80s/90s Horror with Filmmaker Richard Clabaugh

Filmmaker Richard Clabaugh (HELLRAISER III, the WAXWORK films, THE PROPHECY, EYEBORGS and many more) joins Michael to talk about his career in the horror genre including his work with Dimension Films and several horror franchises. Along the way we discuss what makes a great horror film, the importance of creature development and what's Bruce Campbell really like on set. We also deep dive into Anthony Hickox's WAXWORK films.

Check out Richard's You Tube Channels.

THE KINETIC IMAGE - focusing on filmmaking and cinematography

https://www.youtube.com/thekineticimage

and

SCENE HERE - great films and the places they were made

http://www.youtube.com/@Scene-Here

Thanks for joining us. Leave us a review...if you dare. 

IG https://www.instagram.com/fridaynightfrightspodcast/

 Blue Sky https://bsky.app/profile/fridaynightfrights.bsky.social

Transcript

SPEAKER_05 0:00

Your fascination with ghosts, monsters, and the many unearthly elements of the supernatural.

SPEAKER_02 0:22

Hello, everybody, and welcome to Friday Night Brights. I'm Michael Huey. I'm a theater professor, author, actor. I also like horror movies. And this is episode 13, and you know, for 12 episodes, myself and various guests have watched horror movies and talked about them. Today we have someone who has actually made horror films. So I'm very, very happy today to have joining me filmmaker Richard Claybaugh. Richard, welcome to Friday Night Frights. Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here. Well, thank you, sir. And uh so as I said, Richard is a working professional. He started working uh back in the 80s and still working on films, and we're gonna talk a little bit about his career. Uh he has an extensive career, actually, in the horror genre, and so uh there will be titles that you will absolutely recognize. Then we're gonna, as we always do, kind of suggest a double feature uh where you can see um some of Richard's work, two films that he worked on, and he could give us some inside info on. But first, I want to just uh you have uh a YouTube channel and a Vimeo channel, and I've got your bio here from the YouTube channel. I'm just gonna read it. An experienced Hollywood veteran uh Clayball was director of photography on The Prophecy with Christopher Walken, Phantoms with Ben Affleck. You were director of photography on feature films that starred Russell Crowe and Big O'Mortensen, and uh DP andor camera operator on uh horror classics for dimension films, and you directed the cult genre hits Python and Iborgs. You've uh taught cinematography at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts Filmmaking and at Columbia College in Hollywood, known as The Man in the Red Shirt. And I can confirm for you all that today Richard is not only wearing a red shirt, but he has a red jacket over it. And red shoes, ladies and gentlemen. So this is absolutely true. So Richard has, like I said, he has worked extensively in the genre. I'm just going to give you some more names that he was uh DP on, as I said, Prophecy Phantoms, two Children of the Corn movies, Children of the Corn IV and Children of the Corn 666, Prophecy II, Necromancer, American Yakuza, which uh I think just had a Blu-ray review, uh release, right? Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.

SPEAKER_06 2:39

American Yakuza just had a Blu-ray, a Blu-ray release, and uh I encourage everyone to try and get it if you can. It's it's a really surprisingly good movie with Vigo Mortensen. It's one of the first things I did out there, and it's uh a solid movie that I have been so sad has been unavailable for so long, but uh it will surprise people.

SPEAKER_02 3:00

Okay. You were camera operator on Hellraiser 3, uh Warlock, The Armageddon, just kind of hitting the genre movies, and then a couple of movies that we'll talk about uh a little bit later. But first, Richard, I just want to ask you uh was there a time in your life as a kid where you're like, I gotta make movies for a living?

SPEAKER_06 3:17

Oh yeah. Oh yeah. I got literally Super 8 films going back to when I was eight years old. And uh it started off a lot with you know TV shows and things that I'd seen, and I was very influenced by that. Uh Star Trek, very big influence on me. I'm very much a sci-fi guy. Yeah, I I just absolutely in an earlier era, I might have been a uh uh a novelist, but uh as a storyteller, I picked up a camera instead of a pen, and that became the medium that I was familiar with to tell stories.

SPEAKER_02 3:50

Okay. So do you remember some of the movies that inspired you? Um you say you had like Super Eight films as a as a kid, right? Yeah, I remember that as well as like castle films, I think. Um were there any particular movies?

SPEAKER_06 4:02

I had like eight millimeter, old eight millimeter black and white of uh Abbott and Castello meet Frankenstein. Um but then as they made them available, this is before VHS, before anything. I I still have like a 400-foot super eight millimeter roll of the Christopher Reeve Superman, of the Godfather, of the Omen. Um I uh and I still have those, and it's like they're still in their cases. You know, you could buy an 800-foot roll of film that was made from the movies. It was and I would watch those over and over.

