HOOKERS AND THIEVES

When he produced the 80’s horror classic RE-ANIMATOR, Brian Yuzna was already in his thirties. A self-taught filmmaker who came to Hollywood from North Carolina, he quickly learned the business and further cemented his reputation as a major figure in American fantastic cinema by directing SOCIETY, BRIDE OF RE-ANIMATOR and RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD III. This is the first of two talks that Roel Haanen did with Yuzna in May 2021. It deals with the first part of Yuzna’s career and his youth. It also tells the story of his risking everything to get a feature off the ground in North Carolina before eventually going down to Hollywood and almost losing everything. Read part 2 here.

I re-watched most of your films these last two weeks and when I saw SOCIETY, I was struck by how much of these times that movie is, maybe it’s even more current than in the late eighties.

When the movie first came out it was quite popular in the UK. It did well in Italy, Spain, France. But over here it wasn’t well received. The Variety review was terrible. Even my friends didn’t much like it. The movie has its awkwardness, which is a result of amateurish directing on my part. But some of the negativity had to with the fact that SOCIETY was out of touch with the times when it came out. At the end of the eighties, Americans really thought that greed was a good thing. When I was growing up, greed was not good. But when Reagan came to power, the idea started that if only the rich made more money, everybody’s gonna be well. People with money were being worshipped. SOCIETY went against this mythology that anyone can make it, if you only work hard enough. After the collapse of the capital market it got rediscovered by a new generation. I gave it a second chance by buying the film from the financier in Japan. Surprisingly, everybody wanted to see it. Because now they see the system that supports the upper classes.

SOCIETY is also very much entwined with that whole ‘plastic reality’ that was prevalent in American horror movies in the eighties and early nineties. What was it about those practical effects that gave us that specific surreal feeling? And why is that harder to accomplish with CGI?

CGI is basically very sophisticated animation, while rubber effects are done with puppets. Screaming Mad George could put his hand in a sock and bring it to life, make it act. In fact, the guys who are manipulating puppets, their union is the actors guild. They’re acting, just not with their own face. It’s a performance and it’s real. When the remake of THE MUMMY came out in 1999, Arnold Vosloo played the mummy and his whole jaw was torn off. If they’d done that with plastic effects, the movie would have been R-rated. With CGI it’s PG. Now, why is that? Because it doesn’t look real. The paradox is that you recognize a rubber effect for what it is, but there’s a realness to it and you react to that. It’s why SOCIETY still packs a punch. Nobody had ever done that before. That shunting was done by twelve or fourteen puppeteers hiding inside rubber and interacting with the actors.

How did you get in touch with Screaming Mad George for SOCIETY?

The Japanese financiers of SOCIETY requested that I meet with George, because if he was on board, they had a better chance of selling the film in Japan. We met and immediately hit it off. It was just like when I met Stuart Gordon. SOCIETY showed the aesthetic of Screaming Mad George better than any movie he has ever worked on. I thought that there wasn’t much sense in hiring someone like him and then not letting him do what he does best. Otherwise you end up with something like those old Bela Lugosi movies in which he plays the butler or something. I used to be so disappointed by that. No, you hire George and you use his imagination.

I’m sure you know that SOCIETY originally didn’t have the shunting in it. It was about a blood cult. But I wanted to use practical effects. I used to go to all these movies just to see what the special effects guys had come up with. With SOCIETY I was eager to do something we hadn’t seen before. So I came up with the idea of flesh melding together. I was working with the writers on the script and simultaneously working with Screaming Mad George to come up with images for the movie. We were going through these Dali books and started picking out surrealistic images. The composition of the shunting model was based on three different paintings by Dali: The Great Masturbator, Metamorphosis of Narcissus and Soft Construction With Boiled Beans.

