked tale of a wedding-night parlour-game gone bad, forcing a shocked but increasingly self-sufficient bride to fight back against her new in-laws and their murderous intent. Also starring Adam Brody, Henry Czerny and a snarling Andie McDowell as the mother-in-law from Hell, the U.S. indie has proved one of the sleeper hits of the American summer, taking US$27million and earning a Best Picture nomination at the prestigious Spanish genre fest, Sitges.

Maxing out the Fangoria x Monster Fest schedule are such locally-made must-sees as Stuart Stantons’ No Such Thing as Monsters, a bush-set bloodbath earning comparisons to Wes Craven’s 1977 classic, The Hills Have Eyes; Tony D’Aquino’s splatter shocker The Furies, already earning global festival kudos; and, Justin Dix’s stylish haunted high-seas romp, Blood Vessel.

The always-popular retrospective screenings are fronted by the Australian Premiere of Stewart Raffill’s fully-restored 1994 oddity Tammy & The T-Rex (pictured, right), in which a teenage Denise Richards falls for a re-animated dinosaur that has become possessed with the spirit of her late boyfriend (the also-late Paul Walker). Umbrella Entertainment will debut their 4K restoration of Kimble Rendall’s 2000 slasher pic, Cut, starring Molly Ringwald and Kylie Minogue; the 30^th anniversary of the Aussie no-budgeter Houseboat Horror will be celebrated with a post-screening QA; and, a rare showing of Brian De Palma’s 1974 rock opera Phantom of The Paradise will be accompanied by Malcolm Ingram’s fan doc, Phantom of Winnipeg, which ponders the question, “Why was the Canadian city the only place in the world that De Palma’s notorious flop was a huge hit?”

The full Fangoria x Monster Fest Part VIII: Monster Takes Melbourne program can be found at the event’s official website.  

Screen-Space editor Simon Foster is the Festival Director of the 2019 Monster Fest Sydney event.

MONSTER FEST, EVENT CINEMAS AGREE TO SHARE MORE SHOCKS IN 2019

Monster Fest will expand their current arrangement with Australia’s largest exhibition chain Event Cinemas to bring a greater degree of horror film programming to key sites nationally it was announced today.

Since 2011, Monster Fest has been Melbourne’s leading genre festival event; in 2019, it returns to the Cinema Nova complex from October 11^th to 13^th for the 8^th edition of the festival. This will be five full weeks ahead of the traditional late November dates usually occupied by Monster Fest, a move deemed necessary to accommodate the new national screening roster. It is anticipated that the first round of the Event Cinema sessions will coincide with the Halloween trading period before rolling out through November.

Monster Fest director Grant Hardie (pictured, right) has overseen successful ‘Travelling Roadshow’ events beyond the Melbourne base in recent years and views this new plan as the natural progression in the organisation’s relationship with exhibition giant. “Since we started the festival our plan has always been to take it nationally and make it the largest and best known genre festival in this part of the world,” Hardie said. “This continued partnership with Event Cinemas in 2019 makes this a reality.”

Claire Gandy (pictured, below), Event Cinema’s General Manager for Content, attended Monster Fest 2018 to discuss with Hardie his vision for a national horror festival rollout. “Having seen the continued growth of Monster Fest Melbourne in the last few years we at Event wanted to bring that experience to some of our major sites around the country,” said Gandy, “and we are very excited to see how we can work together to make that a reality.” In 2018, the 100 year-old cinema chain paired with the horror festival to turn a limited release run of the Nicholas Cage shocker Mandy into an old-fashioned late night cult movie smash. 

Last November, Monster Fest unveiled some of the most controversial genre titles of the year, including Craig Zahler’s Dragged Across Concrete with Mel Gibson, Jonas Akerlund’s Lords of Chaos and the latest provocation from Lars von Trier, the serial killer epic The House That Jack Built. The festival prides itself on supporting local talent, with Caitlin Stoller’s 30 Miles from Nowhere and Matthew Victor Pastor’s MAGANDA! Pinoy Boy vs Milkman having their World Premieres at Cinema Nova last year; it is envisioned these types of films will enjoy an unprecedented level of national exposure under the new initiative in large-scale auditoriums they may not otherwise occupy.

“In 2018 submissions increased by over 100%, and we had the strongest shorts program since the festival began,” says Hardie. “The interest internationally for Monster Fest is beyond our wildest dreams.” Submissions are now open for features, short films and expanded cinema projects for the expanded 2019 program.

Further information detailing the 2019 Monster Fest program and participating Event cinemas will be announced in the months ahead.

