"Help me....I'm not crazy!"

 

Filming a cult movie about a mental asylum is hard enough, but filming a movie about a cult that controls an actual asylum is an even bigger challenge.

Driving up to the Metropolitan State Hospital in the rural community of Norwalk, just south of L.A., one can't help but recall the statement made by Hellborn writer/director Phil Jones, who teams with makeup artist Brian (Jeepers Creepers) Penikas for this low-budget shrieker. "Norwalk is known for two things: producing cat food and mental institutions," quips the director of the town's legacy. "At least, that's what I've been told."

Dr. Cloves (Shaun O'Hagan) screams the aforementioned dialogue as he runs for his life from a cult of white-hooded and masked figures in the slickly edited opening sequence this writer had a chance to preview. But not until Fango heads up to the state sanitarium serving as Hellborn’s sole location does one truly get the sense of the environment Jones wants to immerse his audience in. The movie sports a red-eyed demon called the Harvester on its poster art, but its true "villain" is the setting. St. Andrews, or K-10 as it is nicknamed, "is its own character," says Jones, "and I want to make sure we give it its own personality and treat it as its own entity."

Even the protagonist, psychology resident James Bishop (played by newcomer Matt Stasi) describes the fortress he's being lured to by a security guard in the film's opening as "more than just an insane asylum; that's a city!"

Placing the Harvester, a horned creature that comes up from a menacing maze of boiler rooms to suck the souls of patients with a single claw to the chest, in the impressive locale, this Alien meets One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest plays it straight for scares. Unlike many recent genre directors, Jones is “letting the comedy come as it comes naturally. If you write a script and try to write in boos or scares, and you can get them, good for you. If you are writing a script and try to write in your own laughs and you get them, good for you. But I just set up the situations as they were and let them both find their own way in.”

A cheerful young production assistant insists on quiet as Fango approaches the floor of one of the ward buildings. As Jones can be heard yelling, “Cut!” in the distance, it’s hard not to notice the antiseptic nature of the surroundings-all hard metal and stone, with cobwebs cascading over doorways which have not housed anyone in years. Even the crew have gotten chills from the setting that Jones’ location scout masterminded at virtually no cost, thanks to a new law passed by California governor Gray Davis that allows independent filmmakers to be reimbursed for their expenses when filming on government-owned property.

“A few assistants decided to spend the night, since we were allowed to sleep there,” Jones recalls. “But after two nights, they said they had to leave. They wouldn’t specifically say why, just that there was something creepy about the place that they couldn’t stand anymore.”

“Cut!” is yelled again, and Fango makes its way past the building’s most heart-stopping hallmark: the old isolation cells that line the corridor, with segmented windows where shattered minds once stared out in desperation. Further down lies the A Ward, where the worst of the worst were confined. Jones is busy directing one of the last few days of shooting, getting pickups of Jackson (David Jean Thomas), a patient who tries to warn Bishop early on that he’s in a hellhole no one leaves. Action is called and Bishop approaches a haggard-looking Jackson.

“Help me. Undo my straps,” begs Jackson, as the green-behind-the-ears Bishop questions him. But nothing’s doing. Genre staple Bruce (Warlock III) Payne, who plays Dr. McCourt, the head of this frightening facility, calls Bishop away as Jackson screams, “Don’t leave me here, he’ll kill me!”

Payne remarks that even he used the willies from the real sanitarium walls to shape his performance as the head doctor/warden who simply cannot keep his criminally insane inmates alive. “Obviously, there is a great feeling of doing something in a place close to a real situation, as far as the physicality,” the actor says. “Knowing that the other parts of this place are actually functioning is kind of freakazoid. It adds to the mood to see real beds bolted down to the floor and a kind of blandness. I’m all for it. I know the DP is really digging it, because it’s a wonderful place to light. I’ve heard a few gossipy stories about what has gone on here in the past, but I have totally had a good experience with it all.”