I was also thinking about the mythology. I came up with the idea of a parasitic life force that invades the body of humans and allows them to exploit other humans. It crawled up from the ground and invaded the bodies of some cavemen. Whoever got infected became part of the ruling class. They intermarry to create the blue blood. One of the clichés of aristocracy is that intermarriage leads to a weak gene pool. If they don’t introduce new blood, they’ll all end up like idiots. This is what I came up with, because I needed to explain why these people needed a shunting in the first place and why they needed Billy. I often start with inspiration. If I or anybody else comes up with something I really want to see, then I reverse-engineer the story. I work my way backwards to fit that in. That’s not something a good storyteller like Stuart Gordon would ever do.

You just talked about the idea of flesh melding together. In INITIATION: SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT 4 you had these big larvae that were put inside human bodies. Are these things from your own subconscious or nightmares? 

I went through a process of trying to figure out where my ideas came from and I realized that I saw a movie once that really impressed me. It was called DOCTOR X by Michael Curtiz. It had Fay Wray in it. It’s kind of a dud, but the whole gimmick is that Doctor X has created this synthetic flesh. You see him putting on this flesh and it melds with his face. That was a disturbing idea. There’s something about the malleability of the body that’s unsettling. It harkens to the fact that bodies are going to deteriorate. Another one I found  was THE TEN COMMANDMENTS. For me, it was a horror movie. It had a pool of water that turned into blood. A staff that becomes a snake. A green mist that kills children. It was supernatural horror. At the end, when Moses goes up to get the tablets, the Israelis start having an orgy around the golden calf. That orgy is done in a way that they could get a G-rating. But it was sex. Huge crazy sex. It really affected me as a child. That’s why I always thought I had to end every movie with some sort of orgy.

Speaking of childhood, I read that you grew up in different countries. Was that because of what your parents did for a living?

Yeah. My father was a civil engineer for the U.S. government. I was born in The Philippines. Then we moved to Nicaragua, Panama, Puerto Rico. By the time I moved to the States, when I was fourteen, I had already lived in five countries.

Did you live in a small circle of expats, shielded from the world outside?

Not at all. It wasn’t like that. I didn’t live on an army base. We lived in Managua, Nicaragua. We lived in Panama City. I went to the American school, but when I got home I played with my Puerto Rican or Panamanian friends. I had different friends at school than I had in the neighborhood.

But I was the gringo. That was not a good thing. Gringos got blamed for everything. It’s actually a derogatory term. People act like it’s not, but it is. When I was growing up I didn’t like being called a gringo, because I was the only one of my friends who was called that. People typically resist the outsider.

Growing up as an outsider, was that a factor in you falling in love with the fantastical?

I don’t think it was a factor. Of course, growing up an expat kid, it marks you in certain ways. Just as it marked my grandparents when they came to this country as immigrants. We were a normal family. We just moved from place to place. What that did with me, is that it has made me comfortable with people of other countries.

As for being the outsider, I think it has more to do with adolescence. At one point growing up you feel you’re not like the others. Your body changes. The narrative of horror deals with issues of sexual maturity. There are distortions of the body, issues of mortality, passions, taboos, bodily fluids. It’s death and sex basically. A lot of people lose their interest in horror by the time they’re thirty. That’s when they start worrying about their family, their mortgage, their job, their health.

Some people, like myself, like horror their whole life. I don’t know why that is. Maybe my love for the fantastical is something innate. None of my five brothers or sisters became horror movie fans. My granddaughter who’s only five years old, who has never been exposed to horror, just loves drawing pictures of vampires and monsters. She likes to be told ghost stories. In the car she rides with an almost full size skeleton. She’s like Wednesday Adams. It could be genetic.

I was thinking about what you just said about death and sex. When I was a teenager I owned a poster of RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD III. The image of Melinda Clarke as a zombie, that’s death and sex personified. Was that theme something you consciously brought forth in that movie?

It’s funny, because I was always a horror fan. Books, movies, comics, whatever. But once I started making movies, that’s when I started reading about horror movies. Trying to understand how to make a good one. Probably the wrong way to go about it. There’s a really good book by David Skal which lays out a pretty good theory on how horror works. So, I thought about it a lot. By the time I made RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD III I was pretty conscious of those ideas and of what I was doing. But still, the way these ideas get into the film, that’s always pure instinct.

