FREE STORY

“Special Features”

by Jeff Strand

From the short story collection Gleefully Macabre Tales

 

“Hi, this is Dale Marshall, director of Draining.”

“And I’m Craig Marshall, producer of Draining.”

“I guess the first thing we should talk about is the opening credits, or, more specifically, the lack of them.”

“Right. Actually, it’s pretty common these days to save all the credits for the end of the movie and just open with the title and nothing else, but we didn’t even want to have the title at the beginning, we just wanted to jump right into the story.”

“If I remember correctly, we sort of bounced back and forth about that idea, but really, when you see a title on the screen it screams ‘This is only a movie!’ and we were going for total realism.”

“Yeah.”

“Anyway, the title Draining is on the DVD itself, so people aren’t going to sit there thinking that they’re watching, y’know, Josie and the Pussycats.”

“I actually liked that movie.”

“Well, maybe you should take a good, hard look at yourself in the mirror and figure out if there are personal changes that need to be made.” [Laughter.]

“Here we are in the garage where we shot most of the film. Again, we were going for total believability, so we didn’t want to do a lot of set design. We added a couple of things, but what you’re seeing here is pretty much the real-life garage.”

“And we couldn’t afford a set designer.”

“Yeah, that too.”

“Great pan here by our director of photography, Gary Lawson. We didn’t have access to a Steadicam–”

“We didn’t even have a dolly track.”

“Right, no dolly track or anything like that, so it was just Gary scooting along on his knees to get the shot.”

“Although we did sweep up the floor so he wouldn’t get any nails in his legs.”

“Because we care about our crew, damn it!” [Laughter.]

“And there’s our lead!”

“The amazing Lee Newman! He was great to work with.”

“Oh, definitely. A real trooper.”

“He wasn’t getting paid and he was in almost every scene, but you never once heard the guy complain.”

“I heard him complain a few times.”

“He didn’t like the food we served, that’s for sure. But if you’re on a Hollywood set, it’s just one egomaniac after another, and we didn’t have anything like that here.”

“Hard to be an egomaniac when you’re working eighteen-hour days and getting paid in Ramen Noodles.”

“That is true.”

“But he was really awesome to work with. We couldn’t have found a more talented lead.”

“Should we talk about how this project started?”

“We came up with the idea, what, five years ago?”

“Five years, yeah.”

“We’d been doing little movies since we were kids. Nothing major, just filming bugs and frogs and neighborhood dogs and stuff like that.”

“We should probably mention that we’re brothers.”

“I think they got that from the last names.”

“Yeah, because ‘Marshall’ is so obscure!”

“No relation to the other sibling team of Garry and Penny Marshall, of course.”

“Of course.”

“And, hey, the first shot of Trish!”

“Patricia Damon.”

“She really looked great in this film.”

“Yeah, she did, and she was so wonderful to work with.”

“She was one of the easiest casting choices. We basically just happened to see her shopping for groceries, and we looked at each other and said ‘That’s the one!’”

“She had this innocence about her that made her perfect for the part. And amazing talent for somebody who’d never been in a film before.”

“Yeah, absolutely. Now, because she had no on-camera experience, we wanted to make sure we got the most authentic reaction possible. So we didn’t tell her what she was going to see. I don’t think we told her anything, did we?”

“Uh…no, we did tell her that it was going to be frightening.”

“That’s right, we did. We wanted to get that build-up of terror before we even started shooting. We pretty much forced our cast to become method actors.” [Laughter.]

“Now what you’re seeing here is actually a mix of two different takes, because when she was struggling she hit Lee a lot harder than we’d anticipated. She didn’t hurt him too badly, but his reaction was out of character. If you watch carefully, you can see that there’s extra tape around her wrists in a couple of the shots.”

“Freeze frame geeks, have at it!”

“We did have quite a few continuity problems during the editing process, but I think we covered most of them pretty well. Nobody never really said anything. If we were smart we’d shut up about it and not give away all of our failings as filmmakers!”

“Oh, I love this shot.”

“Great shot. How many takes of that one?”

“Jeez, I don’t even remember. At least ten.”

“Essentially, Gary was lying on his back with the camera, while Lee and Trish stood over him. But of course Trish was kicking and struggling and she kept kicking Gary and wrecking the shot.”

“We’re lucky she didn’t break the camera.”

“Yeah, we would’ve been screwed. But look at that. We move back, we pan up (and this is just Gary standing up) and see that she’s chained to the wall. Fantastic.”

“But it took us all night to get that damn shot. We weren’t quite as ambitious as we got further into the shooting schedule.” [Laughter.]

[Long silence.]

“I think we’re supposed to be saying something.” [Laughter.]

“I haven’t watched this in over a year. I forgot how gripping some of this early stuff is.”

“Okay, we’ve got to talk about that moment!”

“The blood in the mouth shot! That, ladies and gentlemen, is the genius of Lee Newman. So he slices her arm with the straight razor, and we get this unexpected arterial spray that goes right in his mouth! We knew that once we got into the actual cutting scenes, it was going to be tough to do more than one take, so I’m watching thinking ‘Oh, crap, he’s gonna vomit and ruin the shot.’ But, no, he turns to the camera and wiggles his bloody tongue! Those moments can never be scripted.”