SPEAKER_02 4:32

That is so cool. I didn't know they made them that late in late up to the 70s, you know. Because I had like the Universal Monsters and stuff, you know, and uh so yeah, that was uh tremendous fun. I know you've worked a lot in horror. Were there horror movies growing up that you went that you really gravitated towards?

SPEAKER_06 4:49

Aaron Powell I I watched them all. I was a big fan of Creature Feature every afternoon on Saturday and would catch it whenever I could. Um Creature from the Black Lagoon made a big impression on me. That one scared the heck out of me when I was a kid. The Tingler, oh God, I remember that one being a very effectively uh scary film for me. Uh God, I could go down. I watched them all, and they all formed an influence in one way or another. I mean, I I loved horror growing up. It was it was my thing.

SPEAKER_02 5:18

Is there something looking back as an adult, you kind of go from that era that you go, man, that's that's a great horror movie, a great classic.

SPEAKER_06 5:26

Yeah, actually I just got into this with some folks. There's two that um, and maybe they're more sci-fi than horror, but they were very influential to me. The Day the Air Stood Still, uh, which Robert Wise directed, and then uh Forbidden Planet. And Forbidden Planet was a very big influence on me in terms of my writing and such when we did eyeborgs, because it was a movie that ambushed me with its intelligence. I actually first saw it screened at a science fiction convention, and I was expecting the usual, because I'd watched, you know, Mars Needs Women and Angry Red Planet, and you know, those kind of things. And so I went thinking it was going to be the big monster, you know, sort of movie, and I'm watching it, and it had what I thought was all this hyperbolic dialogue of, you know, oh, you know, this this creature couldn't possibly exist. It runs contrary to all forms of evolution and you know, the sort of stuff that, you know, just people sort of say for over-the-top sci-fi movies, like nothing we've seen before. But then when it got to the end, and I don't want to spoil it for anyone who hasn't seen it, even though it's an older movie, it brings it all home with a surprisingly introspective, insightful, really unexpected to me at the time payoff to all of the stuff that they'd set up that actually was meaningful and human and and really worked for me. And I remember sitting there being just shocked because I wasn't expecting anything smart out of it, smart out of it. So I always said it ambushed me with its intelligence. So when I was doing well, specifically eyeborg's, um, that was a movie that we knew we were gonna sell to the sci-fi channel. That was our target. And we wanted it to come on and look like just a regular dumb Saturday night sci-fi channel monster movie that you wouldn't expect anything of. But then by the time it got to the end, we wanted to catch you off guard, not go where you were expecting, and surprise you with where it paid off. And uh it was successful in that regard, which may or may not have been a good thing. Because when the movie was marketed, uh the box was just absurd that the distributor put on it, showed flying robots over a devastated city, which has nothing to do with the movie at all. The problem was that anyone who would have been interested in that movie, with a you know flying robots destroying cities, would be vastly disappointed by the movie, which was sort of a commentary on government surveillance and where we're going. Very, very relevant to today because it has to do with you know AI creating fake videos. And this was back, you know, in early 2000 we were doing this. And if you were interested in the topic, you would never have picked up this movie and looked at it because nothing about it looked like it, because it it it the twist was such that we we didn't reach the the target audience who would have enjoyed it.

SPEAKER_02 8:30

That's too bad. It must be frustrating when the marketing doesn't match the film you've worked on, you know?

SPEAKER_06 8:34

Yeah, we made up our own posters and such that we presented the distributor that would have, I think, reached the correct audience who were looking for a thinking sci-fi movie with some intelligence to it that delivered on good action, that definitely delivered on the jumps and the scares. We knew we had to do that, but that also had something smart to say in the process. And yeah, they it no, they went with the transmorphers kind of asylum film approach to the box.

SPEAKER_02 9:04

As I mentioned, before we get in deeper into horror, you've worked with uh a lot of big names on films like Christopher Walken, Vigor Mortensen, Russell Crowe, Bit Affleck, um at least a few of these sort of, I guess at the maybe beginning of their careers and everything. Anything, any stories you want to tell about them, or could you kind of, as working with them, could you see, oh, this person's gonna be really well known and have a great career in film?

SPEAKER_06 9:33

The one that I always take the most pride with, because I did two movies with him, we had just done American Yakuza with Vigo Mortensen. And I thought he was amazing. I thought he had all the skill and charisma I can say nothing but good things about Vigo Mortensen, just in every way, shape, and form. Not only is he an amazingly talented actor, an incredibly gifted performer, he's one of the nicest human beings to work with. And this was a low-budget movie we were doing with him. But I I he couldn't have thrown himself into it more completely in terms of giving it his all. And it shows, if you see American Yakuza, the relationship between him and his counterpart played by Ryo Ishibashi is outstanding. And actually, they became good friends out of that. And when he goes to Japan uh to promote movies like Lord of the Rings, he stays at Ryo's house because they're still good friends. Oh, that's cool. So then we were doing The Prophecy.

