Every monster needs a mentor. Imagine the creation of Frankenstein without the mad doctor to nurture his nascent, stitched together hobbling footsteps. Or Christine without the Phantom to guide her unsure, budding voice thru the dark catacombs beneath the Paris Opera into the stellar light of her first performance. We are guided, then we guide. No one is immune to this trajectory. Not even those who dabble in the macabre. Certainly, not I…

My life had just begun to shift from black and white to color. It was 1978. I was 13, and soon, the chiaroscuro pages of FAMOUS MONSTERS would become the Technicolor grue of FANGORIA. Suddenly, I began to watch KING KONG not for the lonely giant ape, but for the flailing Fay Wray struggling in his hairy grip. No longer content to just sit from the audience, I wanted to be up on the stage of my beloved chiller theatre, joining the ranks of the magicians who made the magic that had so informed my life since the tender age of five when I first saw Bela Lugosi spread his wings and fly as DRACULA. But how?

“How” arrived in the name of a monster maker named John Dods. He came by way of my 8th grade art teacher, Ms. Marsh. What to do with this quirky adolescent, she must have thought. This strange boy who would rather toss around rubber heads than footballs. Who dreamed of making it across the end zone not as a quarterback, but rather a hunchback, dragging his foam rubber hump to glory. Team him up with another ‘freak’, she must have thought. Dods, a former student, now a professional independent filmmaker who was actually doing what this kid only dreamed of doing. She thought right.

Meeting John Dods was like meeting Santa Claus. His sack of treats included a stop motion critter named Grog. A lifeless furball Dods would bring to life with a 16mm Bolex camera. For hours on end, in a darkened basement, Dods would articulate Grog an eighth of an inch, then push a button on his Bolex. Click. Move. Click. Move. The result rivaled that of the greatest sorcerer. And I was determined to be the apprentice. Whatever it required, I was there. Hold a light in place for three hours without moving to photograph the NightBeast? Done. Manipulate a deadly spawn puppet while lying under a water hose in the freezing cold with a 99% risk of catching pneumonia? Done. Be a guinea pig for a new method of head casting in which I would be encased in plaster and unable to breathe for a severed head effect in GHOSTBUSTERS 2? Done. Done. Done.

Along the way, we made some grand illusions, John Dods and I. He was the showman. I was his audience. I helped however I could. Sometimes just by cheerleading. Yet always processing. Hoping for the day when I would wear the cape of illusionist.

That day recently arrived in the form of 2001 MANIACS, but it all began with a three headed lump named THE DEADLY SPAWN. My very favorite of all of Dods’s illusions, SPAWN was a no budget ‘monster movie’ made on weekends over the course of two years in 1980 and 1981. The biggest trick was getting the film a theatrical release in 1983, but it happened. The result was a cult classic that has been waiting for a proper renaissance which has just transpired thanks to Don May and Synapse Home Video. I was there then, and I was there now.

To quote John Lennon, “A dream you dream alone is just a dream. A dream you dream together is reality…”

Thank you, John Dods, from the bottom of my heart for being my mentor.

And my friend.

So here we are again! 22 years later! Still talking about THE DEADLY SPAWN!

Yeah, I can’t figure it out. It just won’t go away. At first we couldn’t figure if we were ever going to sell an $8000 film. Now we can’t figure out why it keeps resurfacing.

That was all it cost? $8000?

Give or take $250. That’s the kind of production it was. We could film the end of the world if we had 38 more dollars, but no... We had to cut that shot (laughs).

God, I remember. I was a Freshman in High School. I had just met you through Tom Davis, whose sister was my art teacher. You had done the stop motion animation for his film IMAGINE…

That’s right! A winner at the Student Academy Awards competition. I animated a character I had created named GROG for that film.

I was 15 at the time, and being a kid in New Jersey who liked monster movies, meeting you and Tom was just like meeting George Lucas and Steven Spielberg.

Almost the same thing, I’d say. (laughs). Very close.

