Sluggin’ It Out With James Gunn: Part Two

Now back to our irregularly scheduled James Gunn interview, with more hot Q&A action taken from an unused portion of a chat I had with him prior to the release of Slither last year (scroll down for the first half). I divided the interview here because it flows much better and quickly segues into non-Slither territory with talk about that very controversial (well, really, somewhat-to-slightly controversial – let’s be honest here) Dawn of the Dead remake that he wrote, which seems to make some horror fans choke on their Scary-Os and others rub ‘em all over themselves like a hot horror marinade.
He also talks about taking the film to the MPAA, which I find particularly of interest as last night I watched This Film is Not Yet Rated, an excellent documentary on the MPAA itself. It’s now playing select theatres (at least here in Toronto it is), and it’s something every horror fan absolutely should see to better understand how censorship works on different levels, learn how an unaccountable body comprised of uninformed everymen, corporate shills and the clergy can control the content the film industry, and marvel at a culture that turns a blind eye to graphic violence (particularly against women) yet is laughably conservative about sexuality. Seriously, this movie’s a jaw-dropper. See it or I’ll a send a small gaggle of C.H.U.D.s after you.
But enough of this, let’s let someone else shoot his mouth off, and who better than James Gunn?

Most horror fans will appreciate the use of organic effects in Slither, but that said, there are just some things in this film that wouldn’t work with practical effects, right?
There are certain things we were obviously unable to do with prosthetic effects. We had 27 000 worms bursting out of Brenda when she explodes, and that would’ve been impossible to do. But I wanted to make the line between the practical and the CGI as invisible as we possibly could with the budget that we had.
There were things that we did not get away with in Dawn of the Dead that we got away with here. The head shot [in Slither] when Stella shoots the cop in the head and the worm is flipping out the side of his head – that is so much worse than anything we had in Dawn of the Dead in terms of the head shot that they kept making us cut down again and again. I can’t believe we got away with it.

Why’d Slither get a pass?
I think what happened was they’d just rated Hostel, and they were like, “Well, this movie’s…,” and I noticed they did like the movie. From my time at Troma I used to have to send movies in to get rated, and I don’t want to put down the MPAA because they gave us a rated R, but at the same time I noticed that they’re not completely objective. I mean we were turning in movies at Troma, and 90 per cent of the movies they didn’t like and were very, very harsh with, and every once and a while they’d see a movie and they were like, “Hey, we like this!” and they would be easier with it.

Given that Slither is a lot lighter than Dawn of the Dead, do you think they take the tone of the film into consideration?
I think they do take the tone of the film into consideration. It was the same thing with Kill Bill; things were so over-the-top that they let them get away with a lot in that movie. … There’s almost what I’d like to think is a kindness in Slither that’s rare in a horror film, and maybe that’s because I do like my characters so much. There’s a sweetness to some of the characters that balances out some of the harsh violence, and plus the almost surrealness of everything I think definitely affected our rating.

Speaking of Dawn of the Dead, hardcore horror fans are divided on that film, Rue Morgue staff included; do you still catch flak for zombies that run?
Very, very, very rarely. Honestly, when people first found out that I was writing that film I got death threats, I got ‘em sent to my manager, which then got forwarded on to me. I had ‘em e-mailed to me from my website. I mean, people telling me, “I’m gonna kill you,” or ‘The world would be better off if you shot yourself,’ and all this stuff, and frankly a lot of it was due to Harry Knowles and Ain’t It Cool News. I think I’ve buried the hatchet with Harry, but when the news first came out that I’d be writing it, he went on this crazy rant, so all the Ain’t It Coolheads went nuts. But the weird thing was a month later Harry read the script and he loved it and he posted a great review. From that time, things changed a lot and things got a lot better when that script review was posted and people saw that this wasn’t the Scooby Doo version of Dawn of the Dead, it was just a new version of Dawn of the Dead that was different from the original movie.

So, do you that crowd has come around?
I think there’s a core of people that are still against it, but for the most part people seem to like the movie and appreciate what it is. Some people, like Quentin Tarantino, thought it was the best movie of 2004, and he said the only thing wrong with it was that it had the title Dawn of the Dead, that we should’ve named it something else. But he also understands that that was worth money. You can, say, name it something else, but if it’s called Dawn of the Dead it makes 30 million dollars opening weekend. If it was called Mall of the Dead I’m not sure it would’ve made the same amount of money.

How did the controversy affect the film?
The controversy helped us, but it only helped us because in the end people liked it.
Frankly, I never wanted to do a remake of anything, it never interested me. An adaptation of a cartoon series – I never wanted to do any of these things, but at the same time I think it’s all quite ridiculous, especially the running zombies thing. There’s no such thing as zombies, so there can easily be movies with running zombies, which incidentally go back way before Dawn of the Dead, to Return of the Living Dead. I think the running zombies controversy is ridiculous, and I think remakes of movies go back to the 1910s, I mean people were remaking The Golum and Frankenstein in these movies from 1914! To think that remaking a movie is somehow bad – it’s a part of history and a part of our culture, and some of the greatest movies have been remakes, like The Fly or The Thing. Two of my all time favourite movies horror movies are the Invasion of the Body Snatchers movies – both of ‘em are great movies.
But, at the same time, I understand because now it’s getting a little stupid that people keep coming to me with these remakes, and I also think there’s a need in the market place for completely original material.

So there you have it, some food for thought (and rot). In closing, few films have been as divisive at Rue Morgue as the Dawn of the Dead remake, with debates over the film turning into shouting matches. Keeping that in mind, I’ll let you know shortly how I felt about the film in a follow up post. In the meantime, stay dead…