Melinda Clarke could have made a whole career out of being a horror icon, had she embraced it. But she didn’t, right?

I never stayed in touch with her. I offered her a part in NECRONOMICON, but she didn’t want to do it. I know she did another horror movie that nobody seems to know about. It’s called KILLER TONGUE and it’s a Spanish production. She was also in SPAWN, playing an ass-kicking dominatrix in leather. But really what she did was a lot of TV, a lot of soap operas and The OC. But you’re right, if she had embraced horror, she would have had a great career in the genre. But it is tough for actors. If you’re gonna do horror, you’re in for doing a lot of bad movies, probably. You’ll get love from the fans, but not much recognition from anybody else. Even Christopher Lee only got some recognition when he was in THE LORD OF THE RINGS and STAR WARS. Hammer fans always loved him, but he was not awarded a lot of respect. That’s also what happened to Barbara Crampton.

She did embrace horror, right? Just like Jeffrey Combs.

No, no, not at first. Immediately after RE-ANIMATOR, Stuart Gordon and I started preparing FROM BEYOND. And both Jeffrey and Barbara were really into it. I think FROM BEYOND is Barbara’s best role. She really did well. She even did some promotion in Playboy. She did a nude spread with monsters. But then Barbara did pretty much the same thing Mindy Clarke did. She went into soap operas to get out of horror. After that she even quit for a while. Then I met her again years later, at the first night of the Re-Animator musical. She looked great. More attractive even than when she was younger. She was into horror movies now. I asked her why. She told me that how after she had quit acting, everyone at dinner parties wanted to talk to her about RE-ANIMATOR and other horror movies. That gave her cachet. She had gotten over the idea that her career might have gone a different direction. If you notice, a lot of actors, when they get older, they just take any job. It’s not going to affect their career at that point. But Barbara was smart. She really embraced it and got involved. She invested in movies, produced them, promoted them. In the horror genre, you really have to make your own projects.

Now, as for Jeffrey Combs, he didn’t want to be a horror guy back then. Who would? He wanted to be a leading man. If you’re an actor and you have a success, you want a bigger one and a bigger one. Now, cheap horror movies are not the way to go with that. It’s just like directors who do one successful horror movie and then can’t get out of the genre. It starts framing you. Stuart loved horror, but even when we were working on HONEY, I SHRUNK THE KID I was telling him about my plans for BRIDE OF RE-ANIMATOR. He immediately told me he wouldn’t direct it, because his agent had advised him against doing sequels. When you’re building your career, you’ve got to pick your projects carefully, especially when you’re young. You don’t know how far you’re going to go. 

Back to your beginnings. What was it about horror that first hooked you?

I saw a horror movie when I was very young. It infected me. It’s like a drug. At first it makes you sick. Then you want that rush again. When you get older you keep trying to find something that will give you that thrill.

Which movie gave you that first rush?

It was THE CREATURE WITH THE ATOM BRAIN.

What was so scary about it for you?

I was only six or seven. It was a zombie movie. Someone would die and they would put a tarantula-like thing on his forehead in a lab and they’d become a zombie. The main character is a detective and he has a little daughter. At one point the partner of the detective comes around the house. He’s a friend of the family. We know he’s been zombified because he has this big scar on his forehead and he’s acting weird. Then the little girl comes over to him to show him her doll. Then we hear the girl scream. You think something terrible has happened to the girl. The mother comes rushing in and we see the doll is broken. At the time I didn’t realize that that was basically the FRANKENSTEIN scene on the river. But that movie made me nauseous.

Did you see it on television?

We didn’t have television in Panama, because it was a small, poor country. I saw it at the matinee in Panama City. For fifteen cents you could see cartoons, a Rocketman serial, a bunch of trailers and a couple of movies. You never knew what it was going to be. My mother was very upset that they showed something like that to children. Another one that got me was THE 7TH VOYAGE OF SINBAD, with the Cyclops and the skeleton sword fight. I had nightmares about that. The scene where the woman is turned into the serpent really upset me. Later on I realized it was the sexual aspect of it. It wasn’t until I saw William Castle’s HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL that I could really enjoy a horror film.