Hey, I didn’t know any better. But you guys were actually doing it. I didn’t know how I was going to get from New Jersey to Hollywood, or wherever you go to make monster movies. And then, right in my back yard, there you guys were.

So have you figured it out? Please tell me (laughs)…

I guess you make a movie like DEADLY SPAWN and then wait 21 years for a movie like 2001 MANIACS to come along!

Wait 21 years and the rewards are forthcoming. Perseverance.

Well, The Deadly Spawn has persevered. He’s finally getting his full day in court. I think more people will see him now than they did when it was first released.

Oh, many more. We did get a theatrical release, much to our astonishment. But it was only in the tri-state area. New York. New Jersey. Connecticut. It opened in 50 theaters with TV advertising every night after STAR TREK. We had hoped if we were lucky that the film might get some sort of release on home video, you know, VHS tape. But we ended up getting a theatrical distribution, being on the cover of six film magazines, reviewed by the New York Times, People magazine… It was fun. But it was almost beyond what should have happened. I think people liked us, lesson to bigheaded filmmakers everywhere, and gave us more publicity coverage than a film like that deserved. I mean, we were reviewed on Live at Five, where the Spawn made a personal appearance attacking Pia Lindstrum after she gave it a bad review.

I’ll never forget carting that giant monster in a van from New Jersey to New York, to the NBC studios... My God, do you remember that?

Remember it? I was pushing the Spawn (laughs)! I was afraid we were going to hurt her! She was game as hell. That Pia Lindstrum. Ingrid Bergman’s daughter. She threw her papers up in the air and said, “I’ll give you a good review!” And then she fell off her chair. What a trooper!

And then I flew to California for the first time and presented good old Forry Ackerman with a baby spawn. He kept it in the Ackermansion for years!

 Yes, it was quite amazing. Everything that happened seemed dreamlike.

How about the premiere! You know, a lot of people don’t realize it, but at the time, in ’83, the only way to see some of these low budget horror movies was at what they called the Grindhouse theaters, like the ones on 42 nd Street in Manhattan. And that’s where THE DEADLY SPWAN premiered!

I remember DEADLY SPAWN was released the same day as THE EVIL DEAD, and we ran into Sam Raimi, because he was there to see his film, and we traded movie posters.

Sam did a little better with his film.

Ah, yes (laughs). THE EVIL DEAD was very crude, and done on a similar budget as SPAWN, but it had this manic energy and a crazed over the top sensational humor to it. THE DEADLY SPAWN either wasn’t bad enough or wasn’t good enough. Raimi had a real vision, an auteur’s vision of what was gonna work with almost no money. And we weren’t trying to do that. We didn’t think of it as anything but maybe a first step. Maybe we could get some kind of release, make a little money and then make a better film.

How did DEADLY SPAWN come about? When I came into the picture, it was already a reality.

I was a filmmaker doing short animated films, and my friend, Ted Bohus, thought that between us, we knew enough talented people that could get together and make a movie. People were doing that then a lot more than they are doing it now. You could get a few people together with a few thousand dollars and get something with a beginning, a middle and an end, and have at least a shot, if there were some commercial element in it, of a release direct to video.

Which was a brand new medium at the time.

Yes, it was very new. Not everybody had video recorders then. That was just starting. 1980. So, with Ted’s enthusiasm and belief in our ability to do it, we got a few people together and made a movie with a beginning, middle and end, and enough commercial elements that it not only got a video release, it got an initial theatrical release.

What was cool about SPAWN at the time was, in an era were the horror film was pretty much the slasher genre, guys in masks with knives, you all decidedly made an old fashioned monster movie.

