Permanent Midnight: What’s Crazier Than “ABCs of Death 2”? The Twisted Minds Responsible For It

Image via Complex Original

As the mastermind behind Austin’s Fantastic Fest, Tim League is a venerable expert when it comes to short films. For the last 10 years, the festival has programmed some of the best horror, sci-fi, and bizarro animated shorts from all over the world, and it’s that sensibility that led League to co-spearhead the first ABCs of Death with co-producer Ant Timpson. At its heart, the ABCs franchise is a love letter to the short form—a love letter that’s sorely needed.

Anyone who regularly attends film festivals, particularly Fantastic Fest, will tell you—more often than not, a fest’s short films outshine most of the features. But full-length movies always get the most attention, leaving their miniature counterparts to either get lost in cinematic oblivion or only exist online, and short filmmakers to continually go unnoticed in the mainstream.

League, who’s also the overseer of the Alamo Drafthouse theater chain and the Drafthouse Films distribution company, is ready to change that. For ABCs of Death 2, he and Timpson made a concerted effort to invite more short-specific filmmakers into the project, which is partially why it’s a better overall experience than first ABCs.

Tim League: Having a really strong Shorts program has been important to [Fantastic Fest] from the very beginning. It is interesting, now that you look back at the festival for over ten years, there are certainly filmmakers who we know came first to the festival with shorts who have since moved onto features. There are filmmakers who we’ve only known through shorts who we’ve incorporated into both ABCs of Death films. I love short film, but a lot of time it does serve as a stepping stone into a legitimizing feature. Another way that that comes into play is with our company, Drafthouse Films, releasing the Nacho Vigalondo shorts this year. He’s sort of the ambassador of that kind of filmmaker, in a lot of ways—I think he’s truly exceptional in that format. Some filmmakers don’t understand the elegance that comes from having four to ten minutes to tell a story, whereas it’s a different process altogether for a feature.

For ABCs of Death 2, we incorporated a few more short filmmakers into the mix, whereas, with the first movie, we were trying to get as big a non-union talent pool as we could, because it’s a non-union project. That’s the only way to really do it; it’s such a bizarre thing, that we don’t even qualify for the low budget anthology nature of it—it’s too complicated. It has to be a non-union project, otherwise we’d need to have five times the budget. The first time around, we were looking for the biggest names we could get, but the second time around, the approach was smaller. I’ll use one guy as an example: Chris Nash. He’s such a badass. He blew us away last year at Fantastic Fest with a trio of shorts, so we had such confidence in him that we gave him the letter Z. We said to him, "OK, you realize that, by the letter Z, we need a showstopper—we need a closer, we really need you to deliver."

We also have a caveat in the clause that says, "If we don’t like it, we’re going to cut you from the project." So they have full creative control, yes, but it’s mostly a collaborative effort. Almost everybody we’re working with, they’re not divas—they’re working on a low-budget project. The way it works is, everybody gives us their top three choices of letters and we try to get everybody to do their first choice. They deliver us a synopsis and we make sure we don’t have two similar synopses throughout the entire project. And then we do a couple rounds of script reviews. We’ve gone back to a couple of folks with notes on the finished product, to tell them that something’s not working or to cut something. Everybody’s been receptive.

After the first one, we had people saying, "We should do the ABCs of Action, or the ABCs of Sci-Fi," and that never really made sense. It’s all built on a very specific tradition of the gory-books. I’m interested in anthologies, and there seems to be a glut of anthologies all over the place. I don’t consider that to be a bad thing, though—I don’t use the word "glut" as a bad thing. [My co-producer] Ant Timpson and I have been approached with other ideas, and we might explore using this short film medium to do something outside of the ABCs of Death series. But it'll probably be branded differently.

What’s the most important letter/segment in an ABCs of Death movie? It has to be A, the jump-off point and instant tone-setter. By its end, you'll know whether you're on-board or not. Think about it: If the first segment is titled “A is for Awesome” and just features a couple of people complimenting each other, who’s going to want to stick around for the next 25 shorts? It’d be time to abandon ship and spare the proceeding 115 minutes.

