October 6, 2010

One of the current remakes that this writer has personally been looking forward to for quite some time is the new NIGHT OF THE DEMONS redux. Director Adam Gierasch and co-writing partner Jace Anderson were the ones given the task of updating the late 80′s horror cult classic, and considering the pair have worked with “masters of horror” Tobe Hooper and Dario Argento, it’s safe to say that this new version of NIGHT OF THE DEMONS was in more than capable hands.

This time, the modern take on NIGHT OF THE DEMONS takes everything that was fun and cool about the original and gives it a rockin’ punk sensibility. (And soundtrack!) Not to mention it features a who’s-who of character actors such as Shannon Elizabeth (AMERICAN PIE), Edward Furlong (TERMINATOR 2), Monica Keena (FREDDY VS JASON), Bobbi Sue Luther (LAID TO REST), Diora Baird (TEXAS CHAINSAW: THE BEGINNING), John Beach (FEAR CLINIC) and “scream queen” favorite Tiffany Shepis.

With the DVD/Blu-Ray release set just in time for Halloween this year, MH got the opportunity to stop by the home of the filmmaking duo to learn about the making of the sure-to-be holiday favorite. Read on for the full story on NIGHT OF THE DEMONS! -Robg.

Robg.: How did NIGHT OF THE DEMONS come to you? Were you still in production on AUTOPSY when this project came about?

Adam Gierasch: I was sitting at home minding my own business, I got a phone call from Peter Hoffman from Seven Arts asking if I’d ever heard of NIGHT OF THE DEMONS and I said “yeah, of course”. He might of actually said NIGHT OF THE DEMON at first, and I said “you mean CURSE OF THE DEMON from the 50’s?” No, no, the 1980’s one that Kevin Tenney directed. Of course I knew that film. He asked if I’d be interested in directing it and I said “sure”. Sounds good! I asked if I could think about it for a bit so I could come up with some cool stuff that wasn’t in the original to put my own stamp on it. We were doing a test screening for AUTOPSY and Peter brought these two guys with him. One was Greg McKay, the other was Kevin Tenney. And they watched the movie, liked it and I told them what my ideas were for DEMONS and they were like “wow, that’s pretty wild.” This was a different situation from when we did TOOLBOX MURDERS (with Tobe Hooper). For TOOLBOX, we never went back and watched the original. We wanted to do something entirely different.

Robg.: So the people behind the original were supportive from the beginning then?

Adam Gierasch: Oh yeah, they were the producers. Kevin Tenney has been my link into the original. I’ve talked with Kevin since the beginning. He gave me notes. We argued about stuff, we agreed on other stuff, but we’re still good buddies.

Robg.: So what was the biggest difference in tackling this remake as opposed to TOOLBOX MURDERS, which was also a remake? Was there any criteria laid out that you had to adhere to or were you pretty much given free reign?

Adam Gierasch: There are a bunch of movies with demons – EVIL DEAD, Lamberto Bava’s DEMONS, NIGHT OF THE DEMONS, TALES FROM THE CRYPT: DEMON KNIGHT. All of these basically have the same plot, with some variations. Oddly enough, NIGHT OF THE DEMONS came before Bava’s DEMONS, but with some variations of settings. DEMONS took place in a movie theater, the second one took place in an apartment building, but these were all basically demons running around biting people.

Jace Anderson: And we watched every one of them. We watched the original DEMONS at least 3 times.

Adam Gierasch: In TOOLBOX, what we wanted to do was give Tobe Hooper a script he could really sink his teeth into, plus he got to use powertools again. It was a three-fold goal. First was to give Tobe something he could really do well. Second was to make a movie about Los Angeles, including some of the supernatural aspects of Los Angeles, and finally we wanted to pay homage to Italian horror films. We were especially influenced by SUSPERIA when we wrote TOOLBOX. If you watch it now, it begins in a big rainstorm. The reason we were so fascinated by the Italian films when it came to TOOLBOX is they didn’t give you all the information that you needed. You had to put all the pieces together and it sort of made sense. You had to use your imagination a lot, so we wanted to not really tell people stuff and sort of let there be different interpretations of who the killer was. For NIGHT OF THE DEMONS, we didn’t want to do that. There are certain things that the fans wanted, and there were things that at first I stubbornly thought “no, we’re going to do it entirely differently.” Finally after the 17th person said to me “are you going to put in a lipstick scene?” I stopped to think about it and it was like, “well… that was a pretty cool scene. Fuck it, of course we’ll put in a lipstick scene. I’ll just do something a little differently with it.” And so there were a couple of scenes that we wanted to make sure that we included in our version (from the original). But other than that and the basic plot, we wanted to make it a little bit different. We wanted to put a lot more of my love of the music from that time period in it. Especially because I remember in the original, everyone had cool punk stickers on their cars, but when they got to the house there was no cool punk music. There was only “Stigmata Martyr” by BAUHAUS. That was another question I kept getting, “are you going to use that BAUHAUS song?” No!