Someone else who has had a freeing experience among the madness is FX master Penikas, who is bringing Hellborn’s horrific Harvester to onscreen life. “Over the course of designing, I actually ended up storyboarding all of the stuff that involved the Harvester,” says Penikas, who has found working with Jones to be most rewarding despite the project’s indie status. “It was the right way to do a movie, starting from the ground up. We were trying to determine the simplest way to conjure this demon. I wanted to design a head for it that has a streamlined look, and I remember doing dozens of drawings, and Phil liking everything he was seeing. I kept saying I wasn’t there yet; I hadn’t gotten to the one that leaped off the page and grabbed me. Finally, I nailed one and we knew it was the one we would finally build.”

Even though Hellborn represented a chance to immerse himself and use all the tools of his craft, Penikas wasn’t building this soulstealer with the big-budget funds he has become accustomed to. “In the case of Jeepers Creepers, Victor Salva already has a production designer and an illustrator who work with him, so that takes an extreme load off of our shoulders. I mean, we love doing (design work), but that’s only if the production has the time to hire us that far in advance to work on stuff,” Penikas says. “It’s kind of a rare thing that a project like Hellborn will come up, where we’ll have a couple of months to throw something together before we actually start to build. But we had a great deal of creative freedom, and it always comes down to, “if you can’t give us money, give us time.” Phil was able to do that, so it worked out great. It’s the projects that don’t have any money or time that are headaches.”

The other limiting factor came with the creature being so enormous, and the location being a real mental hospital. “When a budget is limited, it keeps you on your toes,” Penikas says. “We’re using a suit performer named Roger Morrissey (who played the title role in Tale of the Mummy, among others), who’s 7-foot-4, for the Harvester. Even though Roger is a professional and easy to work with, he is a giant. When we put the wings on him, which were 4 feet high and 20 feet wide when spread, and the ceilings were only 8 feet high, it became comical. When he took a step forward, he’d knock a light off.”

The Harvester outfit itself allowed Penikas, who has never used the crutch of CGI, to go back further in his roots, getting the most bang for his buck out of tried-and-true methods. “We had to paint his arms red, because we designed the suit around special armor so we would not have to go through the expense of a full foam latex monster suit. We made a fiberglass head with a foam latex neck and wings, then claws on his fingers and some fine hairs on his arms. It’s down-and-dirty guerrilla filmmaking, but the final effect is very, very cool,” says Penikas with pride.

Overall, Penikas is finding the 18-day Hellborn shoot to be a reinvigorating experience, particularly given stories he’s heard from people in other shops about projects that have wasted money and time. “I’d much rather do shows like this where you are thinking on your feet or on set, even though you have a plan,” the artist says. “You’re a smaller crew trying to get it done and the challenges are greater. Some of these places spend four days sculpting a nose or a fingernail that never even gets on camera.”

Even in the case of Hellborn, though, some FX will end up in the deleted-scenes section of the inevitable DVD. Two days of FX shooting resulted in tons of stunning scare footage, but Jones eventually found that the film required a “Hitch-cockian” approach for pacing purposes. “We originally had three big killings in this film, and have now backed off,” says Jones later on, during postproduction. “When you watch movies like Starship Troopers, it just gets to be overkill, so I thought of movies like Jaws or Alien, where Ridley Scott maybe shows us the Alien in one or two scenes and lets the tension grow.”

For Hellborn, Jones also decided that withholding evidence would allow the supernatural crimes to pay off stronger in the final reels. “It’s better to let people get a sense of what St. Andrews is before we let them know later in the film what is really happening.”

Jones has jumped all over the genre map, starting in 16mm direct-to-video features like the sci-fi nugget Princess Warrior, the action-heavy Cause of Death and the genie fantasy Wish Me Luck. But he insists, “What I learned on those smaller films made doing these last two bigger films (Hellborn and the actioner Backflash) so much easier. I was able to focus not on how much to do things, but how to make a better story to use those skills. I am a storyteller first and foremost.”

Sitting in Jones’ Burbank production office, where his Paragon Film Group production partners Matthew McCombs and Scott Bedno also reside, one can feel the passion behind Jones’ genre interests. One wonders why it took so long for him to get into horror after doing mostly crime and fantasy flicks. But it’s no surprise why he thought it was a godsend that he landed 20-year veteran Penikas to handle the makeup FX.

“I had a Planet of the Apes costume I wanted to display,” says Jones of his extensive collection of life-size statues. “I heard that Brian had the molds for Apes and asked him if he could make something for me to show them off properly, and he said he could do that.”