Thankfully, ABCs of Death 2 gets off to a very strong start with the clever and hilarious “A is for Amateur.” Directed by E.L. Katz, whose feature debut, Cheap Thrills, is one of the year’s best movies, it’s about an assassin who thinks he’s a badass but, sadly, isn’t all that able or qualified to carry out one particular hit. His arch-nemesis: a claustrophobic, bug-infested, vile air vent.

E.L. Katz: My segment is goofy—it’s not me trying to offend somebody. There’s nothing grotesque about it. It’s fun, and that’s just where my head was at. Cheap Thrills ends up being a bummer ultimately, as far as the story goes, so I wanted to do something after that that’s a little lighter. I also knew that I’d never be able to top what Timo [Tjahjanto] did in the first ABCs movie, with "L is for Libido"—it didn’t seem worth trying to do something grotesque and fucked-up, considering that Timo pretty much made it impossible for anybody to top him. I would have been forcing it; it wouldn’t have been the organic choice for me. I’m not the guy who does a film where people are strapped to chairs and their dicks get cut off or something like that. It has to feel right. It has to feel like something I’m doing because that’s the story I want to tell, and not because I’m in a competition with other directors to see who can be the grossest.

It took me four months to figure out what I was going to do. I was going crazy trying to lock down an idea. I had a certain amount of time to send the producers my idea and I definitely went past it. [Laughs.] I’m pretty sure I was one of the last ones to finish their segment. I took forever, dude. I was also doing the Cheap Thrills film festival tour, and I think my brain was overwhelmed from doing all of that. It felt like writer’s block, but I knew it was the letter A. I’d gone to New Zealand for the New Zealand Film Festival and Ant Timpson told me I was letter A, and I was like, "Oh, no!" [Laughs.] Like, "Oh, fuck!" I really respect so many people in this ABCs of Death 2 group and I didn’t want to shit the floor with the first segment and ruin things for all of their subsequent segments. I could’ve really screwed up the whole movie.

What helped me finally settle on the idea was something that happens with me often. First off, I try to do the most serious, intense thing I can think of, and then slowly my brain breaks because of all of this pressure that comes from trying to do something that’s not right for my sensibilities. And then it turns into something really dumb, and that kind of releases me. [Laughs.] I was thinking about Roald Dahl and late ‘80s and early ‘90s action movies, and thought, how can I do a weird Tales from the Crypt crime thing mixed with cheesy, overheated action? And then it hit me—I’d get somebody stuck in an air vent.

I wanted to start off with some really self-important, over-the-top techno song, and have it be like, ‘Yeah, this assassin is so amazing!’ But if you really look at it, there’s something silly about this character, too. He has a ponytail, and he’s so serious and confident. I wanted people to ask themselves, "OK, so what is the tone here?" And then, boom, he’s stuck in an air vent, and it sucks. It is being seen from his worldview—he does see the world as this overheated ‘80s action movie, and he thinks he’s in that world, so then you take the music away and now he’s in the real world. He’s lost his soundtrack, and the real world sucks.

This was a difficult process overall. I took on a bunch of different components that made a short film even tougher than the feature I’d made. It was the stunts, and the bug wrangler—I had to hire a bug wrangler, and that’s more stressful and complicated than you could ever imagine. The air vent was a real pain-in-the-ass; we built it but then had to cut holes in it so we’d be able to shoot from all different angles. We shot it in this freezing warehouse. It definitely wasn’t as easy as I expected, but that’s good, because it taught me a lot of lessons. When I did Cheap Thrills, it was mostly people yelling at each other and drinking in one location, but this had a lot of moving parts. One movie that I’m working on is more of a crime movie with shoot-outs, and this process was good practice for that.

These ABCs movies are so cool for that reason, for giving independent filmmakers opportunities to stretch themselves and experiment, and hopefully reach new audiences. If people see this movie, like my segment, and feel compelled to seek out Cheap Thrills, that would be awesome. But, at the same time, I have no idea who the fan-base is for ABCs. I assume it’s a bunch of stoners, though they’re not going to get my job after watching it. [Laughs.]

