PopHorror Let's Get Scared
Abruptio, written and directed by Evan Marlowe, and said to have been Sid Haig’s last movie before his death in 2019, is unlike any horror movie I’ve ever seen. Featuring life-size puppets and voiced by some of my faves like James Marsters (Buffy the Vampire Slayer series), Robert Englund (duh), Jordan Peele (Get Out), and, of course, Sid Haig (House of 1000 Corpses), Abruptio (read our review HERE) is so fucking creepy, those eyes will haunt you for days.
Les Hackel is a guy down on his luck who wakes to find an explosive device has been implanted in his neck.
To promote the film, I chatted with Evan about his inspiration, the creation of the puppets, horror movies, and more!
PopHorror: Abruptio creeped me the fuck out so I’m excited to talk to you and hear more about it.
Evan Marlowe: Great, thanks! Glad you liked it.
PopHorror: I figured that would be a compliment.
Evan Marlowe: Yeah!
PopHorror: So, what sparked the idea for the film?
Evan Marlowe: Apparently, I woke up from a dream with this idea, according to my wife, to have everything with lifelike puppets. I guess it was kind of a nightmare. I don’t remember that, but my wife’s memory is better than mine. So, she said that was my idea and I guess that was my idea for the movie. From that, I wrote the script that incorporated puppets so that the theme had something to do with being manipulated. That’s where it all came from. But it was about 10 years ago where I wrote the script, so it’s kind of hard for me to go back that far in time. A lot’s happened since then.
PopHorror: I did read that the film took a significant amount of time from start to finish, that you wrote the script in 2014. The audio was 2015, and then it really was kind of finished in 2022. Is that right?
Evan Marlowe: Yeah, it took about a year in post. We didn’t do a lot of CGI and stuff like that, but there was a lot of stuff that needed fixing, so it took about a year. And then the audio, of course, all the audio was done from scratch. There was nothing recorded on set. We took the voices, and we built the soundscape, and the music, and all that stuff takes about a year. Then we got on the festival circuit in 2023.
PopHorror: Oh, wow. So did you ever fear that this wouldn’t see the light of day?
Evan Marlowe: Yeah, for the whole time Even if it did, we didn’t know if it worked as a movie. There’s been no cookbook for this sort of thing. You don’t know if people are going to relate to these inanimate objects moving around, moving their little jaws, and if it would be cohesive. So that was a whole thing. But yeah, along the way we didn’t know if it was even possible to make this sort of movie because it hadn’t been done before.
PopHorror: What motivated you to keep going?
Evan Marlowe: You get into it so far; you figure you got to finish it. If not, it’s going to be a very long short film, and you can’t do anything with a short film, so you just keep going. But I did eventually trim and trim. Around the time of Covid, we figured let’s just get rid of another character, let’s consolidate scenes. It’s just like enough’s enough. We’ve spent enough years on this. Let’s just tie it up and move things along and wrap the movie up. As far as motivation, it was really… There was a scene towards the end where he meets Dr. Travers and that was sort of early-ish in the production, and it was the first time where it really kind of clicked as a scene when I finished editing and it worked as a scene. I could believe these people were talking to each other in the same room. I lost myself in the scene. It was funny. It kind of clicked at that point that some of these scenes probably were working from an audience going in blind, which is hard to do if you’re immersed in it. So that really motivated me, I think, that scene. Like this is actually probably coming together in parts.
PopHorror: And plus, there’s a lot of work that went into this, I’m sure, from the puppets to the recording the audio, to putting it all together, that you want it to be for something. That was what I think would keep me going is like, I put everything of myself in this, like it has to work no matter what I do.
Evan Marlowe: Yeah, it’s easy enough to put out something that you don’t believe in because it’s done all the time. People have to put food on the table so they produce things. But this was not just a work of art, but also something that would be commercially viable, that would excite a wide base of people, not just like people that are puppet fans, for example. So I thought it would have wide appeal as I was making it. I thought it would be seen.
PopHorror: How does it feel to now have it finally being released?
Evan Marlowe: It’s just now seeing the light of day. It just started late September to get into the theaters. It spent a year going through the festival circuit, but that’s a certain kind of person that goes to festivals and is into horror. Now it’s seeing a wider distribution of people that are not necessarily fans of art house movies and puppet movies and weird horror movies. So it’s kind of seeing that light of day. In that regard, it’s still too early to know how it’s being received, but I’m satisfied with the outcome. I’m also relieved that it’s finally off my hands and now Anchor Bay’s taken over and moved forward with it.
PopHorror: I think film festivals, especially those catering more to horror, being more horror-centric, are the perfect places for these types of movies, because I feel like us as horror fans, we appreciate this more or to its full capacity. The puppets, some of them were so lifelike, but yet not at the same time, that it was very unsettling. I feel like, as horror fans, we’re the best audience for this, so I think that that was a great place to start.
Evan Marlowe: I guess I could have made a romance, but I don’t think anyone wants to see that. I’m a horror fan. It was going to be a horror movie anyway. But I wanted to see how far I could – even horror fans – push it, because I think we’ve gotten so used to extreme violence. We see movies all the time now, and they do really well. With CGI and some good special effects, you can pretty much make anything happen to a human body. But we’ve never seen this before and I don’t know how people would take to it. Will they just laugh through all these violent scenes because it’s so unbelievable? Or would they actually find it shocking and become emotionally invested in it? So I thought that was an interesting experiment. And the jury’s still out on that.
PopHorror: I want you to tell us about the puppets. I want to know everything, like concepts, how you designed them, who designed them, how you decided on what to use, whatever you can tell.