SPEAKER_03 10:33

Can you keep a secret? Biggest secret every go. Isn't what anyone expects?

SPEAKER_06 11:02

And we had someone name actor in mind for being Lucifer, and they dropped out at that moment um due to a conflict in schedule. I I without giving too much away, I think they had to go kill Captain Kirk at that point, but they were unavailable for us to uh to use. So suddenly we were looking for someone else to play Lucifer, and our casting director um proposed Vigo. And the idea did not go over super well because he's not a name. He was not at that time, he had no traction. But I was we were in the van driving, I would argue, no, he's an outstanding actor, he'll do a great job in this part. And I think kind of reluctantly on the part of director and producers because they wanted a name to help sell the movie, and to work opposite Christopher Walken. And I know Christopher Walken, when he heard who was playing the party, was like kind of shrugs, he said, no, buddy. So then we're on the set, and there's a scene where Vigo as Lucifer has to really dominate the scene and take charge of it with Christopher Walken's character. You do not easily intimidate Christopher Walken. He is an intimidating character, and he is a force. And I watched him just by doing his job blow other actors away in the scene. And this guy had to come in and upstage him, and he did. He came in, and I remember being on the camera looking through there, shooting Christopher Walken's close-up as he's doing this scene with Vigo, and maybe it's in my imagination, but I swear to God, I could see the moment in his eyes as Vigo was playing opposite him and killing it, that you could see Walken kind of go, holy cow, this guy's actually got some chops here.

SPEAKER_02 13:03

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_06 13:04

And I f I still remember that moment because I think he wasn't expecting much from a quote unknown. And Vigo, well, as everybody knows now, he's Vigo Morenson. He's uh an incredible performer and he's focused on the craft.

SPEAKER_02 13:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 13:23

And uh by the end of that scene, I think uh Christopher Walken realized he was indeed someone who will be going places.

SPEAKER_02 13:30

Yeah, not a nobody. So just to clarify, uh the person who was going to play Lucifer uh got a Star Trek film, is that right?

SPEAKER_07 13:38

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_02 13:38

Okay. Okay. Um so uh you uh started, I guess, uh did a ton of work in the 80s and 90s, and we know 80s, the 80s especially was a a big time for horror films. I guess maybe with the success of The Evil Dead and as an independent film that that just sort of opened the door to a lot of other filmmakers. So having worked on so many horror films, what do you think makes a good horror movie?

SPEAKER_06 14:08

That's a really good question. I do think one of the things that makes a really good horror film is a certain amount of originality, and that's always a hard thing. Coming up with the fresh twist, um, I think a new monster, and I'm using monster in a very broad way here. Monsters can be human beings. Anthony Hopkins in Silence of the Lambs is the monster, as is Buffalo Bill. Um having a monster who captures your imagination and both excites you and terrifies you is, I think, the key to a successful horror film. Um and again, monsters very much can be human. They can be other beings as an alien, um but they can also be people who do incredibly terrifying things and represent a real threat. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 14:57

When we did Phantoms last night, something paid a visit to the town of Snowfield, Colorado. Hundreds of thousands missing. No bodies, no graves, no witnesses. We've always worried that the terror would come from above. What if it came from below?