Well, we made what we knew we would enjoy making in the context of what we thought it would be possible to sell. We knew we weren’t going to get any stars. We didn’t have the kind of budget where you could hire a star for a day for a few thousand dollars. You know, a star of ‘yesteryear’. We weren’t Ed Wood. We didn’t know anybody like Bela Lugosi personally, so there was no star possible. Now at the time, graphic gore was a commercial element. We could do that. And if the monster was good enough, that was a commercial element as well. I was absolutely convinced that it wasn’t a matter of money having a good monster. For the same money that you could have a man in a suit, which was all anybody had been seeing at the time, you could do something much more original and better. I had been reading Carl Sagan’s “Bocca’s Brain”, were he goes into very scientific detail as to why, if a life form were to come from beyond this planet, it would be very different from what you see here. Certainly not something that would resemble a man in a suit, humanoid in form. So I was pushing from the beginning to do something that didn’t look human with two arms, two legs, two eyes... Everybody liked my sketches, so we went more in that direction with an amorphous, bizarre shape with enough recognizable elements that it was scary.

And literally life sized! That always blew my mind. If the movie were made today, the monster would probably never exist except as a little cardboard cut-out that the actors were told to react to.

It was big, about six feet tall, and we made it look bigger in many shots just by the camera angle or positioning the elements within the frame. And it was just the very beginning of the explosion of imaginative creatures in filmmaking. We were at the beginning of that, and I think that’s why we sold it.

The only other monster at the time like that was ALIEN. In fact, DEADLY SPAWN was eventually retitled to cash in on that, was it not?

After the distributor was disappointed with the first week’s box office, they changed the title. The second week it was suddenly RETURN OF THE ALIENS! I guess they were hoping someone might mistake it for a sequel to ALIEN… Which no one would ever mistake it for (laughs)!

No problem there (laughs)! You said earlier that the monster was good, you had something going for you. Well, the other thing you had going for you was an incredibly cool and, now, pretty famous movie poster by Tim Hildebrandt, who had just done the STAR WARS poster.

I just watched ED WOOD on DVD again, and the guy who hired Ed to make GLEN OR GLENDA says to him, “Give me a poster and a title and I can sell it in Europe!” It really almost didn’t matter what the film was in certain venues if the poster’s good. And we not only had a poster that had a lot of impact and effectiveness, but it was by a name who, at that point, was very big. And is still big. Tim Hildebrandt, who was one half of the Brothers Hildebrandt, the other brother being Greg, had a big reputation doing the LORD OF THE RINGS and STAR WARS art. And it excited everybody. Tim not only did the poster, he put a few thousand dollars into the film to complete it. And he not only loaned us the use of his home, but the use of his only child, Charles (laughs)! We keep saying if we make a sequel, Charles hasn’t changed that much.

However Charles did change while making the film…

Yeah, it was shot over a two year period in bits and pieces. And after the director, Doug McKeown, left, I directed a sequence in the basement where Charles Hildebrandt walks down the basement stairs, and by the time he crosses the basement to the other end, he’s a year older and a teenager.

The Magic Adolescence Basement!

How we held the cast together for that long… It’s amazing. You know, when Jean Tafler who played Ellen had to leave, or lost interest, I’m not sure which (laughs)… we simply killed her off. We just wrote the reality we had to deal with into the script. She couldn’t stay with the production, so she became the next victim. And we were complimented with providing the unexpected plot turn of the heroine being killed. Well, the heroine was killed because she quit (laughs)! The spawn took off her head and tossed her through a plate glass window. Real glass, of course, not being able to afford the artificial kind.

For me, one of the most memorable aspects of the film is the basement location where the monster did most of his spawning and killing. And, of course, that was your basement!

Yes, I lived on George Street in New Brunswick for twenty five years. I had the world’s greatest, and probably largest, basement. It was so big we had to erect a false barrier midway to make it appear smaller. Some of the reviewers still refer to the unbelievably huge basement that didn’t seem to go with the rest of the house. Well, they’re right. And it was not only where much of the film was shot, but it was also where the film was edited. And where the monsters were made! The John Dods studio was right there in the very same basement! But it was very convenient, I could just fling blood around, and no one was going to complain. My landlord knew what I was doing and thought it was cool. And at the end of the project, it was very convenient to be editing a scene, and, realizing in the scenes of violence that we needed a six frame shot of a head hitting the wall and splattering, all we had to do was just get the Bolex, walk out of the editing room, go ten feet and shoot the shot!