What had changed for you in the meantime that you could now fully enjoy horror?

First of all, HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL was scary, but it was fun. I watched that movie three times in a row. Had a great time. But also, I had gotten to the point that I could handle it. I read a lot of fantastical stuff. I even started writing my own short stories. And I was already buying and collecting EC comics. And then there were the stories. Panama may not have had television, but they did have ghost stories. After dinner I would go outside and play kick the can or something and some kid would always start telling a ghost story, which would reportedly be true. You know, stuff with people coming out their graves. It was really scary. And I liked it. So, I was naturally inclined towards the fantastical.

Were you already thinking about becoming a filmmaker?

I was not a young kid with dreams of going to Hollywood. I wasn’t like that. In high school I would make little 8mm movies with my friends, but they were just little special effects scenes. When I was in my twenties, my girlfriend and I went on a holiday to Colombia. We took a bus to a Santa Marta, which is on the coast. And from the bus we saw a crew shooting a film. Later on, at a restaurant on the beach, two Jeeps come blasting up. Out jump all these people. It’s night time but they’re wearing sunglasses. The girls are all glamorous. They’re alive and bubbly. It’s the movie people coming to have dinner, right? I remember thinking: My god, I’m on vacation. They are working. And they are having a lot more fun than I am. Maybe the movie business is something to think about. So, it was always there in the back of mind. But I never thought it was realistic. Plus, because I was a hippie, I had never prepared for life. The revolution was supposed to come. You had to turn on, tune in and drop out. That’s what I did. But then the revolution didn’t happen. I got older and became a father. I had to start making a living. I tried to make a living many different ways. I was a carpenter. I built houses on spec. I invested in a restaurant. I had studied studio art in college. One thing I did, was to open up an art supply store. I also painted and sold some of them. I did photography and had a darkroom.

At some point in the seventies you made a film called SELF PORTRAIT IN BRAINS. Can you tell me about that?

It was a learning experience. Somebody gave me this 35mm bolex camera and a projector. I lived on an old farm by the river, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. We had a little goat herd. I started shooting this billy goat on 35mm black and white, and when I watched it, I thought: Wow, this is like Bergman! [Laughs] I took a short story from a friend of mine and made it into a script. It was about an artist who blows his brains out against a canvas to make a painting and then becomes a hologram to take revenge on his unfaithful wife.

Of course, I didn’t know how to make a movie. I needed someone to help me make it, so I put out a little ad in the newspaper. This guy named Michael Muscal answered it, saying he had graduated in radio, television and motion pictures. He was on unemployment, so he would work for nothing. I started preparing the film out of the workspace behind my store, which was where I made canvasses for people and where I painted. Michael did the camera. He got a friend of his to do the sound. We shot the movie. I drove up to New York to rent an editing system and I got an editor. I thought the finished film was wonderful. Until I saw it with people who weren’t involved. When we showed it to our friends, I realized it was no good. So, like an idiot, I thought I could make it into a feature. I wrote more scenes, which we would shoot. Wrote more scenes, shot them. We did this for about six months to a year. But you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.

So, what happened to the movie?

When it was finished I tried to sell it. I learned about the business side of movies by reading weekly Variety and the trade magazines for movie theaters. I read books about contracts. I got a sales agent in New York and he actually sold it in a couple of places.

At that point you were hooked on making movies?

Yes. I just wanted to keep making movies. I had bought a bunch of video equipment and Michael Muscal and I would make video productions for corporations. We made money that way, but it wasn’t making movies. So, I went looking for my next project. I was a big fan of underground comics, so I wrote a letter to Kim Deitch. I optioned some of his comics to make into a movie. He was breaking up with his wife at the time and I offered him a room in my office, which was three thousand miles away in North Carolina. I said to him: You can come over and we can work on the script. He came. I’ll show you the script he wrote.