SPEAKER_06 15:23

Phantoms in the end doesn't completely work, um, which is a pity because it's three-fourths of an absolutely excellent horror film. It has a terrific cast. Uh, I think we did a really good job with it. My first day on the show, and I was the second DP on that, which happened a lot. We're shooting the scene where the monster finally appears. And I had read the script and I went up to the guy who's gonna be doing the effects, and I said, Okay, this movie's gonna live or die at this moment. If the monster works, this movie will work. If the monster doesn't work, this movie's gonna tank. And I literally said that my first day on the job. And he said to me, You know, I've been doing this for X many years. The monster's gonna be great. I think it was two, three weeks later I found out he'd been fired, and we would spend the next year and a half trying to get a monster that looked good. Bob Weinstein had a concept of what he thought the monster would be, and it we it's a long story, but um I shot a lot of tests. We put like weird plastic bag things in water and shot these things against a green screen, and we tried CG creations of various concepts, and and we spent a lot of time thinking about what makes a good monster. Because literally we were trying to figure out so what makes this work? And we came to some really interesting conclusions about the physical design of a creature in terms of at the end of the day, psychologically, what works for you. So suffice to say that the concept is at the end, it's this thing that can take any shape. And when we first see it, there's a crowd of people who it's controlling in the street. All of the bodies come together to merge into this amorphous blob thing that can assume any shape. Okay. With all due respects to the blob, blobs are not inherently scary. Um you react to things that your primal brain recognizes as terrifying. Things that have faces with large maws and teeth. I always remember that scene in the Brandon Fraser Mummy movie where the sandstorm is there. For just a moment, it forms a mouth that's gonna go after him. Oddly enough, back to Forbidden Planet, the invisible creature shows up when it's in the force field and it's got this huge maw-like thing. Right. Those are primal things that trigger a scary reaction in you, alien. You know, it's got a mouth with teeth that look like it's gonna scab or I mean, it does things that are very visceral. And so the amorphous blob didn't really have a psychological effect. Intellectually, it's kind of a cool idea. All the bodies are gonna form into this one giant thing, but it doesn't psychologically translate over. And we hired what we were told that uh there was this up-and-coming VFX company somewhere in some third world country, was my thought at the time. And uh, they were gonna do the creature for us. And they did. And they did it exactly the way it was described to them, and they made it perfect. And Bob Weinstein took one look at it and said, I hate it. And they said, Well, this is exactly what you asked for. And we spent like a lot of money, a lot, a lot. I'm not gonna get into the details to do this creature. And uh he said, I don't like it, do it again. So they did it again for another big chunk of money. He still didn't like it. So we hired another company to put snow around it to try and obscure it so it couldn't be seen, and then told the editor to just keep it really short in the movie. We ended up spending about$1.7 million for eight seconds of film for a monster that ultimately was not effective, and it wasn't technically that there was a problem. The effects company, which by the way, was this then unknown company called Weta Effects out of New Zealand, um, they kicked ass in terms of what they did, but the psychology of the monster wasn't there. And if the image of a monster doesn't scare you, then it's not scary. Yeah. No matter how much you intellectualize that it's doing something, like it's absorbing bodies and more. It's like just it it it didn't pay off. And that is where the movie dies that very moment in the in the film. And up till that point, that is one of the most effective scary horror movies you you could see. I'm very very happy about the shooting of it, was very happy with the performances. Everything about that movie absolutely works, and it's scary as all get out up to that moment. Yeah, Lev Schreiber is in it, and he's he's amazing, he kicks ass. He he took a part that on paper was nothing, and he just kept adding bits throughout, and it's wonderful to work with an actor where you can see their process where they're just taking something and making a character where there wasn't really one on the page. Yeah, there's a scene in that movie where um it just says in the script, you know, there's two heads get found in an oven and um cut off heads, and it just says he's just sort of staring at them for a moment. It wasn't really clear whether he was like upset or things. So he does the scene and we're shooting it, and he's just kind of chewing gum and he's looking at these heads, and he's kind of cocking his head, and he's kind of looking at it, and he's chewing the gum. Ben Affleck comes up behind him and he goes, you know, uh, hey, whirl, whirl, and finally goes, Yeah. And it's like uh you okay? Just oh yeah, fine. He just kind of looks at the heads again and then walks away. And he kept doing stuff like that throughout. And then at the end, his character's bad side sort of becomes the creature when it takes its form at one point. And he's just he's more scary than the blob creature by a long shot, because he's terrifying.

SPEAKER_02 21:27

Uh and that and that's Phantoms from 1998. That's Phantom. Directed by Joe Chappelle, and it's got, as you said, Ben Affleck and uh Lev Schreiber, and Peter O'Toole and Rose McAlen as well.

SPEAKER_06 21:37

Aaron Powell One of my great joys in life is that I got to work with Peter O'Toole. I'll bet who was outstanding, great guy, terrific, um fun, playful, absolutely nothing but good things to say about Peter O'Toole.

SPEAKER_02 21:53

That's fantastic. That's fantastic. Because I was gonna, you know, you always hear him being kind of a wild man.

SPEAKER_06 21:58

Maybe that was in his earlier days. Oh, he was not unwild. We uh we there was a moment and I will uh censor myself here just a little bit. But uh so he had done his scene and we're all standing out on the street. It's snowing, it's cold, it's miserable. He's done. But he was close enough that the AD who had taken him back to his hotel room was within walkie distance. And Peter got on the walkie-talkie to, you know, the crew, and he says, I just want you all to know that I'm back in my hotel room, nice and warm with a glass of cognac. F you all. And that first day he was like, copy that. But we were all out there in the snow. He was warm with a glass of cognac.

SPEAKER_02 22:41

Well, as well as he should be. All right, so here on uh Friday Night Frights, we always give you a double feature to watch, and uh, we've got two that um you worked on both of these movies, right? Okay. And the first one is from 1988, and it's wax work.

SPEAKER_03 22:58

It's 1145. Let's go.

SPEAKER_05 23:02

Imagine, if you will, an exhibit in fear. Looks a little spooky for us. Do you think we should do this? A place that appeals to your deepest and darkest fantasies. Your fascination with ghosts, monsters, and the many unearthly elements of the supernatural. Look at this is killer. Enjoy.