The franchise’s Fantastic Fest roots say one distinct thing about these ABCs of Death movies: while watching 26 short films about lost lives, you’re meant to have a good time. So when people’s heads explode, or creepy grandfathers pop up in bed with their grandchildren, or giant penises attack people (all of which happen in ABCs of Death 2), it’s OK to laugh, cheer, and pop another beer open with your friends. But that doesn’t mean there can’t be any substance within the madness.

Enter Israeli filmmakers Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado, the country’s first internationally recognized genre directors who’ve broken through via the 2010 slasher movie subversion Rabies and last year’s Quentin Tarantino-approved Big Bad Wolves. Their segment, “F is for Falling,” doesn’t have a single laugh, nor does it gleefully revel in gory homicide. Instead, it’s a politically and socially conscious meditation on the strained relations between Israel and Palestine. The tension is seen through the fateful interaction between a female Israeli soldier, whose parachute has her trapped in a tree, and the young, armed Palestinian boy who stumbles across her.

Navot Papushado: The letter F was my first option. Because we knew we were going to be one out of 26 directors, and because our last movies were genre movies with political subtexts, we wanted to keep that sensibility and allow it to have its own identity within the overall movie. We told the producers that we wanted to do it in Hebrew and that we had an idea we thought would be perfect, but that it’s political and more about the humane and tragic side of death. At first look, it’ll seem political because it has a young female Israeli soldier and a young Palestinian kid, but that’s the cliché and the convention—it’s more about the tragedy that befalls these two people. Thankfully, the producers played along. They asked us to make it three minutes, though, and we sent them something that’s six minutes. But they let us go with the full six minutes. Maybe they thought that was OK since we’re two directors. [Laughs.]

Aharon Keshales: After we saw the first ABCs, they reached out to us about the second one, and we said, ‘You can’t top "L is for Libido." [Laughs.] There’s nothing left to do after that. It’s as far as you can go with the gore and just being so out-there, so we decided to go the other way around. We wanted to build a story into ABCs of Death and do something that you don’t get to see in these movies. With these movies, you’re cheering for death—you’re watching and waiting to see how people die. But what if we go the other way and show you two people you don’t want to see die? You won’t be cheering. Our dream anthology of death would be the kind of movie that deals with death in each country—what death means in Israel, what death means in Mexico, what death means in the United States, and so forth. Something like that. So for our segment, we wanted to address what the current situation is in Israel and how death connects to that.

This time around, with the manifesto the producers sent around, they really wanted to get a sense of our personalities and our styles, but they just didn’t want us to do any fart jokes. [Laughs.] That’s what the manifesto said in the first paragraph. That manifesto was, like, seven pages long. It felt like a legal document. Put it this way—we were in the army and we’d never had to sign so many papers before. They wanted this second movie to be more grounded, so people would take it seriously.

Papushado: It’s not like we would have gone that fart joke way, anyway. For us, it was nice to show something subtle, but still resonant. You’re emotionally engaged in the characters, and you don’t want them to die. You wish no one would die in this situation.

Keshales: You need those dynamics in anthology movies. You don’t want it to be a one-note movie all about exploding heads. You have more fun, as a viewer, when the segments have varied tones and unique dynamics.

Papushado: You can see it in the movie itself, too—it seems like there was more thought put into the concepts and stories this time. That’s why we were so excited to be a part of it this time. That’s the reason why we’re very proud of the project in its whole. We feel very comfortable in that confined area, where the jokes are going are floating around the characters and not coming directly from them, but we also feel more comfortable in the place where it’s on the corner of a reality and fairy tale. With our ABCs segment, we didn’t want you to totally know where she is—she could be hanging from the Tree of Life, for all we know.

Keshales: We treated it like the Adam and Eve situation, with the Tree of Life and the forbidden fruit. We went for that biblical notion.

Papushado: And based on the crowd reaction at the [Fantastic Fest] premiere, it’s having the desired effects. We knew our segment would be different from all the others. With the first five segments before F, everyone’s laughing, but then this serious story begins and, suddenly, they’re all quiet. They realize that they’re in a tragedy, but that’s a good silence.