You also used to rent out rooms, and you rented one to me after I graduated from NYU. God, I remember every time I did my laundry, I had to walk through this maze of the macabre just to wash my clothes. You had all the monsters out and you had them incredibly lit, and they just looked so damn frightening.

Yes, almost as frightening as the real monsters out on the street.

It wasn’t a very good neighborhood, was it (laughs)?

But it was cheap! My neighbors saw some freaky things going in and out of those front doors. Sometimes a crowd would gather when we had our early morning expeditions to the studio in Queens when I was working on MONSTERS was shot to see the strange creatures that got carried in and out. We tried to cover them up, cause they would literally cause a crowd to form.

Because you had a good monster, you benefited greatly with tons of Fangoria coverage and magazine coverage. I remember you telling me, if you want to get in a magazine, you don’t need a good film, you just need good photos…

I wrote for Starlog publications for eighteen years, and my experience is that if you want to be on a cover, make it red!

Right now, I’m looking at a framed cover of the Cinemagic magazine for which you photographed me for an article on “Shooting Production Stills”…

What color is your shirt?

Red…

Exactly right. I don’t even know if editors realize it, but they’re more likely to use a picture that has strong colors. It’s just logic. They want it visually arresting, and hot colors tend to be more arresting visually. Even today, editors aren’t looking for great writing as much as they’re looking for great pictures.

Isn’t that also true about most movies today (laughs)?

Yes, increasingly. It’s a visual medium. It always was, but the visuals are increasingly important, almost to the point where films are turning into Walt Disney’s FANTASIA. Talk about being ahead of his time. In that film, the visuals and music were the most important elements, and the story was the least.

It feels like there’s a John Dods renaissance going on. In addition to THE DEADLY SPAWN, another film for which you made a monster has just been released on DVD by Troma. The good old NIGHTBEAST.

NIGHTBEAST just came out. I just saw it the other day. I recommend playing it with the commentary (laughs). It’s a little hard to get through without the commentary, which makes it more interesting. It was the first feature film I ever worked on, and I designed the NightBeast. And I also played the NightBeast in one of the opening scenes. It’s the scene with the very thin NightBeast!

Didn’t the NightBeast actually appear in PLAYBOY?

I was selling masks at the time, and somebody suggested I send pictures to PLAYBOY, because one of the editors collected masks. He had a column called “Potpourri” which featured novel, unusual merchandise. So I sent him pictures and he said, “Send me a mask and we’ll run it.” It was bribery, I guess. I certainly didn’t get the mask back (laughs). But people who read PLAYBOY obviously have money, because I got more orders than I could fill. I wasn’t ready. And then it happened again, when I was more ready to sell masks. It was two years later, and they again ran pictures. “NightBeast. As featured in PLAYBOY.” (laughs)

I’m happy to say I am a proud owner of a NightBeast mask! One of my prized possessions, which you gave me for my college graduation.

Yes. You were one of the few that I ever knew that might appreciate such a gift. Or want it.

What can I say? I’m a freak. I love my NightBeast mask (laughs). I love all your stuff. The creatures you did on a weekly basis for MONSTERS. The severed heads you did for the tunnel scene in GHOSTBUSTERS 2, of which I was one, I might add. But probably your most famous is the work you did designing the make-up for the Broadway production of Disney’s BEATUTY AND THE BEAST.

Once I started working for theater, I never worked for film again. It’s been more lucrative, more creatively rewarding, and its been very steady employment.

You started with PHANTOM OF THE OPERA?

Yes. I worked on PHANTOM. I didn’t design the make-up, just refitted it for each new actor. But the first time that I had creative involvement turned out to be for the biggest, most expensive show ever produced at the time, BEAUTY AND THE BEAST. They weren’t going to fall on their face, so they were throwing everything at it they knew how to do. And it still sells extremely well after more than ten years on Broadway. Its one of those shows that somehow becomes a mega hit and never stops running. I’m the prosthetic designer for not only the Broadway show, but for seven international productions of BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, designing the make-up prosthetics for the Beast, and eight other characters as well. All the principals wear things that I make for them.