SPEAKER_00 23:30

Wow, the glasses from nutty zombies from hell.

SPEAKER_05 23:35

You're like a closer look. But whatever you do, don't step over the rope.

SPEAKER_02 23:41

So, Waxwork, I'm just gonna we're not gonna we're we're gonna talk about this in kind of a spoiler-free way, so you can uh watch it uh if you haven't already. Uh, directed by Anthony Hiccox. I'm just gonna read you the letterboxed synopsis, wealthy slacker college student Mark, who's played by Zach Gallaghan, his new girlfriend Sarah, who's played by kind of a genre favorite, Deborah Foreman, who's also in Bally Girl, probably best known for Bally Girl, but I think she's in April Fool's Day as well and a few other uh horror movies, uh, and their friends are invited to a special showing at a mysterious wax museum, which displays 18 of the most evil men of all time after his ex-girlfriend and another friend disappear, Mark becomes suspicious. So uh just to set this up a little more, these these college students uh are invited into this wax museum by the owner who is played by David Warner, who we just talked about in our last episode, because he is Jack the Ripper in Time After Time and has a great career English actor. And they get inside, and it's kind of a typical sort of Chamber of Horrors uh kind of setup with various and sundry monsters. And let's just say that once if you happen to step over the rope line into the wax exhibit, you enter the exhibit itself. It becomes reality. There's a really interesting uh supporting cast of names. You've got John Reese Davies, who is Salah in the Indiana Jones movies and uh did uh uh Living Daylights, I think, with Timothy Dalton, one of the Bond films. He had just done that at the time. And uh, of course, in Sliders, he was the professor. Oh, right, right, right. And you got Patrick McNey, who is from TV's Avengers, the great spy shows uh of the 60s, and he's also in a a Bond film. I think he's interviewed with a kill uh who is in it as well. And um so yeah, it is a I I I I was doing a little research and I I just watched uh Wax work for the show. And what are the reviews of the Blu-ray? And incidentally, you can I'll tell you about where you can get this. Um both of these movies at the end of this, called it the quintessential eighties horror film. Uh what do you think about that?

SPEAKER_06 25:56

I I think that's that's appropriate. The director was a huge fan of all those old horror movies. And Waxworks is basically one big homage to all the movies he loved growing up. So when you go into the Waxworks, it's supposedly all these villains from history. They're not from this universe's history, they are from movie history. Right. And so you you've got every everything. There is little cameos in the background of evil-possessed baby in a crib, uh, of of a creature from the black lagoonish kind of creature in there. Um, but the main ones were uh very much villains from from versions, copyright-free versions of villains from recognizable horror franchises. And when you stepped across the line, you stepped into it. John Reese Davies, for example, is the wolfman.

SPEAKER_04 26:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 26:56

And some guy finds himself in in the cabin in the woods with the wolf man, and uh somebody else steps into Dracula's castle, and all of them sort of episodically, you step in, they they're confused. By the time they're figuring out what's really happening, they're being killed in some horrible way. And it's just good fun.

SPEAKER_02 27:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 27:19

Um, it was a lot of fun to shoot. Tony Hickox had a very comical approach to everything we did, which I confess at the time was throwing me a bit because I was a little bit more of a horror purist. I didn't really appreciate the camp quality of it at the time. I do so much more now. When I look at it, I realize, oh, this was we were going for high camp because I thought we were going for terror. And I think the distributor did too. But I think we were going for more campy.

SPEAKER_02 27:49

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it definitely comes across that way. But also, you know, we talk mostly about classic horror here, and uh the dedication, which is at the very end of the credits, first thing it's dedicated to is Hammer, the British studio that I talk about every single episode on Friday Night Frights, uh, as long as as well as Dari Aragunto, I noticed was in there, and Steven Spielberg was in that dedication too. But I was noticing there is a um kind of an extended mummy sequence. And uh I noticed that the guy from the real world, I think he's the detective who's investigating the uh disappearances of the college students, takes a spear and uh rams it through the mummy, straight through the mummy, which is exactly like Hammers the Mummy from 19 uh 58. And that's gotta be a specific homage. There's also um and I think one of the coolest-looking scenes in it, and maybe as camera operator you can talk about this, is the homage to Night of the Living Dead, where it goes black and white. And I I thought that was a really visually striking scene.