Keshales: We weren’t afraid of that reaction, though. In Big Bad Wolves, we noticed that the audiences all went quiet suddenly, and that’s what we like.

Papushado: I’ll tell you the exact moment when you know we’ve got the ABCs audience—it’s when she falls from the tree and she breaks her leg. There was nobody cheering when that happened. If there were cheers, it would’ve been death for ours segment. We’d know that it’s not working and people don’t get it. It’s all about expectations—because it’s in an ABCs of Death movie, you’re expecting heads to explode, but when you don’t get that within the first couple of minutes, you understand that you’re not going to see any heads chopped off. You start to understand that it’s something different, and, hopefully, you can appreciate that.

Larry Fessenden is so New York, so it’s no surprise that for ABCs of Death 2, the veteran indie producer/director/actor delivered a five-minute slice of Big Apple life with his signature sense of humor, DIY aesthetic, and penchant for keeping things twisted.

In “N is for Nexus,” the Glass Eye Pix founder—who’s helped filmmakers like Ti West and Kelly Reichardt bring critically acclaimed projects to life—finds horror and tragedy in the mundane. It’s Halloween in the city, and a guy heads out, in costume, to meet up with his girlfriend, who’s also in costume, and that seemingly commonplace act sets in motion a chain of events that—since it’s the ABCs of Death after all—ends very badly for all involved.

Larry Fessenden: I just wanted to do something about all of these lives converging, and then celebrate Halloween in New York City, which is my favorite time. I’m older but I have a kid, so that reinvigorates the whole experience. Obviously it’s not the same as it used to be, but there’s still a great atmosphere. I wanted to shoot on Halloween and take advantage of that and do it DIY and shoot what’s actually happening on the streets. The red door that’s in the movie, that’s from the bar that’s on 7th and B—it’s just a great color, and if you want that color in your movie, you’ll need to go find where it really exists, and that’s on that specific door. I love producing movies when you shoot on the street, because you create the art direction from what’s there. These are small things that most people don’t really take in, but that’s the delight I had in creating this piece.

I love the seasons in New York City. People say, "Why don’t you move to LA?" That would have been a good move career-wise, I think, but sometimes you have to put other things first, which was my sense of place. That’s what made this ABCs opportunity so special. The other thing I wanted to was do it totally on my own. There was very little money, and I didn’t want to start asking for favors—I’m way too old for that. I just wanted to go out and enjoy the fact that you can go out and do something on your own nowadays. Of course I had a friend help me out, but we built all these crazy rigs; I put the camera on a bike and rode along side the dude on the bike to film; I built the masks. I really wanted to just handcraft something, which is an aesthetic I’ve brought to features, too. This was a celebration of that, that handmade thing that can still happen. That’s the beauty of technology now—you can go out, on your own, and create a story.

I think there’s such good stuff in ABCs of Death that I don’t know how my segment comes off. [Laughs.] I always think about timing, though, and, because I have a dark sensibility, that leads me to think about something like when you’re delayed because you’ve forgotten your keys, that’s why you get hit by the car later on. That stuff always intrigues me. It’s the same way that I’d love to tell a feature where, in the end, somebody gets hit by a car, and that’s how the story ends, but, honestly, maybe that’s not best done on a feature. [Laughs.] You’d spend so much time and energy on a story that’d suddenly get interrupted; here, though, in short form, I had the opportunity to embrace that thinking and tell a story like that.

The other thing I wanted to do, and I don’t know if it was done in the first ABCs movie or not, was to bring the actual word into the story and film. I really do think about the convergence that leads to an unfortunate incident. All that stuff tickles me endlessly. It’s sort of like, if you change your plan to catch the later one, will that be the one that crashes? There are endless ironies, and, in a way, we’re all just making this shit up as we go along. I wanted to embed all of that into the story.

You don’t invite the Twisted Twins into your production and expect anything subtle. Since their lo-fi and madcap 2009 grindhouse-throwback debut, Dead Hooker in a Trunk, Vancouver natives Jen and Sylvia Soska have become mainstays at horror conventions and festivals through their warmly approachable self-branding and filter-free personalities. They also earned the respect of critics worldwide with their 2012 follow-up, American Mary, a graphic yet strikingly tender body horror exercise that’s 100% Soska.