DEVIL WOMAN: THE HEIDI LEE DOUGLAS INTERVIEW

A fresh-faced environmentalist new to the frontline crusade against Tasmania’s ruthless logging practices has her inner beast unleashed in Devil Woman, an Aussie short-film riff on the werewolf legend that has had global festival crowds screaming in terrified delight. It is the brainchild of writer/director Heidi Lee Douglas, founder of Dark Lake Productions and one of Australia’s most socially aware filmmakers. Her work to date – the thriller Little Lamb (2014), documentary project Defendant 5 (2015) and striking music video Wish (2018) – offers rich insight and artistry in their exploration of gender identity, violence and environmental concerns. One of the sector's most pro-active advocates for diversity and equality, Douglas also presides as Co-Chair of the Australian chapter of Film Fatales, a global community of women feature film and television directors. 

Ahead of the Australian Premiere of Devil Woman at Monster Fest VII, Douglas (pictured, above; with actor Peter Healy) spoke with SCREEN-SPACE about her film's origins, aims and place amongst the all-too-rarely explored genre of female-focussed transformative eco-horror…    

SCREEN-SPACE: Devil Woman is a modern spin on classic werewolf mythology. What other influences and inspirations helped gel the concept in your mind?

DOUGLAS: I got the original idea back in 2007, when I was involved with the Tasmanian forest campaigns as a documentary filmmaker [at the time] the Tasmanian Devil facial tumour outbreak was discovered. It’s a horrifying, fatal disease; brutal in the way its cancerous ulcerations are transmitted via biting. I was travelling regularly through backwater logging towns that had a very ‘gothic frontier’ nature and almost post-apocalyptic blockade-style camps, and would witness violent confrontations between loggers and activists. 28 Days Later was the biggest stylistic influence to the original concept, and then I discovered Night of The Living Dead and Dawn of The Dead, which have the tradition of a zombie/contagion film with social issues as subtext. The werewolf/ transformation narrative was originally inspired by the analysis of folk tales in Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ Women Who Run With The Wolves. Women transforming into animals to discover their true animalistic strength and power - I love that type of mythic storytelling. (pictured, above; actress Marigold Pazar as 'Eddy')

SCREEN-SPACE: Like all great horror films, Devil Woman tackles bigger issues as well as delivering the frights. You explore toxic masculinity, wide-eyed conservationists, and gender stereotypes across both sexes. Did you go with an attack plan?

DOUGLAS: I wanted to show the tough-as-nails women at blockade camps, which I had never seen represented on screen. Their isolation when up against these burly, angry loggers in real life is very scary and very loaded. The lead character ‘Eddy’ is a fish-out-of-water science student based on my own experience turning up to my first blockade as a student filmmaker, at Timbarra Gold Mine back in 1999. The film’s coda hints that we need to look beyond gender or any other political divides, because if we continue on a path of environmental destruction an apocalypse won’t discriminate. I’m thinking of the 1000 people still missing in the Californian wildfires right now. That is real life horror, real tragedy. Yet President Trump still denies climate change. (Pictured, above; Peter Healy as 'Reilly')

SCREEN-SPACE: The film is both a down’n’dirty bushland yarn and an extremely polished piece of filmmaking – shot in widescreen, against beautiful locations. Tell me about crafting the film’s aesthetic.

DOUGLAS: I looked at the way 28 Days Later and Children of Men were shot, to create that immediate, visceral, documentary-like experience of being in the world with the characters. I used scale in the frame to emphasis power, and colour palette to underlie transformation. Because my background is in documentary and editing I think in terms of coverage and how it will cut together, whilst Director of Photography Meg White (pictured, right) ensured it was also cinematic. We looked at Australian colonial art to think about representation of the forest in daylight, and what makes the Australian forest landscapes unique and scary. We used smoke haze on set in the camp to create texture. For the colour grade I was inspired by Deliverance to subtly reinforce humans as animals within the wilderness. The score was inspired by Dead Man using sparing rawness to imbue an isolated frontier feeling. The location is a main character in the story, so getting that right was very important. I couldn’t shoot it in Tasmania so I had to find a suitable location in regional NSW. Nerissa Davis and Alice Cregan, who brought first hand experience in logging blockades in Tasmania, ran the Art Department. They nailed the production design, which was important for authenticity.

SCREEN-SPACE: It’s an intrinsically Australian film, yet it’s travelling well, finding favour with festival programmers worldwide, having played London's FrightFest and Fantasia in Montreal, to name just two. The terrifically staged horror sequences aside, what are the elements that are resonating?