SPEAKER_06 28:53

Um Yeah, and it was fun to shoot and know it was gonna be black and white. Um that was great. Which by the way, our makeup artist was Bob Keane, who um years later I was watching uh Dog Soldiers uh with the you know British soldiers trap being attacked by werewolves. I'm looking at the werewolves in them, I was thinking, my God, that looks a lot like the werewolf from Waxworks. And it was Bob Keane did both movies. And then Bob Keane, by the way, teaches at School of the Arts. He uh he did all of our makeup stuff and all this, and he also did uh the Hellraiser 3 movie that we did. And he actually he did the Hellraisers, I think, maybe all of them, but uh to a certain point. But he uh he he was great, and yeah, the makeup effects in those movies, yeah, they were they were top, top-notch. They were done by the best.

SPEAKER_02 29:41

Yeah, absolutely. So this it's a it's a mix of of sort of comedy. Uh Zach Gallaghan is an actor who has that kind of, I don't know, kind of uh Matthew Broderick slash 80s Tom Cruise kind of vibe of the, you know, slacker college as the student as the description says. So it's comedy, and then there's some fairly serious gore in this movie as well, I think, although it's you're never far from a laugh.

SPEAKER_06 30:11

Zach was perfect because Zach was mostly known for Gremlins. He was, of course, the star of the two Gremlins movies. And um he he made this work for me. He was always a pleasure to work with on set. He's he's one of those guys who's just fun. He's just a fun, nice guy. And uh he really made it bearable. He he had fun with the character. There were times he would do things, and I remember one shot in particular, he kind of came through and did it in such a quirky, silly way that I thought we were certainly going to reshoot it again. That was a joke, right? And Tony was like, no, I like it. Print it, move on. It's in the movie. But yeah, he was always bringing something fun to it. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_02 30:50

You know, it's interesting. If you are a classic horror person listening to this, I mean, horror history is littered with Wax Museum films, the mystery of the wax museum, which I think is a pre-code film. Then you've got Vincent Price's House of Wax that was in 3D in the 50s, um, and that was remade, I think, in the 2000s, I want to say, with Paris Hilton, if I'm not mistaken, uh, in the cast. So this is kind of in line with that, not necessarily that you're the fear is you're going to be made into wax works as it is in some of those older movies, but this is, you know, the wax works coming to life in a very different way, which is kind of cool.

SPEAKER_06 31:28

Although in the movie, if you step into the museum, into the exhibit, and you're killed there, you become part of the exhibit.

SPEAKER_02 31:36

Yes, that's right.

SPEAKER_06 31:37

And there's a scene I really thought was really good where um and I don't think this is a spoiler. So the detective investigating things goes into one of the museum exhibits, and when he steps across the line, we are afraid he's gonna get transported into it, but he isn't because it already has a victim. And he goes up to someone who looks like the wax figure or something, and as he cuts the wax open, underneath the wax skin are wax veins, wax, it's like everything of a human anatomy is inside the wax dummy. They aren't just superficially waxed, but as he cuts it open, they're wax all the way through, blood vessels and everything. And I thought that was a really interesting twist to sell the idea that you'd been transformed into a wax being. Yeah. You weren't just covered in wax.

SPEAKER_02 32:32

Yes. Yeah, thank you. That was actually a really kind of cool effect, too, the the little piece of um of the wax figure skin that he he clips off there. So I gotta before we move on to the second feature, I want to ask you one quick question. Maybe you can uh explain this. So at the end of this film, it it shocker and surprise, it sets it up that there might be a second film a little bit. And uh the closing credit song is It's My Party and I'll Cry If I Want To by Leslie Gore, which is a bold choice. Do you have any idea why um if the if that was the director's idea or what?

SPEAKER_06 33:05

Aaron Ross Powell It was very much Tony's idea, and I asked, and when they did, I asked Tony why why that song? And he says, the whole time we were making the movie, I that song kept coming up, and we kept playing that song, and it just felt somehow right, like it went with the movie. So he he went with it.

SPEAKER_02 33:21

It works. I mean, you're sitting there going, okay, that's let's have fun, right? So all right. So if uh wax work is our first um feature, well, obviously the second one has got to be uh its sequel, which is Waxworks 2, Wax Work 2, Lost in Time.

SPEAKER_01 33:38

Does the burning down of the Wax Museum have any bearing on whether the accused killed her stepfather or not?

SPEAKER_03 33:45

Something has gone wrong. If we don't find some evidence, you're gonna run it in jail, or they're gonna give you the elector chair. You have inherited your grandfather's and my collection of strange artifacts. There may be something there that will help you in your quest. Look at this. It's the Cartagorean time door.

SPEAKER_02 34:02

From 1992, also directed by Anthony Hickox, and he wrote both of these as well, right? Correct. So uh here just to get you set up for Waxwork 2 a little bit, uh it says the survivors of the first wax work must use a portal through time to defeat the evil that has followed them and turned their lives upside down. So this has Zach Gallaghan returning. Uh you've also got other folks that you might recall. Bruce Campbell, the legend Bruce Campbell. Amazing Bruce Campbell. You've got Marina Cyrus is in this, Juliet Mills, John Ireland, Patrick McNee, um, I I'm assuming makes a uh cameo. You got David Carradine, Alexander Kudnov, the the dancer and actor. And so uh this is from 1992. Uh second now, did you were you also camera operator on this one?