Before they give the slasher genre a spin with this month’s See No Evil 2 (available on DVD/Blu-ray on October 21), the twins have given ABCs of Death 2 a much-needed feminine touch with “T is for Torture Porn,” one of the anthology’s wildest entries. It stars the sisters’ go-to actress, Tristan Risk, and shows what happens when a bunch of sexist male pigs try to get an auditioning actress to service them sexually, only to discover that said actress has been hiding a monstrous secret beneath her dress.

Let Jen, Sylvia, and Tristan themselves elaborate. They do it better than anyone else ever could.

Jen Soska: [ABCs of Death 2] is a real showcase of talent. That’s what great about it—people can watch the segments, find one they love, see the director’s name, and then go look them up and see what else they’ve done. I remember in the first movie, I saw "L is for Libido" and was so fucking amazed and blown away that I immediately looked up Timo Tjahjanto’s previous work. It’s funny, "L is for Libido" was in the manifesto the producers sent everyone before we started working on our films. They didn’t cite that short’s title specifically, but it said, "No penetration of children on camera." I guess people don’t like that [Laughs.]

Sylvia Soska: That manifesto was terrifying. It was seven pages of "You can’t do this," and we already knew we wanted to "T is for Torture Porn," where a woman has tentacles instead of a vagina and fucks people to death! [Laughs.] I was like, "Shit!" We messaged back our producer and said, "Hey, so we wanted to tentacle-rape a bunch of people," and he said, "Sure, go for it!" Little did he know that the blood and semen would be coming out of the fucking asshole. [Laughs.]

Jen: The producer, Mark [Walkow], actually messaged us back and said, ‘Can you put in more anal penetration? Can you make it more horrible?’ I was like, "Mark, you’re the best boss ever." And about that manifesto—we brought it up to Tim [League] after the fact and he said, "What manifesto?" [Laughs.] It was clearly something their lawyer made up.

Sylvia: I definitely wanted us to be towards the end of the alphabet. I think everyone near the beginning has a much harder job, because they have to make something that immediately hits you over the head and is instantly memorable. Like, for example, "D is for Deloused"—that’s one of the fucking best shorts in ABCs of Death 2, but towards the end of it, there’s been so much thrown at you that if it’d been placed near the end of the movie, it might be too much for the audience. There’s definitely a strategy that goes into placing these segments.

Jen: I was hoping that the tone of ours would stand out no matter where it fell in the alphabet. I never wanted to A or Z, because I didn’t want the pressure of opening or closing the movie. Also, our producers told us something really interesting—the first 30 seconds of each segment is basically a write-off. They said, "In the first 30 seconds, don’t do anything too important, because everybody’s going to still be thinking about the segment before yours." Which was super helpful and important. At first, we had a bunch of super-important stuff in ours right away, but I’m glad we listened to the producers, because "S is for Split" is so good and so heavy. You need a little bit of time to come down from it before T really gets going.

Tristan Risk: For a filmmaker, I’d think, working on a movie like this must be like an Iron Chef situation. Like, ‘Here are your limitations, now create something that’s a spectacular cuisine out of the tools you have been given,” and you’re like, "But it’s a giant block of tofu! You know what, it’s not my first choice but I’m going to make this the best fucking four-course tofu meal anybody’s ever consumed!" It doesn’t let you get comfortable as an artist, which is how it should always be. You should never sit on your laurels—you should always push your own envelope; otherwise, you’re going to lose the romance of what you do.

Sylvia: This idea was actually in our heads before the finished the first ABCs. At that point, the first movie’s open letter was T, and we wanted to do ’T is for Torture Porn’ even back then. But then we saw "T is for Toilet" and were like, "Fuck!" It’s so good and deserved to win. And then when we met Ant [Timpson], he said, "If we had asked you to do the first one, would you have done it?" And I said, "Fuck yes!" That’s when he asked us to be a part of the sequel.