DOUGLAS: The thought provoking themes, the gritty score by my brother Ben Douglas, Meg White’s superb cinematography, the twists and turns in the plot. Audiences come away wanting a feature version, which is encouraging. There are some amazing films in the eco-horror sub genre such as The Birds, Godzilla, The Thing and Jaws. I reckon it’s a sub genre that’s ripe for modern exploration, and the reaction from audiences, film programmers and the film industry to Devil Woman suggests I’m right.

DEVIL WOMAN will screen Friday November 23 at Monster Fest VII at Carlton’s Cinema Nova. Full ticket and session details are at the festival’s official website.

LIVING SPACE: THE STEVEN SPIEL INTERVIEW

What begins as a cheeky nod to slasher film tropes ascends to all-out supernatural terror in Living Space, the accomplished feature debut of Melbourne-based writer/director Steven Spiel. A double-helix narrative that turns back on and into itself with increasingly skilful dexterity, Living Space reps a rare Australian foray into the horror of Nazi imagery set against a stylistically European landscape; the authentic aesthetic helped the film find favour at the recent European Film Market in Berlin, the first stop on a global sales roll-out that includes the all-important Marche du Film in Cannes in May. SCREEN-SPACE spoke with Spiel ahead of his film’s World Premiere, held in Sydney over the weekend as part of the Monster Fest ‘Travelling Sideshow’ program…

SCREEN-SPACE: Before the narrative amps up into some truly nightmarish moments, you have a lot of fun with the target audience’s appreciation of familiar horror set-ups…  

SPIEL: Brad (Leigh Scully) and Ashley (Georgia Chara) play a young American couple travelling through the heartland of Germany when their car breaks down in the middle of the countryside, forcing them to find protection in an abandoned property nearby. But, once inside, they find it is the home of a dead Nazi and his deceased family. So they go through a far amount of torment from that point on. It goes deeper and we use a great deal more psychological elements to flesh out the story, but that’s a basic outline.

SCREEN-SPACE: As the chilling ‘Officer’, actor Andy McPhee brings to life a truly memorable screen villain. What inspired the creation of such evil personified?

SPIEL: When I set out to write the film, I thought hard about whom the antagonist should be. I am really quite fearful of military iconography, that sort of grand authority figures, and the most frightening of all those types are the German SS officers of World War 2. So I threw all the familiar aspects of that imagery into the mix and the villain and the narrative grew from there. We use war footage in the film, because I wanted to acknowledge that we understood and were deeply respectful of the horrors of that period. But this is not any type of political statement at all; we just set out to make a solidly entertaining horror film. (Pictured, right; Andy McPhee, as Officer, with Georgia Chara in Living Space).

SCREEN-SPACE: Is horror a passion of yours, or was there one-eye on the genre’s international sales potential when you were deciding on your debut feature?

SPIEL: Well, it’s both actually. I’ve always been very passionate about horror. It’s a genre I have always enjoyed watching and I think when anyone sets out to make a film they should strive to make a movie that they would also like to watch. The characters, the arc have to be something that I would find intriguing. It is as crucial to the writing of the story as it is to the watching of the finished film.

SCREEN-SPACE: I’m assuming the indie-horror budget didn’t stretch to shooting in Germany…

SPIEL: We shot in Geelong, in Victoria, over a 12-day period. We got the whole cast and crew accommodated in Geelong, somehow. All the aerial footage, the countryside, everything that you see in the film is regional Victoria doubling as Germany. I worked very closely with our cinematographer, Branco Grabovic, and the post-production colouring team, both researching the look and feel of the German landscape and applying that knowledge to the final colour grading on the film. Being an independent film, we couldn’t get everyone over to Germany, which would’ve been ideal (laughs) but I think we executed it pretty well. (Pictured, left; cinematographer Branco Grabovic, left, with his director)

SCREEN-SPACE: You’ve stated that you don’t really want Living Space labelled ‘Nazi-exploitation’, despite your clever use of the iconography. What are the genre films and filmmakers that have influenced the story and mood of Living Space?

SPIEL: One that immediately springs to mind is Christopher Smith’s Triangle, with Melissa George. It’s a fascinating film that is both structurally complex and very entertaining. I’d also say Scorsese’s Shutter Island. These are films that explore the darker corners of psychology, unfold as engrossing mysteries, and end with a twist of some kind. All of my short films have that twist in the end, some sort of development that catches audiences off guard, and they have all informed what I’ve done in Living Space.

LIVING SPACE will screen in Brisbane, Melbourne, Adelaide and Geelong as part of the 2018 Monster Fest Travelling Sideshow. For venues, dates and session times, check the official Monster Fest website.