SPEAKER_06 34:52

I was camera operator on that one as well. Okay. And let me give credit to Jerry Lively, who was the director of photography of both films and who kindly allowed me to operate camera. And uh it was it's his photography. But the way Tony shoots, you kind of need somebody to be specifically on camera the whole time. Tony designs constant trick shots where the camera is moving fast, pushing in really quick to minimum focus. Um and it's just it it you kind of had to constantly be on camera for a Tony Hicks film. So it needed two people. But just I do not ever want to be accused of taking credit for work I did not do. Absolutely, Jerry Lively was the DP on these films. Um I'm thrilled that I got to work with him. Unfortunately, Jerry passed away just a few months ago, actually. Um, and Tony passed away about a year and a half, two years ago now, I guess, maybe longer. But um yeah, they were they were the guys who gave me the shot.

SPEAKER_02 35:56

Thank you very much for that. So Waxworks 2 is uh a little bit different tone, Tony.

SPEAKER_06 36:01

You want to just talk about that? Um it's even it went more for the humor and less for the jugular. And uh we we once again got even more literal into you're getting tossed into various movie universes. So they get tossed into one where suddenly they're on a spaceship and they're fighting an alien. Um we get tossed into uh an old fantasy realm, which is where Alexander Gudinoff is the king. And um we I'm trying to remember what the other ones were, we just but they're all very much we we weren't holding back, they're not evil characters from history, they're they're movie scenes, and we go in and and then have fun with them. The haunting was the one with Marina Certis and Bruce Campbell, and it's it's pretty funny. And in each one, Zach Gallaghan, Zach Gallaghan's character has to figure out some clue in order to get out of the situation, but he has to live through whatever is happening, so he has to survive.

SPEAKER_02 37:04

Fantastic. I think I would be remiss if um I had you here and did not ask you what is Bruce Campbell like on set? Is he like Bruce Campbell that we all know and love?

SPEAKER_06 37:15

Yep. He is a cut-up, he is a card, he was fun. Most I mean, so we had a couple of days with him because the the whole movie is a very episodic in sections. So he plays this professor, kind of the Roddy McDowell character from the Haunting of Hill House or the Haunting, which where Roddy McDowell played the scientist. I'm not sure. It may be haunting, I'm not sure. Might have been the haunting.

SPEAKER_02 37:39

I'll check that out. You keep going.

SPEAKER_06 37:41

But um, he's kind of that character, and uh and then we go down and find him strung up on a uh uh big wooden X with his chest cut open, this flesh pulled back, but he's alive, and crows are picking things out of his ribcage, which was, I think it was popcorn, but we actually have crows on him picking out stuff from this you know fake rib thing, and it's pretty freaking funny.

SPEAKER_02 38:11

Uh I think you're talking about uh Roddy McDowell and Legend of Hellhouse.

SPEAKER_06 38:14

The Legend of Hellhouse.

SPEAKER_02 38:15

Yes, who was directed by John Huff. Shout out to John Huff, who also directed one of my favorite hammers, Twins of Evil, and Dirty Mary Crazy Larry, I believe.

SPEAKER_06 38:24

Again, we we would do these kind of composite parodies. Like you mentioned it's wax work, not wax works. Yeah. Thank you. How many liked seven characters? He said he wants seven letters. And I remember him saying that he felt it was good luck. So it was never wax works, it was always wax work. Because I thought the sequel would be wax work too, wax works, but no, no, no. It's just wax work.

SPEAKER_02 38:45

It distinguishes it from other films. Yeah, yeah. So if you want to see these, they are readily available streaming to be, I think uh I know the first one is free on Prime, and there is a nice Blu-ray that was released not too long ago from Vestron that has both of them. Uh Vestron. So if you're interested in uh in checking them out. So uh that's Wax Work and Waxwork 2. All right, we just have a couple minutes left, but uh I wanted to talk about uh you have two YouTube channels, uh and I'm gonna put the links for both of these on our social media as well as the the uh show description. Uh the first is called the Kinetic Image, which is I I guess uh sort of geared towards would-be professionals in the filmmaking industry, but a couple that I just want to highlight of videos that you have. You've got how to shoot a good movie punch, which was really fun to watch. Uh and then you've got uh a section on Hellraiser 3, uh, which you worked on. Uh you were a director of photography on that one?