Jen: Even though our segment is out-there and crazy, we did want to work in some commentary and meaning, too. Being one of the only female directors in this anthology, we knew there was going to be a spotlight on us, so we wanted to attack some of the issues that affect women in the film industry, like the misogyny and sexual objectification that happen to women in horror. So often, you see female characters in horror movies and their tits come out before you even learn their name. I wanted to exploit the men this time. How often do you see a bunch of men get gang-raped? Not enough, outside of Deliverance.

Sylvia: The back-room castings that happen in Hollywood are some of the most sexually violent thing that happen to women in the industry. You hear about women who get cummed in so much that they have to pump their chests out. I hear about that and I say, "I wish she would just ass-rape some of those guys! Give them a taste of their own medicine." It was so much fun to address that. At the same time, if you just want to have fun and watch it, you can turn your brain off and enjoy the craziness, just like with all of our movies. If you want to sit there and think, too, you can also do that.

Jen: If you beat someone over the head with your message, you’ll turn them off, but if you sneak in your point, it can be really effective. Like in American Mary, we snuck in the message of "Don’t judge people based on how the fuck they look." That’s in there, but it doesn’t feel like an after school special.

If you’ve ever taken a “guys” vacation to an exotic locale with your boys, you know the situation. Your girlfriend is back at home, hoping you’ll behave yourself; your slightly obnoxious, always inebriated best friend keeps getting you to do bad, albeit fun-in-the-moment, things; and, before you know it, you find yourself flirting with beautiful women who don’t speak English but sure do seem to love American men—well, more what’s in the American man’s pockets.

That’s the set-up in “V is for Vacation,” the dark and increasingly brutal short from director Jerome Sable and his writing partner, Nicholas Musurca. Hailing from Canada, Sable has been known more for light-hearted horror-musicals, a tricky conceit that he’s nailed with his 2010 short The Legend of Beaver Dam and this year’s Glee-esque slasher comedy Stage Fright. There’s nothing funny or buoyant about “V is for Vacation,” though—it’s one of ABCs of Death 2’s most disturbing segments, and a startling departure for Sable.

Jerome Sable: Nick and I talked about this as an opportunity to do something out of our comfort zone, to do something that’s nothing like the more musically driven and up-tempo stuff we’ve done already. It was our chance to take a step out and not do something tonally upbeat. Some people who’ve seen ABCs think "V is for Vacation" is an angry piece, and I can’t blame them. [Laughs.] When we first talked about it with the producers, they were saying that a lot of the segments can turn out to be silly or end up being horror-comedies because they are so short, but that they were interested in not always doing that. So we said, "OK, what can we do in a short time that can be something really dark?"

Originally, we were going to do more of a found-footage thing, where it’d be this longer piece where someone had found these tapes that the guy was making on his vacation, but then, as the process evolved and the running time shortened, we thought, what if it’s happening live right then and there in this one FaceTime call? The idea itself comes from that danger zone of how you might be behave, or your friends might behave, when you’re on vacation in a place where you feel that there aren’t any consequences. That’s the danger we were trying to explore. It’s that time when you suddenly feel anonymous, and you suddenly feel like, since you don’t understand anything, you don’t understand the rules, and, because of that, there are no consequences. That’s what’s scary in some cases. Maybe you’re with a guy who’s really out of control and might be a liability to those around him. We wanted to push that idea further. And, yeah, there is a culture of Americans behaving badly abroad.

Nicholas Musurca: In groups of guys, the bad behavior is usually being set by that one craziest person, so what if everyone else, who might not be bad guys by any means, feel compelled to live up to the crazy guy’s example? We were interested in what a guy would do in that situation.

Sable: We go towards dangerous things sometimes. It’s not that we "hate" douchey guys like the one in our segment—it’s more that we’re fascinated by those kinds of guys. We weren’t basing it off of any one person in particular, but we do have friends who’ve had experiences in the Philippines and Thailand that have produced these types of emotions, so we constructed the story to reflect true things emotionally and situationally speaking and just pushed that for an ABCs movie.

We also knew that we’d be near the end of the movie, with V, so we needed it to be something that hits really hard. Initially, our first two choices were D and E, because we wanted to be closer to the front of the movie. We came up with this great idea for D, and thought, yeah, for sure we’ve got this! [Laughs.] And then they were like, "OK, you have V," our third choice. So we couldn’t do "D is for Duet" then.