And every week you have to bake the appliances for six days worth of shows for every single production of BEAUTY AND THE BEAST around the world!

It’s like the commercial with the guy who makes the donuts. Every morning I get up, “Time to make the Beast faces. Time to bake some fangs” (laughs). This, of course, is because in the case of the Beast, they do not reuse his appliances. They’re so delicate and fragile so that they can move easily on the actor’s face. They don’t survive the performance, so they go through 35 sets a month. After this year I will have produced over fifty thousand prosthetic pieces in the last ten years just for BEAUTY AND THE BEAST.

If a filmmaker can be considered an “auteur”, I also think an FX artist can as well. In your case, I look at all your creations, Deadly Spawn, NightBeast, Beauty and the Beast. There’s a similarity. There’s a fascination with fangs and with teeth…

John Dods. Special Effects artist and Dentist (laughs). Yeah, teeth are good. I fit as many in the NightBeast as I could figure out how to fit in, and with the Deadly Spawn, the central design of the mama spawn was so over the top, I just kept putting teeth in week after week, until somehow it finally seemed done. It was its primary feature, a mouth of teeth, so it was important that it be impressive, cuz no matter how many times I tried, eyes just looked ridiculous. It just looked like a Disney character. Wherever I put them, however big I made them, it just looked silly. So I took out the eyes which made the teeth the dominant feature.

I gotta say, its very wonderful to have publications like Fangoria giving the DEADLY SPAWN DVD such a great review. The sentiment that comes up a lot is that there’s a certain naiveté about the film, a certain child-like innocence that went into the making of it. “Hey. I love monsters You love monsters. We’re playing in the sandbox making a monster movie. You wanna play with us?”

That’s well put. That’s exactly what we were doing. And that quality certainly reflected the filmmakers. I always said that if Walt Disney had made a gore film, this would be the film. Everybody in it is so innocent. And, maybe, to the film’s commercial detriment, the closest thing to sex in the film is this really awkward kiss. We were like twelve year olds. The twelve year old parts of us were making this film. It’s not cynical. It’s not harsh. It’s of a quality you don’t often see today. The film still amazes me because you’re watching it and it has a very amateur veneer, but if you stay with it, suddenly it comes to life with these moments of unexpected polish and professionalism and excitement.

Like my favorite scene with the old ladies having their luncheon as the Spawns get into their salad and attack them…

Yeah, I’ve seen it fifty, sixty times and I still laugh every time. I just think its genuinely funny. There’s stuff that Tim Hildebrandt contributed, that I contributed, that the director, Doug McKeown, who also wrote the script, contributed, that actually have merit. But unfortunately, and unavoidably, often its like a beautiful picture in a crummy frame. The better parts of it ought to be in a better film. Its too bad that they’re not. But its an eight thousand dollar film, and maybe we shouldn’t have tried so hard. But you can’t help it. Once you’re working on a film, you become devoted to it and its your whole life. I guess that’s why I stayed with it for two years. I just couldn’t stop working on it.

And you really haven’t stopped. It was so cool getting the call from Don May at Synapse films asking us to get together for the DVD commentary. Don actually put more money into the DVD than the film cost itself. And his love for the film… It just blew me away how hard he worked putting together the DVD.

 In spite of its extraordinarily low budget, it’s still novel today to see something real in a film. People have become so acclimated to CGI, which even when its very good, still has a kind of artificial quality to it. And you can’t be more real than something that IS real. So if you see SPAWN today, it’s surprisingly effective, perhaps simply because you’re not used to seeing a mechanical monster.

DEADLY SPAWN is kind of like the last gasp of that type of film. In fact, the same year as DEADLY SPAWN, Ray Harryhausen made his final film, CLASH OF THE TITANS, which, perhaps symbolically, also had a poster illustrated by Tim Hildebrandt.