SPEAKER_06 39:47

No, no, no. Camera operator. Camera operator, and that's another Anthony Hickock's film. Another Anthony Kickox film director, and and Jerry Lively as the DP. So um Camera Operator. And that one was a lot of funny stories because I was living in Los Angeles at the time, but it shot in Winston-Salem, and we actually shot where we are right now as we're recording this on the Wake Forest campus. We uh there's a scene in there where at the end they actually bury the uh the cube, the box, and um they put it into a building that's under construction, and that's actually the business school here at Wake Forest University, is where we shot that. And I just remember that the night we shot that, it was so funny because we were staying in High Point somewhere, and they would just put us on a bus, and then we'd go to all of these different reasons. We shot in Greensboro, we shot in a high point, we shot here, and I never knew where I was because I I didn't get here. And I got out and I'm standing here and I looked around and I looked at somebody who was a student. I said, I'm sorry, where are we? And he says, Oh, you're just down from Wake Chapel. I said, No, no, no, I'm sorry. What city is this? And he says, Oh, you're in Winston-Salem, North Carolina on the planet Earth.

SPEAKER_02 40:58

Yeah, okay, there you go. Yeah. If you're listening in another country, yeah, for a while uh in uh 80s and 90s and in the 2000s, North Carolina had a pretty booming, booming film business. And uh so a lot of things were shot here. So that that is the kinetic image, and one video you just uploaded recently is about the history of the Superman costume throughout the years, right?

SPEAKER_06 41:20

That should um that will be up by the time this goes up, I assume. Okay. Um the kinetic image deals with film tech stuff, but in kind of a fun, trivia sort of tech trivia way. And so I actually drove to Metropolis. Yes, there is a city called Metropolis, and it is the official home of Superman. And there they have the Super Museum, where they have all kinds of things from all of the various Superman movies and TV shows, including the original costume worn during the black and white filming with George Reeves. And the interesting thing about that costume is when you see it, is the costume is brown and gray. And everyone's kind of like, why did you need to make a brown and gray costume? Yeah, sure it was going to be a black and white show, but you just shoot it on black and white film and it's black and white, right? And I do a deep dive into how color photographs and appears in black and white, and how much you have to carefully design a costume because of the way the black and white film at the time recorded it. And then they did do color episodes after the first two seasons, but the show was still being aired in black and white and viewed on black and white TVs, and the color suit looked terrible at first. So they had to carefully engineer a costume that could work with the technology of the day. And so I kind of do this whole deep dive doing taking color costumes and black and white costumes and changing them to show what they would have looked like in that time. Then they also have one of the Christopher Reeve costumes, and the Christopher Reeve costume had technical issues because they couldn't do blue screen to make him fly for the most part, because he's wearing a blue costume. But they did make some to do blue screen with, and they had to devise a special version of the costume so they could do it. And then I do another episode where we talk about the modern Superman costumes and the old costumes would when we started shooting digitally fabrics moray and create this weird effect. And if you don't know what that means, take out my episode and I'll explain it. But they the costumes had to be designed today, the present-day Superman costumes, to avoid merating since they're shot digitally. So for me, the whole evolution of the design of the Superman costume as worn by the actor reflects the current state of film technology. And I got fascinated with that, how technology shaped how the costume had to be redesigned. And I don't think people are really conscious of that. And I thought it was kind of a fun little road to go down. And that's the kind of thing we do on the kinetic image. We find obscure little technical things and then kind of go deep diving into them.

SPEAKER_02 44:00

And scene here, uh, you're visiting famous film locations.

SPEAKER_06 44:03

Scene here is me trying to do what Anthony Burdain as a chef did with food and going to locations, is me as a cinematographer going to movie locations and travel. And I have been so far to Monument Valley, Devil's Tower, uh Field of Dreams, the train wreck site from the Fugitive, which is still sitting there. They actually crashed two trains, uh, a train into a bus in the fugitive and left it sitting there. And you can actually go see where that is and the dam that he jumps off of. Um, I went to a place uh where you can visit the original Star Trek sets, which have been faithfully recreated. And I went to the place where the original Star Trek series and many shows have shot, Vasquez Rocks, where you know Captain Kirk fights the giant lizard creature that's the Gorn. All of those are going to be episodes on Seen Here, which is spelled like seen in a movie, S-C-E-N-E-H-E-R-E. So it will be on YouTube, Seen Here. Yeah, fantastic. It's a travel series based on movie locations.

SPEAKER_02 45:08

Fantastic. And I said the links will be on our social media. And um Richard, I can't thank you enough for being here, sir. My pleasure. Thank you so much. And uh folks, that's all the time you have for today. Uh we'd love it if you would join us on our um social media. We're at Friday Night Frights Podcast on Instagram. We're at FridayNightFrights.bsky.social on Blue Sky. Please um send us a DM. Let us know how you like the show. Richard, again, thank you. And folks, if you're in a wax museum and you happen to drop your lighter into the exhibit, for God's sake, don't step over the road. See you next time.