PopHorror Let's Get Scared
Whenever I sit down to watch a Steven Kostanski (read our other interview with him HERE) movie, I know I’m in for a wild and bizarre ride, and his latest flick Frankie Freako, brings the wild and the bizarre with the strange and the freaky and so much more. Steven, known for once being a member of the Canadian film production and directing company Astron-6, has shown the horror community that he’s the real deal with the elaborate and beautiful worlds he has created most recently in The Void, Psycho Goreman and now Frankie Freako, but also with his amazing prosthetics and makeup effects work. You know those kickass kills in the new Shudder film, In a Violent Nature? Steven was the prosthetics makeup effects lead.
For Frankie Freako, Steven reunites with Astron-6 member Conor Sweeney to bring you his latest creation.
Workaholic yuppie Conor is in an existential rut until one night he catches a bizarre ad for a party hotline hosted by a strange dancing goblin: Frankie Freako. Could this be just the recipe to spice up his boring life?
To celebrate the release of the film, I chatted with Steven about the inspiration behind the film, creating Freakworld and the Freako puppets, and more!
PopHorror: I really enjoyed Frankie Freako so I’m super excited to talk to you about it today. What inspired the film and how did the project come about?
Steven Kostanski: I was watching little monster movies with the Director of Photography of Frankie Freako, Pierce Derks, who’s a close buddy of mine. He was streaming every little monster movie out there and as we were watching those, this idea started formulating in my head of wanting to make my own little puppet monster mayhem movie. I was also inspired by working with Conor Sweeney, a fellow Astron-6 member. We did a merch commercial for PG (Psycho Goreman) where it was basically just him riffing the whole time and while we were doing that, I remember thinking, man I’d love to make something that’s just Conor doing his thing, and he’s just surrounded with a bunch of weird monsters and stuff. So, a combination of watching a lot of little puppet monster movies and then also wanting to come up with a project that I could get Conor to really showcase his talents and an excuse to beat him up with a lot of little puppets.
PopHorror: He’s definitely a great casting choice. This was perfect for him. Let’s talk about the creature design and your vision for the Freakos.
Steven Kostanski: As far as the creature design – the puppet designs – I wanted them all to be unique and have their own personalities. I design things as though I want them to be toys or the George Lucas term, making things very toyetic. I’ve applied that to all my movies but especially to Frankie Freako. Every character has a very bold color palette. The main three Freakos are like, RGB – red, green, blue. That was the starting point and I built from there. I was very much inspired by the puppet master movies where all the puppets have their own look and personality and feel like their own movie into themselves. I wanted that vibe with every character in Frankie Freako. Like every character that comes on screen, I want the audience to be thinking, what’s that guy’s deal? That was very much my approach to designing everything in Frankie Freako.
PopHorror: I really appreciated their different personalities. It was cool to see how different they were. You not only wrote, directed, and edited the film, but also created an entirely other world with Freakworld and all its inhabitants. Can you tell us about your creative process?
Steven Kostanski: Being a kid that grew up loving a lot of fantasy, sci-fi, and horror and genre movies that featured bizarre landscapes and universes. I’m definitely a Star Wars kid so I’m all about creating weird worlds and mythologies. I feel like half the fun of making these movies is starting from scratch and just building a weird reality that operates on its own internal logic. I find, especially with Frankie, in a similar way to PG, where it’s inspired by genre movies that didn’t have the resources to exist in the fantastical part of the story the whole time. PG we get instances of the alien counsel and Paladins of Obsidian, all these cliques of the main characters and their universes. So Frankie is similar to that. I like to over-design and over-build these universes, so they feel very lived in and real, and I want the audience to almost be thinking what else is going on in this place. I don’t want it to be surface level. I want it to feel real and tangible in its unreality. It was very much inspired by things, specifically for Frankie and for Freakworld they were inspired by the Super Mario Bros Movie. The world of that is very bizarre. The early 90s had a lot of weird alternate universes in these movies, these genre movies. Even Little Monsters is a good reference point. These things that you have characters that are grounded in reality thrusted into and you just try to make it as wacky and extreme as possible. Those types of worlds in late 80s, early 90s movies were a big inspiration and the jumping off point for Freakworld.
PopHorror: I was highly impressed with Freakworld. It reminded me of The Garbage Pail Kids movie and Little Monsters too. Last question, was there anything you were adamant about leaving in the film, no matter what?
Steven Kostanski: There was a lot of dumb stuff we made up on the day on set. There is a very strange interaction between Adam (Brooks) and Conor. I don’t want to spoil it because the audience will know what it is. It’s a throwaway moment, it’s kind of like a handshake that goes wrong. That is something that I refused to lose. Not that anyone even really asked for me to lose it. I think at that point in the movie, the producers were already like, well this is what it is and we can’t do anything about it. They weren’t really bumping on anything, but that moment is very bizarre and I’m glad that we kept it in the movie, along with the other strange moments and choices in the movie. It’s a movie based on weird, offbeat choices so it is kind of hard to pick specific ones because the whole thing is built on a foundation of nonsense.
Thank you so much to Steven for taking the time to speak with us. Frankie Freako is in theaters now!