Evan Marlowe: When we started, the first puppet we made, Les, we did a life cast of an actor, a friend of ours, and the outcome wasn’t great. We realized you don’t need to do life casts of real people. We just need someone that can sculpt a head really well. So we went through a few people and eventually we settled on Jeff Farley. He was a quick turnaround, very good look to the puppets, just understood when I was throwing out ideas. And he could translate that, not only my ideas, but the voice into the face. And it held up, it made it durable and that’s important. You don’t have to consider that with actors, but you have to be ahead of the durability factor. So it was trial and error for sure. We did a little bit of a silicone. Silicone looks great, but it tears and it’s really hard. We tried building up from the chest up to the head to see if that would work, and that was extremely heavy and unnecessary for most of the shots. So we just settled on doing a very lightweight thing for the head and making it mountable on a PVC frame. That allowed the puppeteer to not have to use all his energy keeping it up in the air and having it moving up and down between shots, having it in a rigid position. And that’s what eventually wound up as the solution, just minimize the weight of it and the amount that we had to shoot and just keep that sort of PVC underneath. That gave the greatest ability for the puppeteer to get in there and focus on the emotions of the character. So it’s a foam latex. As far as the details, Jeff knew all that stuff. I just kind of threw ideas out there, what it should look like and what it needed to do, and he kind of went with that.
PopHorror: You mentioned the puppeteer. So these were life-size, I’m assuming?
Evan Marlowe: Yeah, that was definitely the thing. We had to use realistic puppets, life-size in real settings or standing sets. I didn’t want to do anything smaller, miniatures or anything like that. There were times, and it’s not most of the movie, like maybe 10% of the movie or less, where we had to have a stand-in with a mask because I just couldn’t see how we would do this with a puppet. So there are those occasional cutaway wide shots that we used, or stunts for example, where we used an actor or stand-in. But for a vast majority, it was some sort of puppet.
PopHorror: I love that. I’m really impressed because you’re right, this isn’t something that we’ve ever seen before and I hope that it paves way for more creepy stuff like this. The eyes, it was the eyes, man.
Evan Marlowe: Yeah, and Jeff understood he had to hand paint all the eyes because you can get prefabricated eyes, but I guess he felt they were just too glassy and inanimate. He painted all the eyes by hand, just to make sure that those had a real human sparkle to them. It is very creepy.
PopHorror: What is it that draws you to horror?
Evan Marlowe: I think most people are drawn to horror because of the fact that we can explore our fears. It’s a very large tent, and we all have different fears. Some people are freaked out by gore. But last year, Fangoria picked Skinamarink as its best film, and he had a huge backlash because a lot of people didn’t get that movie and thought it was really boring. But it explores a certain type of fear that you might have had as a child, and it’s a very personal work. If you don’t share that fear with that filmmaker, you’re just not going to get it. I mean, that’s what’s essential to horror, is that we each have different kinds of fears and different ways of expressing and exploring it. But basically, at the end of the day, we’re all afraid of different things and horror is a way for us to kind of let it all get out. It’s not always that serious. A lot of times, it’s just a laugh. I think certain films, including mine and Terrifier, are just a certain laugh at certain things that normally should be horrifying. It also lets us let out some steam.
PopHorror: I am definitely a gorehound. I love my gore, so things like Terrifier are fun for when I want to watch a slasher. But I agree with you that we all have different fears, and horror is a great way to experience your fear from the comfort and safety of your own home or theater, wherever you’re watching it. It allows you to experience without having to actually experience it in real life.
Evan Marlowe: Yes, and it brings up an interesting point, the fact of safety. I’m always looking for ways that we can make audiences feel less safe. So I saw a clip many years ago of somebody – you can find it, it went viral on the internet – opened the door and got freaked out because they were pretending to be an intruder and scared the person. They ran out and got hit by a car outside in the street. It’s a famous clip.
PopHorror: I have not seen that!
Evan Marlowe: I don’t remember the name. But it purported itself to be realistic, but I don’t think it was, I think there was some CGI involved. But the fact is, we thought we were watching a horrible accident as the viewer. We didn’t know what was going on. I think, to some degree, Blair Witch was like that, but we kind of understood at the end that it wasn’t really realistic. But this was a case where it could have been real, and then the viewer really doesn’t know – the person on the internet watching this viral clip – if this is a real person getting really injured or if it was just CGI. And I think that makes you feel unsafe because we assume everything now is CGI, if we see something fantastic, or AI. I think where we confuse the audience and they don’t know if this is real, and they suddenly actually feel fear or horror, as opposed to like something that’s synthesized because you’re watching a movie, I think that’s the new frontier of horror.
PopHorror: That’s what makes it the scariest. I have just one last question for you today. What is your favorite scary movie?
Evan Marlowe: I’ve been around for a while, I’ve watched a lot of horror movies, but the one that’s most sentimental value, I think was Alien, because I saw it in the theater, where I was, I don’t know, eight to 10, and the person who sold us the ticket didn’t really tell us how scary it was. I went with my mom and some friends my age. And they said, “Well, there are a couple of really scary scenes, but I’ll come back and get you before they start.” And they never showed up. And you know, you get like chestburster and all that. You’re just a little kid hiding behind your seat, literally. And I sat through the whole movie, my mom didn’t take us out of that. So, I think that was like the most scared I’d ever been in a theater and probably I’ve ever been. And I think just for that reason, Alien really holds a place in my heart.
Thank you so much to Evan for taking the time to chat with us. Abruptio will be available on DVD and Blu-ray in December.