I never really thought of that.

After that, things just kinda became corporate and computerized. Give me an imperfect DEADLY SPAWN over a slick VAN HELSING anyday.

Well, what happened is, suddenly horror, science fiction, all imaginative films became much more commercial than they had ever been, and so money flooded into it. And money can be a good thing and money can be the kiss of death. There’s a tendency with too much money to just switch off the creative mechanism. If you don’t have a lot of money you’ve got to get good ideas or there’s nothing. But if there’s a lot of money, you can just throw it around and at least get good visuals. I just saw VAN HELSING, and there’s sure a lot to look at, but I felt guilty that I disliked it so much. I mean, the effects people put so much into it, but still, its not even as good as a video game. At least there, you can contribute to it. You can interact and be part of the entertainment. I just sat there and felt like I was being visually assaulted with too much of everything.

Not to dismiss the talents of anybody who works in the field of CGI, but there just seems to be a lack of soul in computerized effects. And whatever you want to say about DEADLY SPAWN, it has soul. The blood, sweat and tears of the filmmakers are in that film.

I think you have some sense of the effort in the good parts. Of the effort and care that went into it. And big budget films today, sometimes, have a bland quality. They’re homogenized. There are so many people involved that often a singular vision doesn’t come through. It’s like they put twenty people’s vision in a blender and just pushed “mix”.

You nailed it. What’s lacking is a singular voice. The singular voice of a Ray Harryhausen, a Willis O’Brien, or a Roger Corman. And why, perhaps, the CGI in something like TERMINATOR 2 or LORD OF THE RINGS works better is because there’s that singular voice of a James Cameron or a Peter Jackson.

Yes, exactly right. Cameron and Jackson are filmmakers who live and breathe special effects. Steven Spielberg is exactly the same thing. They know how to be personal with an army of effects technicians. They know how to work with them in a way so that their vision isn’t lost. Not all directors can do that. They don’t have the technical experience and background…

Or maybe they just aren’t given the opportunity because there’s a bunch of producers and financiers lording over them. When a movie costs so much or is gonna make or break a studio, sometimes one has no choice but to give in.

Well, I would never assume what’s on the screen is the director’s choice. He tends to get credit when it’s good and blame when it’s bad. Not everybody’s Spielberg who can pretty much do anything he wants. Most directors have other considerations. If it’s not your money, usually somebody’s telling you what direction to go in. And, yeah. The individual voice can be lost, muted, and dulled. The distinctive quality of the artist’s voice can be made bland by the economic pressures that are always present on big budget films. Or low budget films.

Speaking of low budget, there is now talk of a DVD sequel to DEADLY SPAWN. How would you envision that?

Well, I have no shortage of ideas. I mean, I’ve had 22 years to ponder it (laughs)!

Like you said, it would definitely be low budget, which is fine because I love low budget films. So many great ideas have come out of the straight jacket of low budget filmmaking. You just have to become Houdini. So I think my DEADLY SPAWN sequel would be four concurrent stories intercut. There would be a comic sequence, a pure terror sequence, another where you put most of your money that has some spectacular physical aspect to it. That’s where you might want to get into some CGI to create environments that might be prohibitive economically by any other means. You can have an epic sequence with giant spawns devouring a city or something. One could be like the original set in a claustrophobic setting, like that TWILIGHT ZONE episode, THE INVADERS. Just an old lady in a house invaded by spawns. No dialogue. Just music. And that would be the episode that uses mechanical effects. I’m not sure what the fourth story would be, but they would all be complimentary to each other and all tie up together with some sort of ribbon by the end of the film. A big grand finale where men with sticks poke the Spawn and push him off a cliff a la JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS, thus killing the Spawn forever (laughs).

I don’t think you could ever kill the Deadly Spawn.

It depends on how much money it makes whether you can kill it or not! You could always find a way to bring it back if the box office was good. Yes, in the grand tradition of film monsters, if it makes money, it never dies…