Vicious Fun is a brand new slasher movie which tips its hat to the genre’s 1980s heyday in multiple respects. “Death by intestine strangulation, trepanning and slo-mo machete” reports Buzz’s Keiron Self in his review, while Buzz’s Carl Marsh found out more from the film’s Canadian director Cody Calahan.
The film’s title sums it up perfectly: some of the kills are so extreme, and they get better and better! It took me back to being eight or nine, when my dad let us watch videos like Driller Killer…
Cody Callahan: Oh, no way! It’s funny – I hadn’t heard of that movie until after I’d made mine. Somebody pointed it out to me, but no, [Vicious Fun] is not a reference to that. But it is sort of a reference to everything from the 80s.
You also have music that’s a throwback to the 1980s; albeit with this modern sound. Is it all by one band?
There were a couple of bands in it, including Drab Majesty. I had heard them through a friend, so I wrote to their label to use a couple of their songs. As far as the score, 95% of it is Steph Copeland, who I’ve worked with on all the movies I’ve directed. She just killed this because it was about keeping it nostalgic but giving it a modern feel, so that it still had that drive and didn’t feel too dated. We wanted to make sure that it had that modern tinge.
I get that – Vicious Fun doesn’t go to the retro extremes of something like Stranger Things in that respect.
Yeah. They did that. So it was important, especially during these times, that I didn’t make something where everybody went, “oh, you’re jumping on the bandwagon”. I wanted to make sure our homage to the 80s was different, and I think we achieved that.
Both funny and vicious, some of this movie’s scenes are intense to watch. Was anything especially hard to pull off, production-wise?
The hardest gag was actually the head pop – when the desk fell on it. We had this fake head made, and it wasn’t great, but the shot’s so quick. I think we probably dropped the desk 15 times, and every time the desk would hit, there was no blood [in the shot]. It would shoot either into the desk, or out the back, or off-camera. Once it soaked our first AC. It was nuts! No matter how many times we dropped that desk, we could not get it to work.
So we had the head digitally put on, and all that blood is the only digital blood in the movie. Everything else is fucking legit, real, and on the day, but that one we had to fix. So it wasn’t that it was hard, but it was a little gut-wrenching, because I wanted to make a movie that was all 80s-like -no VFX, nothing – but we had to do a little fix, as you do.
What impressed – and scared – me the most weren’t the violent scenes, but the part at the start where the killers are telling their murder stories. Including one saying he would let a victim die, then bring them back to life and put them on life support so he could keep torturing, killing and resuscitating for months!
Which makes it all the better when you know he gets it in the end! It was funny because I wanted a balance. I didn’t want it to be too much of a comedy, where you couldn’t fear these killers, and they were gimmicky.
I do feel like we were a little influenced by Seven – that scene where they find the guy in the room – but it came from just tossing ideas with the writer, James Villeneuve. Like a deduction thing where we would just come up with all of these fucking twisted ideas, and the most twisted one wins. I didn’t set out to make Vicious Fun to reinvent the wheel – I just wanted to make the wheel fun.
Vicious Fun is out now via Shudder. Info and streaming: here
words CARL MARSH photos SHUDDER