PopHorror Let's Get Scared
Jimmy and Stiggs, written and directed by Joe Begos and starring Joe and Matt Mercer, is a neon-drenched, drug-induced fever nightmare of an alien abduction movie, and I wouldn’t expect anything less from Joe (read our other interview with him HERE). Joe is fairly new to the filmmaking game, having released his first feature film, Almost Human, back in 2013, but since then he’s blown our minds with Bliss and VFW, both in 2019, my favorite, Christmas Blood Christmas in 2022, and now this blood-soaked homage to Dead Alive and Bad Taste packed with practical effects, Jimmy and Stiggs. What started as a Covid project filmed solely in his own apartment with a crew of friends, Jimmy and Stiggs just wrapped up a theater tour of the country and announced a merchandise line exclusively at Hot Topic.
A perfect storm of lousy news sees out-of-work filmmaker Jimmy Lang spiral into a bender, during which he claims to have been abducted by aliens, and fearing their return, he contacts his old friend Stiggs to help him gear up for war.
To celebrate the release of the film, I chatted with Joe about bringing the project to life, crafting the alien design, horror movies, and more!
PopHorror: I had a lot of fun with Jimmy and Stiggs so I’m excited to talk to you about it today. You and I spoke back in 2022 for Christmas Bloody Christmas, which is still one of my favorite Christmas movies to watch every year. You actually mentioned that you were working on this film at the time. Congratulations for finishing it and going into theaters! What sparked the idea for Jimmy and Stiggs and how did the project come about?
Joe Begos: When we talked, I was about halfway through shooting it actually. Basically, what happened, Bliss and VFW, I made back-to-back, kind of overlapping and then they came out really close together too, at the end of 2019, beginning of 2020. I had these two movies that were really well received getting good releases coming out back-to-back and I thought that I was going to be able to launch into another movie rather quickly, that I’d finally unlocked the door to getting quick financing. Then of course, the entire world shut down and there was a stop out to that. But then I started seeing stuff popup really quickly into the pandemic where people were making movies in their homes or on Zoom or fucking on phones, whatever. I was like, who knows when this is going to end? I’m really itching to make something. I’m just a filmmaker, I’m not someone who waits around for financing, I just need to make movies. So, I’m like, I own all this 16mm equipment, all my closest collaborators are my close friends, and my apartment is really cool. It doesn’t look like an Airbnb or something like a lot of people’s apartments. The apartment you saw in the movie is like 80% what it is in the movie so I was like, well, let’s make something here. I’ll have it done by the end of the summer and hopefully everything will have moved on. So, I wrote an overly complicated movie that took a lot longer than I thought and we wrapped in September of last year, and it was part of the thing where it’s like I can’t make something quick. I need to put everything into something and because I had just made Bliss and VFW, it was important for me to not only just make a movie that fit my filmography, but not make something where it was like, oh that was Joe’s detour during the pandemic, to make something that would actually feel like a natural evolution in my filmography. It was a really big learning experience. I learned a lot on this movie because I had the parameters of just being in my apartment but still having to make something that felt big and huge and propulsive and cinematic and not like I made this in my apartment but like this is a natural next step. So, that was something I was up against the whole time, but also I learned a lot as a filmmaker having to figure out ways to do that. Then the fact that it took so long and we ended up running out of money because even though it was in my apartment, we shot it on film so we were having to buy a few new reels of film every few weeks, which starts to add up, and then developing it and all that. So, we ran out of money and then I got Christmas Bloody Christmas and that had actual backing by a company, so I had a hard deadline, and I had to shelve Jimmy and Stiggs for like a year or 14 months or whatever. But because I had this fresh injection of money from the paycheck from Christmas Bloody Christmas, I was able to inject that into Jimmy and Stiggs and that got us another year of shooting time. When I say year, we’re shooting like a few days a month or something like that. Whenever I can get everybody together. It’s not like we’re shooting for a year straight or something like that. Then I ran out of money again and I kind of had to start selling my film collection. I had actual film prints that I had to sell, stuff like that but we eventually got it over the hump. So, yeah, it started as that, and then the movie itself mutated and took on its own life as I was making it. I’m never going to make another movie where I make something else halfway through. It’s interesting because learning how to direct myself and looking at footage and being like, my performance was fucking awful, what do I have to say to myself to direct myself better for this scene or because I production designed this movie? What do I have to do to make this pop? When I went into Christmas Bloody Christmas, I’d already been doing this for two years so the lessons I learned from directing myself or directing the production design, I actually was able to bring to Christmas Bloody Christmas, and I feel like it has the strongest production design because I was able to direct my production designer a lot better. Also, I feel like my actors in Christmas Bloody Christmas – the two leads specifically – have the most naturalistic performance than any of my other movies because I unlocked the key of, oh, this is what I can say to someone, or this is how I can pull something out of somebody. That was a long winded answer.
PopHorror: With shooting in your own apartment, how trashed was it when you were finished?
Joe Begos: This is my apartment right now [gesturing behind him]. It hasn’t really cleaned up very much. But also the alien blood looks fucking awesome so I don’t want to pull that down. There were points where I knew I was going to be shooting for a year with Christmas so I sort of cleaned up, but other times it’s like, we’re in the middle of a scene, the fight’s in the office – we shot that for five months on and off – and that had to stay like that, fucking completely trashed. I had to put my computer stuff into my living room, then we were in my bedroom for a month with the alien stuff. I don’t actually sleep in a water bed. I had to drag that out and sleep on a mattress in my living room. So it was a mess. I also can’t afford to get new furniture yet so hopefully this movie pops up so I can. My furniture is also covered in fucking alien slime. So, it’s cleaned up to a livable state, but it is the set of the movie still. Also because my apartment was painted like that with the comics wallpaper and neon signs. That was all there before so I’m leaving that stuff up. The astronaut paintings were new. I took down my Bliss painting and put up an astronaut painting and took down some of my movie posters. Other than that, it’s pretty close to how it was. When I was writing the movie, I was cooped up in that apartment smoking weed, drinking whiskey all the time writing that movie in that location so the aesthetic and the vibe came from that.