There’s something wild happening up in Canada, and, before long, you’ll need to pay attention. They’re known as Astron-6, and they’re a crew of reckless, fun-loving indie filmmakers who work on the cheap but load their DIY films with nostalgia, insanity, and genuine laughs. Seek out Father’s Day, an exploitation homage directed by the whole team that rivals Hobo with a Shotgun’s reverential mayhem, or Manborg, the greatest RoboCop tribute by way of Masters of the Universe and Evil Dead movie you’ll likely ever see.

The latter film was directed solo by Astron-6’s Steven Kostanski, who’s back on his own with ABCs of Death 2’s unsurprisingly demented “W is for Wish.” It starts out as a perky infomercial for a kid-marketed toy named Zorb but quickly explodes into a nightmarish orgy of monsters, lasers, dungeons, and, of course, death. It’s everything you’ll soon expect from the Astron-6 brand, once they start receiving their deserved in-the-mainstream props. (Pro tip: Astron-6 has an Italian giallo spoof on deck, titled The Editor, and it’s something special.)

Steven Kostanski: It was a great coincidence, because [my co-writer] Jeremy Gillespie and I had conceived this whole Zorb universe already, and then we got the email to do ABCs. The idea was to do a goofy toy line, so when I got the email about doing a segment for this movie, it was like, obviously we had to work the toy line into our segment. We’re obsessed with ‘80s fantasy movies, and we’d already done our Gore Blade shorts back in 2007, 2008, so the fantasy world was already familiar to us. So the idea of being able to do one and kind of turn it on its head and make it this nightmare version of He-Man was pretty instantaneous. We wrote the script on a train ride back from Montreal—it’s the fastest we’ve ever written anything, because it was so engrained in our beings. [Laughs.]

The key to pulling off something like this is to—while being influenced by the older, retro stuff we’re passionate about, like He-Man, and Krull, and Lucio Fulci’s Conquest—create your own universe that subverts conventions while honoring those influences. It’s taking a very PG thing and making the hard-R version of it. It’s an easy way to mine more ideas from the concept.

It’s also about taking your universe seriously. Jeremy and I spent a lot of time figuring out the mechanics of how this universe works. Deep down, I think we’re still kids still playing with toys. This is just our way of translating that into our adult lives. The passion comes out when we’re throwing ideas back and forth and losing ourselves in the universe. Taking thing seriously also helped us because we were working with kids, which can be really hard, but it’d be even tougher if you were laughing at your concept and winking at the retro-ness the whole time. You don’t see kids playing with He-Man toys and being ironic about it. When I was playing with toys, back when I was a kid, I wasn’t saying, "Oh, these toys are so dumb—aren’t I so cool for playing with these dumb toys?" [Laughs.]

Keeping that in mind through my creative career is important—that’s how you keep the naive charm intact. I’m never looking down on these things. I really feel like this is the universe I live in; the Zorb universe is second nature to me, even more so than real life. People often look down on genre and fantasy stuff as something that’s just meant for kids, and not understanding what’s so smart about these things.

I’m rooted in older techniques, in terms of how I do special effects all in my bedroom and on my own. New technology is great, and digital filmmaking has been great for getting instant results for stuff, but I try to keep everything I do rooted in a practical, real setting. The head explosion in my segment, for instance, there’s some composite effects work we did after, but for that we actually wired a head and blew it up. That was my favorite part of making the movie was being able to finally do that—I’ve always loved good, practical head explosions. [Laughs.] You see people in movies now doing CG bullet hits and head explosions, and it’s not the same. It doesn’t have the same longevity, either; nobody in ten years will look at those CG effects and go, ‘Oh, that was really well done.’ It’s a time thing, as well. People don’t want to put in the time and the effort to pull off good practical effects.

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve tried to do gags that have just failed on my completely. But you have to do it wrong before you do it right. That’s definitely the motto for all of my movies: I have to screw it up in order to make it look right, and then do it again. You have to push your limits—nobody wants to watch a movie where the director is just half-assing it.