Horror Movies On A Budget

The horror movie director labors under burdens unknown to the horror novelist.

It is all well and good for the writer, when the action lags a bit and we’re waiting for the hero to arrive from Antarctica where he has been researching exactly this kind of monster, to throw in a passing gal from The Greek Underworld who has snakes instead of hair to keep us entertained until the hero’s plane lands.

The movie director however has to somehow visually bring this to life and present a credible vision to the audience.

Snakes aren’t cheap, hairdos aren’t cheap, and snaky hairdos are least cheap of all. He submits a budget to Accounting back at studio headquarters:

Item: 20 snakes, must take direction well, no divas

Item: One expert snake trainer.

Item: One lady willing to wear interesting headdress and sneer at mere mortals

Item: Greek Underworld costume

Item: Greek Underworld supporting characters, including Cerberus the two-headed dog, Sisyphus, the guy continually rolling the boulder up the hill, others

Item: Chariot carrying the snake headed lady up from The Underworld, preferably pulled by a full team of fire-breathing horses

Item: Design and construction of a decent version of the River Styx

Item: Other, as needed

The dollars add up, and the grand total is noticed back at headquarters.

On another occasion, the writer sits down to the typewriter with a great idea about boll-weevils monstrously enlarged to the size of buildings by stray alien radiation, and by time he knocks off for lunch he has half a chapter under his belt, with one hero, two heroines (one blonde, one brunette), one villainous but still quite attractive woman scientist who seems to have something to do with this whole insect gigantism turn of events (a redhead), a hardy band of boll-weevils trackers, and the usual government bureaucrats who don’t believe that anything is really amiss.

The redhead and bureaucrats and so on come pretty easy to the director but what about those giant bugs? What about the buildings they will be rolling into and demolishing? What about the Army units that finally swarm into action and try to bring them down with convention weapons?

The director submits his special effects budget on this one with the usual Items — giant boll-weevils, several city blocks suitable for destruction, twenty, no make it forty, Army squads equipped with tanks, jeeps, flamethrowers — and sits back waiting for delivery.

The dollars add up and up. And then up some more.

“Pricey, pricey, pricey,” says the new head of the Accounting Department back at headquarters and issues a memo titled “New Special Effects Policy” that makes clear that budgets are being slashed and everyone, even genius young directors, need to fall in line.

And so that young director makes a gesture in the direction of budgetary discipline where he can, cutting the catering budget by a full 2%, but finds that the tide has turned and gestures aren’t enough, and it is now something of a cost-cutting memo machine back there at headquarters. Each new memo slashes costs to half of what they were before, and then half again of that, and then half again of that.

At the end of the carnage the young director now has a shooting budget equivalent to what his monthly rent was for his first apartment, the one that had the walls so thin that when the guy adjoining him put up a nail to hang a picture, it thrust through to his side of the unit.

Still, what is he to do?

He has to stay in the pictures, he just has to. After all, he is a genius, as he has been telling everyone within earshot since he was a toddler, and didn’t the great directors all have to work within financial constraints?

In fact, some of their best work came out of solutions they had to come up with on the fly when presented with just these kinds of budget cuts.

In filming his cutting edge version of Dracula – Dracula as an early farm-to-table pioneer – he considers the description of the castle from the book:

The castle was built on the corner of a great rock, so that on three sides it was quite impregnable, and great windows were placed here where sling, or bow, or culverin could not reach, and consequently light and comfort, impossible to a position which had to be guarded, were secured. To the west was a great valley, and then, rising far away, great jagged mountain fastnesses, rising peak on peak, the sheer rock studded with mountain ash and thorn, whose roots clung in cracks and crevices and crannies of the stone.