PopHorror: Can you tell us about the alien design?
Joe Begos: Yeah, Russell FX did the effects on this, who did everything back to Bliss and they did the new Hellraiser remake and The Ritual and stuff like that. When they came on board, it was important to me that… When people make alien movies now, they try to design something cool. They want to make it their own, they want to do this. But for me, I was born in the late 80s so when I was a small child, I’d watch The X-Files and Unsolved Mysteries and a lot of these alien documentaries or alien autopsies, which I mention in the movie. They’re all very much the old school gray, big-eyed aliens. When I was a kid living in the woods in New England, and I’d watch an episode of Unsolved Mysteries or Sightings or The X-Files, I was worried I was going to be abducted by these actual gray aliens. In the lore of aliens and alien abduction, you’ve got like Whitley Strieber and people like that, when they claim that they’re actually abducted, that’s what the aliens look like. It was kind of bizarre to me that there’s such a lack of movies that utilize the actual simplistic look of aliens that scare people so much. Communion did, that’s one of the last ones. Extraterrestrial did about 10 years ago, but there’s very few movies that do that, so I knew that this wasn’t going to be something where it was like… It’s a horror movie but it’s not something where I’m trying to scare the audience necessarily. It’s more of like a fun horror splatter movie. Nobody had ever done a movie where these gray aliens are getting blown apart and fucking killed and putting hammers in their heads. I love the iconography of those aliens and I wanted to do something that stuck out. And then because of the aesthetic where I’m in very dark, black lit, neon-soaked locations – that’s just what appeals to me and all my work – how can we take that original iconic design and put my own little spin on it.
So, that’s where we came up with the neon blood and making them, I like to say, Heat blue. If you’re familiar with Heat, whenever Val Kilmer is looking out the back of his Malibu home and the skyline is that very Michael Mann blue, I was like, let’s make these aliens Michael Mann blue. We bounced around what color the blood should be. Obviously, neon green was the first thing I went to but that’s so synonymous with Toxic Avenger and that’s actually good because Toxic Avenger is coming out like two weeks after us but like, you’ve got Predator, Street Trash, Toxic Avenger, so… I always loved how at the end of Terminator 2, the magma glowed off the screen. We kind of went with that just because of that iconic look and also sort of just adjacent to human blood so it does look kind of like blood. That’s where all of that came from.
PopHorror: The movie really reminded me of Dead Alive.
Joe Begos: Yeah!
PopHorror: Especially the scene with the fan blades and all of the blood. And a little bit of Evil Dead, too.
Joe Begos: Oh yeah, those are huge influences for me. Bad Taste too. That’s what I want to do. I want to cover everything in blood. Well, it depends on the movie, but like in a movie like this, the fucking places got to be bleeding, the walls have got to be bleeding. Everything’s got to be covered in blood. Not a lot of stuff like that anymore. I mean, there’s stuff like Terrifier, but I feel like Terrifier’s more like… Dead Alive or Evil Dead, there’s like a fun to the splatter and an absurdness where I feel like Terrifier is more of like a horrorish grim take on violence, which is fine, it’s its own thing. But I want that old school, fucking let’s cover everything in… A lot of movies that try to do that, I feel like they’re wink wink nudge nudge, look at how ridiculous and stupid we are, let’s look at the audience. Dead Alive was playing that absurdly serious. Evil Dead 2 was playing it comical but not like, oh we’re in on the joke, more like Three Stooges. I wanted to do something too, where it’s like we’re going to make this as serious as if we’re making The Godfather, but the fact of the matter is there’s rubber aliens exploding all over the place so the absurdity and the laughs and the ridiculousness comes from playing that straight as opposed to laughing at it.
PopHorror: I like that. Was there anything that you were adamant about keeping in the film, no matter what?
Joe Begos: No, just because the nature of how we made it. Everything is in the movie. The fight scene in the office in the script was actually like a 30 second thing but that was the last thing we shot and our running time was a little short so it kind of worked in our favor because it’s like, well, it’s perfect to have. There’s a lot of things going on so we extended it out. Everything I wanted in the movie was there and that’s also the reason why it took so long. Stupidly, when we did the original run of the movie we did all the easy shit first, leaving all of the effects stuff saying we can pick it up later but then it just stacked up. As we were shooting over the course of the years, we had to get together to do the most complicated parts of the movie, but I wanted to make sure we got it all done. But we did. We got everything in there. In fact, we added some frosting on top of that.
PopHorror: I have just one last question for you today. What is your favorite scary movie?
Joe Begos: I don’t know. It’s kind of a revolving wheel. I love Videodrome, I love Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, I love Basket Case, I love Evil Dead 2, I love Phantasm, Demon Knight. My favorite movie of all time and what got me into making movies is the original Terminator. Theoretically, that’s a slasher. I would consider that closer to a horror movie than an action movie. That’s probably my main one but if you want to get into real horror, it’s an ever evolving wheel. It’s a group of movies that I watched when I was younger that are all just as good to me or influential to me.
Thank you so much to Joe for taking the time to chat with us. Jimmy and Stiggs is currently in theaters.
