From V/H/S/94
V/H/S/94, the newest entry in the anthology franchise, is now available on the horror streaming service Shudder (perfectly timed with Halloween). I spoke with directors Jennifer Reeder, Chloe Okuno, Simon Barrett, Ryan Prows, and producer Josh Goldbloom about their entries in the new anthology film.
JE: Josh, as the producer, what was the process like of overseeing the project and how it all connects?
Josh Goldbloom: I guess the word I’d use is ‘exciting.’ It felt to us like we were prepping for five feature films all at once. I wasn’t a part of the previous V/H/S movies, but we put this together to have a little bit more fluidity. I think from a production standpoint it was important to us that every segment had a different key crew, it was just different for every segment. It’s exciting to take a production and turn it into something that’s real and tangible. [Shooting] one project at a time was a whole lot of fun for us… like anything in production it’s a headache but you work with some really beautiful people and you keep a good crew around you, and it feels good to open a little light on the process as a whole.
They were filmed sequentially, nothing was shot simultaneously. We started back in December with Chloe’s segment, and then Simon. Ryan went up next. We took a bit of a break after Simon and Ryan, then Jennifer came in and did the wraparounds, and after Jennifer did the wraparound Timo shot in Indonesia, so [its a] bizarre production that occurred over the course of like five to six months.
JE: My next question is for Jennifer. I thought the wraparound frame story really did a good job of pulling it together, I love the ending. What was that production process like?
Jennifer Reeder: I came in kind of late in the process; David was supposed to direct the wraparound and he got pulled away to do Hellraiser… We shot that in a warehouse outside of Toronto. It’s kind of a props warehouse but also there were some sets built in there… it just felt like a kind of perfect place to to shoot the the wraparound where it could be a drug superlab for instance, or it could be an underground video production soundstage. That location was totally bananas. I’ve never been able to shoot someplace where there was that kind of production design so deeply built in. Having said that, you also were able to bring in lots and lots of working monitors, so much of what is seen… there’s very little compositing. We really had no less than 30 televisions transmitting a signal at any moment, so the experience itself was really quite analog.
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I think that going into this process I heard from multiple people that the wraparounds are tough, that that the fans don’t always love the wraparound, and so I tried to rise to the occasion make a wraparound that at least wasn’t the most hated wrap around of all the V/H/S [movies]. I wanted the wraparound to have a story [that was] not just something that anchored the other shorts, but when the audience came back to the wrap around it wasn’t just an interstitial moment to get to the next short. There was some level of character development and character arc, and that there was a narrative through line to follow.
JE: I thought it was very successful! I have a question for Chloe. Tell me about the process of coming up with the the narrative thread in your segment.
Chloe Okuno: The other day, I was trying to remember how the hell I came up with this. At a certain point I wanted to do a feature that had a storm drain and an encounter with some kind of creature. And because I knew that was something I was interested in, I felt like it would be a good sort of subject matter for V/H/S and for found footage. I adapted it to that and used the classic news reporter trope to sort of justify why the cameras continue rolling, it just was an amalgamation of a few different things. It took a little bit of inspiration from so many different pieces that came together to form the story of Raatma.
JE: I’m also very interested in how you came up with the creature design for the rat man and how you executed it.
CO: Yeah, I worked with Keith Thompson, who’s an amazing concept artist and we had hours of discussions initially you know. There was a concept that was more or less like a literal sort of large rat, and like he thought of the sort of mother aspect. It was extremely creepy, but eventually we got towards what we ended up with in the movie. I think it was wanting it to have some rat like qualities where you could see how someone would see the creature and associate it with a rat man, but at the same time be genuinely horrific. The thing that we talked about was this idea that creature had found its way into our world and it’s coughing up this bile. We built it out from there… Patrick McGee built the actual creature, and obviously did an incredible job in a very short period of time.
JE: As a creature feature fan, I love it. Simon, what was the process of coming up with The Empty Wake like for you?
Simon Barrett: I got involved in it in a pretty straightforward way, which is through Brad Miska and Josh asked me years ago if I would have interest in doing a fourth V/H/S movie. [I would] if the goal was to get enough of a budget that we could afford actual like gore effects, which previously, we would try to make. When David Bruckner and Radio Silence kind of came on board and started talking about the 1994 of it all that got me even more excited then because I was like, well, that really means we can make it look like a very unique film.
One of the reasons I was on board from the start is because I had always wanted to do a kind of contained-corpse horror story. The two wraparounds that I wrote were kind of zombie stories in a way but you know, and I kind of wanted to do a version of the Russian film V, that style kind of having to stand and watch over a corpse, and never got to make it last that work for a feature. And then I realized I didn’t have it worked out. It was 16 pages, and I was like, ‘Look, I couldn’t sustain that for another second.’ And that was it.
JE: I love it! I thought it was quite effective. My last question is for Ryan. I love your segment, it’s both retro and very timely. Where did the idea come from, and tell me about the creature?
Ryan Prows: I worked with Patrick McGee as well and Daniela was our onset person for the actual creature effects, which they both did a killer job. Turns out fake blood very rapidly freezes in tubes when you when you shoot in sub zero temperatures and during a pandemic… but yeah, the idea I mean it was definitely kind of what you alluded to. [Those kinds of compounds] were in the 90s as well. and before that. [At the time the] Michigan governor [situation] was kind of early on. I was just so shocked that at how soon that story was coming on when we wrote the script, and we were in pre-production during January 6th, I think I was talking with our special effects guy as far about some explosions and stuff like that while watching the madness unfold.
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You can catch V/H/S/94 on Shudder.