When the money was flowing he would have submitted a budget similar to the below:

Item: One ancient castle perched upon ancient mountains

Item: One Romanian village, complete with several gross of peasants

Item: Several score of pitchforks, torches, and destructive farming implements

Item: Several wolves that howl on command and don’t mind being called ‘children of the night’

Item: Several catacombs, cellars, basements, spooky women, insect-eating guys

Item: Other as needed

He knows now however that this won’t fly so he scouts sites for all he is worth, but anything remotely resembling this description calls for a budget equal to his next twenty movies, considering he gets to make them at all.

Which he won’t if he doesn’t hew to the budget.

After considering any number of sites to house the Count, he takes a gulp and ends up with a nice split level in the suburbs, a bit of a fixer-upper if you want to know the truth, with two pink flamingos in the front yard, and one of those plywood portraits from the back of a hefty woman bent over her garden and showing her bloomers. He gives you…Dracula’s Castle!

It’s all good!

It isn’t quite what he first pictured, but he will manage the mood with lighting and dialogue.

And when, while filming The Pit and The Pendulum, which includes a huge pendulum swinging widely over the main character tied to the floor stomach side up and descending very slowly, intent on eventually cutting him in half, he gets another cost-cutting memo, he thinks quick and settles for the largest in a set of ginsu knives he got at an absolute steal off of an infomercial in the 80s and which swings down in a diabolical or at least erratic pattern, suspended by a length of twine played out by a guy from the ceiling.

The heart of the scene is still there, in his consideration, and gets the point across nicely.

And when, in the middle of setting up the scene for Godzilla vs Civilization, he is denied the line item for ‘one mid-sized city for annihilation,’ he sits down and decides to turn the movie into something quite a bit more of an internal drama, Godzilla vs Self Doubt. It is a popular topic these days, and may hit big with a certain demographic.

Next to go are the monsters themselves.

We cut to a scene of a water-soaked young man, apparently some sort of warrior from ancient times in a nautical setting. Sword, sandals, tunic, chain metal vest.

He sits there dripping for a while, apparently catching his breath, and then says to someone off-camera, “shoot, that kraken, a legendary cephalopod-like sea monster of gigantic size in Scandinavian folklore, is sure one mean son of a gun.” He pauses for a moment. “I kind of liked him though.”

And that is that. The light touch, you see. That is enough for the talented filmmaker to get it across. The light touch.

And so it goes.

The adventure drama revolving around an ancient Egyptian curse, several mummies in varying states of decay, a scattering of huge pyramids, secret internal chambers, a Black Skull of Death, troops of ancient priests, sacrificial altars, a few hidden tombs, a sandstorm, and a ride down the Nile, which earlier would have generated special effects line items running on for several pages, now is handled by the U.S. Post Office, for the price of a single stamp.

“Honey, you down here?” says the heroine opening the mail she has just gathered. “It looks like I’ve had some ancient Egyptian curse laid upon me, that’s what this note says anyway, Black Skull of Death, ancient chambers, pyramids, the whole nine yards. Why don’t you come down and we’ll talk about it.”

In like manner, the attractive young woman in another movie still looks off camera, to the left or the right, either will do, and says:

“Goodness, Jack, are you turning into some kind of werewolf or something?”

These characters paint a word picture of the occasion, you see, so much more effective in its own way than garish special effects. Words alone were good enough for Shakespeare, yes?

But the young director reaches new heights of cost-cutting while taking on his next project, The Invisible Man.

The subject matter, main characters, and general plot line solves a lot of problems for the struggling young director.

Here is one entire actor he doesn’t need to hire, and in consideration he comes to a further realization: what if this invisibility dealeo was spreading, and the camera has only to film scenes where not only the invisible man is invisible, but so is his wife, three children, two dogs, seven neighbors, 22 colleagues at work, and several thousand people in his city?

The cost savings on actors alone will be worth a fortune!

This is an Accounting VP’s dream, for the young director now simply flips the ‘on’ switch of the camera and lets it roll, scene after scene of empty parks, empty houses, empty streets, and entirely invisible action.

This really drives down the special effects budget and wins the young director a place in the hearts of management back at the studio.