Robg.: Is this modern or does it take place in the 80’s like the original?

Adam Gierasch: It’s modern. But it might as well be 80’s. It’s got a very 80’s feel to it and we shot it to look and feel like an 80’s horror movie shot on good old fashioned grainy, highly saturated 16 mm film, so it’s got a cool look to it. It looks like the kind of movie we all grew up watching, which is neat when you get to shoot on a format like this.

Robg.: Who was the Director of Photography on this? Was it someone you worked with previously?

Adam Gierasch: Yaron Levy shot it. He had done one set of insert shots on AUTOPSY and he had been recommended to me by Mike Mendez, because he was the gaffer on THE GRAVEDANCERS and also the gaffer & occasional DP on SAW. So he went from James Wan to Mike Mendez to me. I interviewed a lot of DP’s but Yaron was the one that really wanted to do it. He 100 percent convinced me he was the right guy. I interviewed a lot of big DP’s for this, but passion won out. He really wanted to do this movie and he was great. Since then, I did another movie with him and I plan on doing the next one with him too. Can’t say enough good things about him. He was fantastic!

Robg.: Can you talk a bit about shooting this in New Orleans? Because you see the picture of the house where this party is going down and you think “wow”!

Adam Gierasch: Yeah, that’s what we said when we walked up to it!

Robg.: Did you have to adjust the script at all for that particular house, or did it fit in with what was in your original script?

Jace Anderson: It’s never literally perfect but it was pretty close. We had to rewrite a little, just figuring out which rooms certain scenes should take place in…

Adam Gierasch: We changed houses actually at one point.

Jace Anderson: Oh, that’s right!

Adam Gierasch: The first house we had an elevator in it, so we wrote a lot of elevator set pieces, but that house was much smaller and it actually wasn’t in New Orleans. But then we found Luling Mansion and we lost the elevator stuff. What ever was not in the house we were able to build. It was difficult to shoot though because we had to shoot at night, which is never my favorite thing to do. I like shooting in the day so you can go home and go to sleep at night!

Robg.: And have a normal schedule, of course.

Adam Gierasch: Yeah, because then you’ve got the fear of the sunrise because you know you can’t shoot anymore stuff once the sun comes up, as opposed to if you shoot during the day, there’s the fear of the sun going down… There’s always a lot of fear when it comes to shooting a movie. (Laughs) Fear of not making your days.

Robg.: How pivotal was the look of demons and how much did you work on getting the look of the demons right?

Adam Gierasch: Oh, we worked a lot on the demons. We chose Drac Studios, they’d done the FX for HANNIBAL and WATCHMEN, THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST and BENJAMIN BUTTON. They had good ideas, but I was pretty specific in what I wanted. I wanted all the demons to look a little bit different instead of just being demonic. I wanted different ideas for each character, and I knew I wanted one demon to be the typical sexy, horned demoness. And then I wanted another to look like a fish human. I wanted one to look like something out of a Fulci movie. I really wanted each one to look different, and they basically do. Once you see a bunch of people in the movie run around in prosthetics, it gets a little tricky, but certain ones have certain abilities.

Robg.: What I like about what I’ve seen so far is the different look of the demons. As a kid, the thing that intrigued me about horror movies was if I could draw the characters. Seeing these demons, I want to draw them! I want an action figure of them all! I know the one that Bobbi Sue Luther plays is faceless and has a skull demon face.

Adam Gierasch: We wanted a topless demon with her face ripped off. That was a prerequisite! (Laughs)

Robg.: What about the casting for this? Because you have such an eclectic group here between Shannon Elizabeth, Monica Keena, Edward Furlong, Diora Baird. Were these people you wanted to work with?