“It’s all in the casting.”

“He was pissed, though. Look at the way he’s cutting her leg. When he carves Whore, that wasn’t in the script, either.”

“That part was. It was in the shooting script.”

“Are you sure? I thought it was Bitch.”

“Oh, right, I just meant that cutting a word in her leg was in the script.”

“I think Whore works better.”

“I remember Lee explaining it afterwards. Because when you look at Trish, obviously you can tell that she wasn’t a whore. I wouldn’t necessarily say that she looks virginal, but she’s at least not whorish.”

“I think she looks virginal.”

“Do you?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, I can see that, I guess. Lee’s point, though, was that she’s definitely not a whore, so when he carves that on her leg we can really see how disturbed the character is.”

“And when you trust your cast, you get these wonderful moments.”

“The hand part. That wasn’t originally going to be a saw; it was just going to be a knife. But Lee couldn’t get through the bone.”

“That’ll be one of the outtakes. He’s just sitting there cutting and cutting and cutting and the goddamn hand won’t come off!”

“So the part where the saw starts cutting her wrist, that’s actually an insert shot we did later of him cutting her other wrist. And the sawing we’re seeing now is actually him sawing in the groove made by the knife.”

“The magic of cinema!”

“Should we talk about soundproofing?”

“Oh, yeah. We spent an entire weekend soundproofing this stupid garage. Testing it was a lot of fun. I’d go in there and scream at the top of my lungs, and you’d stand outside to see if you could hear me.”

“But the funny part is that Trish was screaming so loud that we were sure the cops were going to show up!”

“Thus…the tongue scene!”

“Oooooh, even I cringe at this part.”

“Gotta hand it to Lee, though. One take.”

“The pliers are in…in…in…oooh, there goes the tongue!”

“Ouch.”

“Now this is interesting. That shot right there of the tongue hitting the floor. That’s not Trish’s tongue.”

“It’s actually a prosthetic tongue. We bought it from a Halloween shop for, what, ninety-nine cents?”

“Ninety-nine cents before tax. We had a shot of the real tongue hitting the floor, but it didn’t look real. The real tongue looked fake, and the fake tongue looked real. Isn’t that weird?”

“And there go her eyeballs!”

“You’ve gotta have an eyeball moment in a movie like this. It’s, like, the law.”

“The fans would boycott us forever if we didn’t have a good old fashioned eyeball scene.”

“This scene was tough, though, because we’ve all seen so many eyeballs come out. How do you make it original? We were brainstorming ideas back when we were writing the script, and I thought, what about a frozen eyeball pop? So we just had Lee spray CO2 on her. We had to sharpen the Popsicle stick so it would go in, but you can’t really tell.”

“We did cut out the part where he severs the stalk because it interrupted the pacing of the gag.”

“And now the big death moment!”

“We had to get this in one take, for obvious reasons. We’d originally settled on a decapitation, but I think two days before that we changed the plan.”

“Well, that was around the time when the news was filled with stories about hostages being decapitated by terrorists, and we were worried that if we paralleled real-life horror too closely, we’d lose some of our audience.”

“Also, Lee was getting into his role so much that we wanted to give him a chance to really cut loose. So we gave him the axe, and just told him to go nuts.”

“And he did, as you can see.”

“Look at those pieces fly.”

“The one that hits the dartboard…wouldn’t it have been cool if it hit the bullseye?”

“If we’d had a CGI budget, we could’ve digitally altered it.”

“Maybe for the Super-Special Edition of Draining.”

“Oh, man, I just love watching this scene. Look at Lee’s face while he chops away. He was just so great to work with.”

“Is she dead yet?”

“No, I think she dies right…here.”

“Right in the throat.”

“But not a decapitation.” [Laughter.]

“Do you want to talk about cleanup?”

“God, no!”

“When we do the sequel, we’re going to hire a janitor.”

“That took forever.”

“I still slip on blood occasionally.”

“You do not.”

“No, but I do see a dried speck here and there.”

“Look at Lee’s face while he stands there. A perfect combination of excitement and remorse.”

“Yeah. You know that the guy feels bad about what he’s done, but you also know that he’ll do it again.”

“And we cut to…the lovely and talented Rebecca Fredell! Now that is a whore!” [Laughter.]

“I can’t believe you said that!”

“We’ll edit it out.”

“Seriously, though, she was great to work with…”

 

____________________

Gleefully Macabre Tales is currently a Bram Stoker-award finalist for Best Collection. If you want to attend the Burbank ceremony in person and watch me weep if I lose, check out the official Stokers website.

A few copies of the spendy hardcover collector’s edition are available from The Horror Mall. Grab ‘em while you can!

A digital edition will be available soon from The Horror Mall. Stay tuned to this website for details. 

If you wanna pre-order some other really demented stuff, and you probably do if you scrolled down this far without closing this website in disgust, check out Benjamin’s Parasite and The Severed Nose (which is also available in a deluxe hardcover lettered edition). 

End sales pitch. Thanks for reading!

–Jeff