A working relationship with Penikas grew over time, and while Jones couldn’t afford him on his earlier films, he was lucky enough to have him to do some work on a Backflash crash victim. This dark, quirky not-just-a-bank-heist film stars Robert Patrick, Jennifer Esposito and Melissa Joan Hart and was released to U.S. video by Dimension in July after a run overseas.

With a good reception to the home release for Backflash, and positive interest from Dimension and other indie companies, Hellborn looks to follow a similar distribution track. The genre-veteran cast of Payne, Tiny (Prison) Lister weighing in as McCourt’s orderly Smithy and sultry Tracy (Demonic Toys) Scoggins as the conniving Nurse Helen will help draw genre fans, as will its fresh approach to the shock-corridor subgenre.

“I couldn’t think of another film that took place in a mental institution where they had a demon hiding in the basement that was being fed victims by a cult,” Jones notes. “Once I had that, I just needed to figure out how I was going to tell that story in a suspenseful way.”

McCombs and Jones concocted a script that was strong enough to draw Payne, who, even though he plays a doctor with a devil-may-care exterior, relished the chance to bring some complexity to the kind of previously straightforward bad-guy roles he has done before. “I know why I’m being asked to come to the party, so to speak,” says Payne of trying to pick roles that run against the type his fans are accustomed to, yet remain loyal to their expectations. “Obviously I will have suggestions to bring, and I hope I will find a director whose opinions I’ll value as well, and who will pick from my gifts what they want to use. Phil was interested in me, and we sat down and had a very lengthy conversation and struck up a real camaraderie.” 

Once the groundwork was laid, Jones used the character of Dr. McCourt as a catalyst for the film’s distributing machinations. “We always talked about his role, and really came together on his character throughout the shoot,” the director says. “We used about 70 percent of the ideas he came up with.”

“The day in the social room was probably the most rewarding and exciting,” says Payne of the scene in which patients with varying degrees of illness of affliction lurk among McCourt and Bishop until one steps into the middle of their conversation. “Phil wanted me to do this scene, and we came to the conclusion of, wouldn’t it be fantastic if we could get a spot where we are really in amongst them, but at the same time are almost like a couple of pigeons looking down on the city?

“We finagled an improvised bit of dialogue,” Payne continues, “which I feel really made the role human. You’re looking at these people and they’re all in pain, and of course you have a huge amount of empathy for that. When this guy came to sit down, I thought it would be a bit of cruel irony or philanthropic to ask him, “Hello, how are we today?”  The patient looks at McCourt, who with poker-faced glee asks, “Would you like a mint?” After a pregnant pause, he teases, “Aw, silly, no sugar for you.”

“It was just perverse,” Payne laughs.  “If Jack Handey of Deep Thoughts said it, you would think it was so sweet. But if John Malkovich in Con Air said it, you’d think, ‘What a sick guy.’ But we wanted to divide that right down the middle.”

Payne did just about all of his scenes with novice Stasi, and praises, “Matt is refreshingly human. He is at an age where that can all go to your head. You are put together under unrealistic situations, but there are moments where you just have to come together to bond as a family.”

As for the man at the helm of Hellborn, Payne comments, “I saw Backflash before I met Phil because I wanted to know who I was meeting, and he comes off to me as someone who definitely likes to play his cards close to his chest. But even though he has his vision, he’s not dogmatic or overpedantic and has the largesse to glide. Glide is the key process to all filmmaking. The ability to jump from people in one department to another, and to move around with all the heavy-handed wearing of hats, cannot be taught, and I look for that in directors.”

It is both Jones’ openness and serious commitment to the genre that promise to make Hellborn a film that will help instead of harm the souls who labored on it. “My entering into it was more to get into the psychology,” Payne concludes. “You could take the same script and put it with three different directors and three different casts, and you would end up with three completely different films. My instinct comes from the day or the moment when you want to do a project. And mine was that Phil is crucially intelligent and open to ideas, obviously likes actors and treats everyone as humans.”

Reprinted from Issue # 219 of Fangoria. Copyright 2002 by the Starlog Group.  This magazine was purchased by Bruce's Angels from the Fangoria  Store.   No violation of copyright is intended.. This is purely for the benefit of fans who don't have access to this magazine.