[Yuzna goes away and comes back with what is essentially a long, beautifully drawn storyboard with text next to the panels.]

That’s beautiful.

Yeah, but it shows I didn’t have a clue as to what I was doing. I couldn’t get anyone interested in making a movie in North Carolina. Today, they’re making movies everywhere, but this was 1980. So, I put a little ad out in Variety, asking for a director. I got hundreds of letters, from New York and Los Angeles. There was this guy in Chapel Hill who used to be in the movie business and he warned me not to go to L.A. He said it was all hookers and thieves. [Laughs]

But when I got to Los Angeles I suddenly found myself surrounded by people like me. They all wanted to make movies! I met Bob Greenberg and he took me to independent movie sets. He introduced me to Albert Band whose son Charlie was just setting up Empire Pictures. Their projects reminded me of William Castle and Roger Corman, the kind of stuff I loved.

Charlie offered to make my Kim Deitch movie, but I had to put up the money for development. I took my savings and borrowed some more and put that into the development. By that time I had helped Charlie with his cash flow on productions like TRANCERS and some others. It was great working with him at that time, but I realized that my Kim Deitch movie wasn’t getting made. It was difficult to get your money back out of Empire. So what I did was, I used his offices and post production accounts to produce RE-ANIMATOR. I didn't pay for them, I took it out of Empire's debt to me.

Whose idea was it to adapt RE-ANIMATOR?

That was Stuart’s idea. I had met him through Bob Greenberg. Stuart and I hit it off immediately. He was trying to get RE-ANIMATOR made as a pilot for a TV show. I said: If you want to develop it as a feature, let’s do it together. He said yes. I was developing a comedy at the same time, about a standup comedian who is also a cat burglar. So I had to choose. I thought: if the comedy isn’t funny I’m fucked. But with horror, you don’t have to make the best movie in the world, just don’t be reticent about it. A lot of people like bad horror movies. I sure do. The worst thing you can do, is try to be respectable, especially on a low budget. Nobody will give you any credit for being restrained. Luckily, Stuart was all about that. He liked to shock. Within a year of meeting him we started shooting RE-ANIMATOR.

In a way you did make a comedy, because RE-ANIMATOR works as a horror movie and as a comedy.

I think a lot of that had to do with how much we were laughing when we were writing the script. Also, Stuart has a sense of irony. He’s a theatre director. There’s this sense that you’re getting a full meal. Not just a bloody steak. In RE-ANIMATOR you get romance, humor, horror. If you look at Shakespeare, you always get some comedy with your drama, there are ghosts and there’s horror. That’s part of having an entertainment. Stuart was an entertainer. He catered to an audience.

I always had the impression that you came to horror naturally, because of your innate love of the genre, and that Gordon somehow stumbled into it.

Stuart loved horror, but he did have a broad range. Dennis Paoli always says that he and Stuart could have made any type of movie together, but that I wanted to make a horror movie, so that's what they did. So then that became what the audience expected from them. But Stuart was so talented. One of the surprises of RE-ANIMATOR, it being so low-budget and shot in sixteen days, is that it was so well directed. The acting was so good. Everybody in that movie is in the same world. Stuart had been directing actors for ten years. He may have been a first time movie director, but he had much experience. The only novice on that movie was me. I was really lucky to get Stuart Gordon’s first movie as a producer.

You made two more movies with Stuart Gordon for Charles Band’s Empire Pictures, FROM BEYOND and DOLLS. After that you quit working for Band because there was a lawsuit.

Yes. We shot those back to back in Rome, on one set. We shot DOLLS before Christmas and after Christmas we changed the set dressing and we shot FROM BEYOND. Then we edited both movies. During that time I became aware that Empire was collecting money from the sales of RE-ANIMATOR and not giving it to me. I took out a lawsuit. Once I was suing him, I couldn’t continue working with Charlie. It just looked bad, especially to the investors. They weren’t getting their money and I was still working with him. Certainly there’s some bad blood when something like this happens, but I was never unable to talk to Charlie. I always admired what he did, especially in the beginning. Later on his films became smaller and smaller and less interesting. When he started making them as cheap as possible, I lost my interest in them.

