Big Gay Horror Fan is not alone in this! How often have you enjoyed a film where the creative parties involved simply want to forget that it ever existed? Here, in this exclusive interview, I torture celebrated horror auteur Brian Yuzna (Society, The Dentist, From Beyond, Reanimator) with questions about his involvement with one of my guilty pleasures, Silent Night Deadly Night 4: The Initiation.
BGHF: You’re appearing in Chicago, tonight, to celebrate the visual wonders of your first film, Society. I, personally, have always loved the creative flair you brought to Silent Night, Deadly Night 4: The Initiation. Its a film, like Halloween 3, that veers from the initial source to create something a bit deeper.
Brian: Well, that’s a weird one. It was much cheaper. That one was really out of control. It just seems really unsuccessful in a lot of ways. It is so ambitious aesthetically. It’s just so out there on that level and that is really a collaboration with Screaming Mad George. I was just really reaching for an aesthetic. What I was really trying to do was I wanted to do this effect called simulacra. Do you know what that is?
BGHF: Well, I’ve heard of it…
Brian: It’s like when you look at a cloud and you see a face in it. You project something into it. It can be that. A projection from yourself, a psychological projection. It’s something that if you become mentally psychotic or unbalanced that can get out of control. There’s another level of simulacra in nature such as when a butterfly might develop its wing pattern so that when it alights on something it looks like a big face. This would scare off a predator. So, there are a lot of animals who develop ways of looking like something else to fool their competitors. It’s like a protective disguise or protective evolution. The whole animal will look like something else. Insects will do this a lot. They will look bigger. This is a very clear simulacra. Another level is optical illusions. You know those pictures that look one way, but if you look at it in another light, it’s different. Here’s a famous one: the woman in front of her vanity mirror putting on make-up, but if you look at it in another way, you realize that it’s actually a skull! The mirror is actually a skull – making a point that vanity is fleeting. Or you see the image of a line drawing of a lamp, but if you look at it another way, it’s really two faces touching their noses. In fact, in Society we did take paintings by Dali and use them as compositions in the shunting sequence. But, I was hoping that I could get the shunting to be a simulacra initially. That as Billy was watching it; it would look like one thing, but then turn out to be another. Of course, a simulacra is much easier to do graphically than on film. It usually depends on an affixed point of view, not moving the point of view. It normally depends on a frozen staging. When things move, though, it is hard to keep the ambiguity of what is the foreground and what is the background. Here’s a movie that did simulacra in an amazing way – the Robert Wise version of The Haunting. It’s still the best ghost movie ever made. That’s a movie in which you never see the ghost and in a pure ghost movie, you never do. It the scene when the two women are on the bed, scared shitless because they hear the pounding, down the hall. They are hugging each other, holding hands, watching the door. On the door, the shadows subtly shift, but the pattern of the wood in the door – it’s a wrinkled pattern -and the camera keep staring at it and it starts looking like a face. It has this feeling of a personality. It’s really scary!
BGHF: That’s an amazing moment!
Brian: I think fear is often like that. It’s like you’re in the dark house and you wake up at night and look around and all of a sudden, things could be something else! You have to turn on the light. That was certainly very much on our minds in The Initiation. That was my main goal: to do the simulacra’s.
BGHF: Did you reach the goal?
Brian: No. we did some things like it. I was supposed to print the movie and flip the film. So that everything that was left would be halfway right once she got initiated. There were a lot of ideas there. It was just too much for our resources. And it was probably just too ambitious from an aesthetics point of view. There’s just no sense to it. I read this book about Lilith and tried to use that. It was really an out of control attempt with no money. That budget was so small. You can’t even build anything for it and yet you’re trying to make all these sophisticated effects! But some of it works better than others. George made simulacra’s on the wall. There were stains on the wall that we would show. There’s a lot of stuff like that in there. I tried to film certain scenes so they would look like something else. We just sort of went crazy trying to do it. It didn’t really work. There’s a similar process for the narrative. At the beginning when the girl jumps off the building and she’s burning, the idea came from Lilith. Lilith was the first wife of Adam. She didn’t want to be dominated and became the patron saint of a certain type of feminism. She’s normally depicted as having fire from the waist. So, that was why we put that in. So, there are all these things in there that are coming from mythology and then just subconscious aesthetics of our own. It was really an out of control kind of thing that didn’t work. (Laughs) But either people mercifully don’t know about it or mercifully don’t bring it up!
BGHF: (Laughs) I do think your aesthetics truly make something interesting out of the film, though. It’s never boring.
Brian: But I certainly would say that the problem is that ideas have to fit into the frame, into the narrative structure. If you’re going to use ideas, you have to make them work within the narrative structure. You’ve got to make a good movie with those ideas. I have always erred by being too ambitious for my resources. You can do what you want to a certain degree – and I would do just whatever and would just hope that it would work out. Most often it doesn’t and then you have a failure in a movie. This whole way of working that I tried to do with The Initiation – with a whole stream of consciousness – I think it worked much better in Society. We just took ideas and did them, but underneath them was some aesthetic sense for Society, but not so much with The Initiation.
BGHF: It’s still a very interesting way to create.
Brian: It’s the way visual artists work. They don’t quantify.
Brian Yuzna appears tonight, Friday, November 30th, at Terror in the Aisles 13 http://www.facebook.com/#!/events/534843479863719/ – Big Gay Horror Fan, meanwhile, is always accepting burning Lilith’s at http://www.facebook.com/#!/BigGayHorrorFan!
Until the next time – SWEET love and pink GRUE, Big Gay Horror Fan
Of course, Yuzna’s 1989 directorial debut Society is full of slimy gelatinous male nudity during that film’s notorious shunting sequence. But, lead actor Billy Warlock, at the height of his youthful beauty, is also often seen in lingering states of mouth watering undress.
Perhaps in homage to Psycho’s opening moments, movie buff Yuzna films an athletic lunch break motel rendezvous between his leads Neith Hunter and Tommy Hinkley in the beginning minutes of his goopy bug laden 1990 treatise Initiation: Silent Night, Deadly Night 4. Flipping their bodies amidst the sweaty sheets, both the beautiful Hunter and the buff Hinkley allow us ample views of their flesh – including a prime shot of Hinkley’s taut and healthy butt cheeks!
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