Adam Gierasch: A lot of it was just casting. It was typical movie casting, people came in and auditioned and we picked. The clearest example of that one was John Beach. Anyone who sees the movie will remember him.

Jace Anderson: He’s got a great, great scene in DEMONS and he knocked it out of the park.

Adam Gierasch: Yeah, he’s one of the real fun people in this. John just came in an auditioned. Monica also came in and knocked it out of the park. Other people were suggested like Eddie Furlong and Shannon Elizabeth and Diora Baird, whom I just met with, talked to and we all agreed it’d be a fun movie to work on together.

Robg.: Obviously the original went on to spawn two more sequels. Have you given any thought to continuing your version at all? Would you be game to do a follow-up, a NIGHT OF THE DEMONS 2?

Adam Gierasch: Tiffany Shepis had some good ideas about what the sequel should be. (Laughs)

Jace Anderson: (Laughs) Tiffany and I came up with the whole sequel where –

Adam Gierasch: No, don’t tell him! Let’s save it. But yeah, Tiffany and Jace came up with some good ideas. I know where I’d like to set it. If it happens, it’d be great, but let’s not count our chickens before they hatch yet. But yeah, I’d be game.

Jace Anderson: If it’s popular enough to spawn a sequel then yeah, we’d be game.

Robg.: I know personally how important music is to you, so when it came time to select the soundtrack for NIGHT OF THE DEMONS, how’d you put it together? Who were some artists you had to have on there?

Adam Gierasch: Well, what’s interesting about the original NIGHT OF THE DEMONS film was that you took one look at that party and thought “I want to be anywhere but there.” (Laughs) Even the characters were like, “this party sucks!” And we wanted to make sure that our party looked like it was fun! Because instead of gathering 10 people saying “well, where’s the party?” We wanted it to be a big rockin’ party that you would want to be at. And so, we wanted the music to be really a Halloween themed soundtrack. So I kept thinking of different songs that would work and that I wanted to use. I would say 90 percent of the songs that I wanted to use, we got in the movie. Like I said before, I saw those stickers on the car in the first movie and I thought ya know what? I’m going to put together the horror punk soundtrack of my dreams.

Jace Anderson: Some of the songs were so vital to the story that we actually used them during shooting.

Adam Gierasch: We picked a lot of them ahead of time and we played them during some of the sequences while we were filming.

Robg.: Do you guys use music at all during the writing process?

Jace Anderson: I typically don’t, but it’s funny, it depends on what phase of writing I’m at. I listen to stuff that would horrify most people. I can’t tell you how many gruesome scenes I’ve written to the MOULIN ROUGE soundtrack. (Laughs) Or Italian pop singers from the 60’s!

Adam Gierasch: You people out there in webland, do not fear. None of those types of songs are anywhere near DEMONS. (Laughs) That’s just for part of Jace’s writing process. In the movie RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD, I remember seeing that movie and I thought “Holy shit, they used ‘Party Time’ by 45 GRAVE in it!” But then I realized they changed the lyrics! I thought how could you change the lyrics to ‘Party Time’ for a movie? They made it into something about… zombies? No! ‘Party Time’ is one of the darkest songs ever written! It’s amazing! It’s one of the sickest songs. For those of you guys out there that don’t know the song, go listen to the original version. It’s a terribly gruesome, sick song about… well, killing and molesting children. And if you think about it, “do you want to party?” That makes it all the more sicker. So when we were doing this movie, we thought “we have to use 45 GRAVE.” Low and behold, 45 GRAVE are still around so we got them to write us the NIGHT OF THE DEMONS theme song. There were other songs I wanted to use that weren’t quite punk rock as 45 GRAVE, but I really wanted to use ‘em. I pictured a long tracking shot to the song ‘Bloodletting’ by CONCRETE BLONDE. And I thought it’d always be cool to use TYPE O NEGATIVE. TYPE O always works so well for movies. And then there were other songs – there was one band in particular that is noticeably absent from the soundtrack, I don’t know what the fans will think about that, but it is a real shame. Let’s just put it that way. But we did get the great song Code Blue by T.S.O.L. which is one of the great early 80’s punk bands. If you guys don’t know it, download it! But pay to download it!

We’ll have a follow-up article next week with NIGHT OF THE DEMONS director Adam Gierasch sharing with us his all time favorite punk rock records!

NIGHT OF THE DEMONS hits DVD and Blu-Ray on October 19th, 2010!