Did you win the lawsuit?

We settled. It cost me a whole lot of money in legal fees. It was a big gamble, but I had to do it. Eventually, I wasn’t suing Charlie, because he had sold Empire to Vestron. By the time we came to the depositions, it was also with another company, Trans World Entertainment run by Eduard Sarlui. When Sarlui showed up he made a couple of calls and resolved the thing right there. Within hours I had the paperwork, and soon some money and the rights to the movie back. Not the millions that RE-ANIMATOR had made. Because, one of the things they do is they package titles. For example, they sell twenty movies of which RE-ANIMATOR is one. If RE-ANIMATOR is the biggest title in the package, it’s still on the books for only one-twentieth of what that package costs. On video RE-ANIMATOR sold well over a hundred-thousand units. Back then, one rental video cost seventy dollars. So, RE-ANIMATOR made millions, but I missed out on it. On the one hand, I was very unlucky, in that I had the exact same experience many people have when they come to Hollywood: hookers and thieves. But on the other hand RE-ANIMATOR gave me the chance to make a living in the movie business.

Before you made RE-ANIMATOR, how did you make a living in Los Angeles?

One of the first things I did when I came to Los Angeles was invest in a documentary about Amos ‘n Andy, the controversial TV show which is now of course considered to be politically incorrect. The guy who was doing that documentary was a lawyer from San Diego named Michael Avery. He started packaging old TV shows and selling them on the VHS market. I was a partner in that. I bought an editing machine that I put in my house in L.A. and I hired an editor. Avery would find out which TV shows were in the public domain. And there were many, because nobody had ever bothered to renew the copyright because they thought nobody was ever going to watch them again. We put out four hundred hours of what we called the golden age of television. That’s how I made a living before I made RE-ANIMATOR. 

After RE-ANIMATOR you also started producing films for others.

Yes, DOLLS and FROM BEYOND were fully financed by Empire. On those pictures I was being paid for my work as a producer. But I never fit into the studio system. I came to Hollywood to make my movie, never having the ambition to work at Fox or Paramount. I had always worked for myself and I didn’t have the skills to thrive in the studio system.

But you had a chance at Disney, with HONEY, I SHRUNK THE KIDS.

Yeah, that proves my point, because we know how long that lasted. [Laughs] I had my chance at the big time. I tried, but I couldn’t do the politics. Stuart got a little further. He even had an office at Disney at one point. You’d think he would have been an A-list director. He was so talented. But he also wasn’t good at the politics. You just don’t develop those skills if you don’t have them. I didn’t develop them being a self-taught filmmaker in North Carolina, and he didn’t develop them being an independent theatre director in Chicago. Being talented isn’t enough, you gotta know how to fit your talent into working with a lot of powerful egos and personalities. Look at how many have tried and didn’t make it. The only one of the independents who  went onto a whole other level is Sam Raimi. Stuart had the talent, he had the connections, people liked him, he had good representation… Still, look at the movies he’s made at Disney. His biggest thing was, he got his name on HONEY, I BLEW UP THE KID. He didn’t have much to do with it. He came up with the concept of blowing up the kid instead of shrinking him. Finally, he put in his chips and forced them to let him make THE WONDERFUL ICE CREAM SUIT, which they hardly even released. His biggest movie is probably SPACE TRUCKERS, but that was a big independent production. For all his talent, he made mostly low-budget movies. But they were his movies.

Related talks:

• Brian Yuzna (part 2)

This interview first appeared in a shorter version in the Dutch fanzine Schokkend Nieuws. Above is the full version of this talk, edited only for clarity.

Special thanks to Milan Hulsing for letting us use his fantastic drawing of Brian Yuzna. Be sure to visit his website!