An exclusive interview with the writer-director
Horror fans are living in good times. Not because of the glut of remakes and sequels that are permeating our theaters, but because some of our childhood favorites are being revisited, cleaned up and repackaged for the DVD and Blu-Ray formats. Speaking for myself, but I’m sure you’ll agree, next to The Monster Squad – which we saw released last year as a special edition presentation – I was clamoring to see Fred Dekker’s other ’80s cult classic Night of the Creeps resurrected on anything other than my worn-out VHS tape.
The wait is over. This week, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment releases Dekker’s space slug/zombie flick starring Tom “thrill me” Atkins, Jason Lively and Steve Marshall – on DVD and Blu-Ray thanks to the same man who brought The Monster Squad DVD to life, Michael Felsher. In anticipation of this release, we spoke with Dekker about the creation of the disc and his thoughts on the film over two decades after its ’86 release.
ShockTillYouDrop.com: Finally, we’re seeing a Night of the Creeps special edition realized. How did this get kick-started?
Fred Dekker: [DVD producer] Michael [Felsher] is a force to be reckoned with. He’s a huge fan of both of my first two films, Night of the Creeps and The Monster Squad, and of the two, I think he said Night of the Creeps was the one he wanted the most to turn into a DVD. He worked for years at Anchor Bays and I’m sure he spent years bugging Sony about it. At some point, he talked Lionsgate into doing The Monster Squad DVD. That was a great disc and, for the fans, it had some great stuff on it. It also happened to sell through the roof. At that point, I think Sony Home Entertainment saw the writing on the wall and Michael kept haranguing them. Finally they relented and it’s been a great ride.
Shock: What’s the real draw to this disc for the die-hard fans? What’s the nugget we’re all bound to go nuts over?
Dekker: The re-master exceeded my expectations. I can’t believe how good it looks. I had the privilege of being able to re-color it and re-master it. It looks contemporary. The big nugget for me, personally, is they allowed me to put the original ending back on the theatrical cut of the movie. We’re calling it the director’s cut because it’s the version of the movie I would have liked to have released when it came back out.
Shock: When fans demand they see alternate cuts, it’s a larger process than fans might think that costs money.
Dekker: It does cost money and that’s where the research comes in and someone has to go off and find the pieces. So, when Sony approached me and graciously agreed to let me do the director’s cut and put the original ending back on, they had to find the original ending. The body of the movie was transferred from an inter-positive and it looks fantastic, but the ending, it turns out, only existed on a 3/4-inch video tape. So if you look very carefully you’ll notice a slight difference in picture quality. But what we tried to do is degrade the image very slightly right up to the cut of the new material. Unless you know it’s coming, you might not notice it.
It actually disappeared for many years, particularly after its theatrical run. And then I would see it at video stores and hear references to it, mostly in my family. As far as I was concerned, it was dead for many years until it was resurrected. But I always had problems with the movie. It was my first film, I was learning on the job. There was a lot of stuff that was clunky in it for me. There’s stuff in it, though, that’s transcendent, I was like a kid in a candy store where nobody told me I couldn’t do something. Like, I want to put Tom Atkins on a dolly and just spin him around the room with the background whizzing by. My feelings about the movie have softened a bit. I saw it in Austin, Texas where they got to see the director’s cut, it was interesting to feel the vibe in the room because most people have seen the movie and most have liked it. But there was a sense of respect, it wasn’t just an affectionate kind of B-movie, this was a real movie to them. The favorite scene in the movie where Tom Atkins explains to Jason Lively what happened and it’s really good. It’s flat-out good, the camera work is good, the music is good. It’s actually good, I was proud.
Shock: Well, I’m glad to hear you haven’t knocked the FX which I still find a lot of fun.
Dekker: Well, I’d like to say we made a mistake very early in the movie that was a blessing in disguise. I wanted the aliens in the opening prologue to look weird somehow. In retrospect, I remember my first thought was to get someone from the Lakers. The biggest guy I possibly could but have him run down a corridor and over crank it. That would make him look creepy looking. If I had done that, it would have been different because you would have thought it was a hardcore, scary, straight-forward movie. What I did was put little people in alien costumes. And the first time you see one of them waddling around the corner with a laser gun, you laugh. What that did, by accident, is it allows the audience to laugh at the movie affectionately whenever they want. It takes the curse off a lot of the makeup and special effects like the zombie dog which leaves something to be desired. But when it cuts to the zombie dog, the audience knows it looks fake because they know it’s tongue-in-cheek from the get-go.
Shock: Laying down the director’s commentary and doing the interviews, was there anything new about the film that you learned?
Dekker: There was stuff I didn’t know. Amusing behind-the-scenes stuff in the makeup FX department. I guess they picked a guinea pig, I don’t know who it was, who they had quite a bit of fun with. I learned and never knew that Jason Lively and Steve Marshall gave Tom Atkins a bit of a hard time to try and screw up his performance. I don’t think he was thrilled at that at the time, and clearly they failed at their efforts. I got to the root of the George Clooney rumor. There’s a rumor that he’s in the movie in the background. But he may have been on the set at some point.
Shock: What’s great is that Creeps is getting a dual release – DVD and Blu-Ray. Monster Squad didn’t have that, but a Blu-Ray is on the way in November. Is that a new transfer?
Dekker: Thanks for asking, it is. We did a re-master all over again. It’s really interesting because the first time I saw The Monster Squad at Lionsgate, I was just stunned at the image. Then I went to do Night of the Creeps whichâ¦the movies are slightly different in their respect, mostly due to my producer, Peter Hyams who was on Monster Squad. That film was also anamorphic. There was a lot of stage smoke in that film so it has a slightly softer image and it’s a slightly more earth tone-y color palette. Creeps is colorful, lots of wide lenses, very bright, but I went into Creeps and it looked better than The Monster Squad. Then I went in to do the Monster Squad re-master for the Blu-Ray and it looked better than Creeps. So every time we re-master one of these movies, it looks better than it did last time. It’s stunning.
Shock: There’s been some talk of a Creeps sequel, a Monster Squad remake. What’s the latest?
Dekker: They’re in the works to the degree that Rob Cohen is interested in doing a remake of The Monster Squad and I’m interested in doing a sequel to Night of the Creeps. As far as directors opening their big yaps doing interviews, that’s where it stands right now. I think making a remake of Monster Squad is a tragic and stupid idea. The movie preceded a whole generation of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Goosebumps and there’s a show now called The Troop, we’ve seen it so much, why do it now? With Night of the Creeps, I think it would be fun to get the original cast back together and follow up the original.
Source: Ryan Rotten, Managing Editor
