Nathan Fillion

Slime, slugs, tentacles plus star Michael Rooker and director James Gunn.

March 13, 2006 - It’s been far too long since there’s been a good alien slug invasion movie, don’t you think? Far too long in my book. After James Gunn wrote the hit remake of Dawn of the Dead, Universal gave him the chance to take a stab at his own project as both writer and director. A long-time fan of the works of directors like David Cronenberg, Stuart Gordon, John Carpenter and Frank Henenlotter, Gunn opted to aim for fun as well as scares for his feature debut.

The result of Gunn’s passion is entitled Slither. The horror comedy hits screens at the end of this month and IGN FilmForce got the chance to fly to Vancouver last year and check out the sets as well as speak with Gunn and one of the film’s stars, Michael Rooker. The rest of the cast includes Nathan Fillion, Elizabeth Banks, Gregg Henry and Brenda James. But before we get into all that...

In the small hunting town of Wheelsy, a large meteor falls to Earth. Grant Grant (Michael Rooker - and yes, his name is Grant Grant) is the town’s resident rich jerk, married to the beautiful and far younger Starla (Elizabeth Banks), and Grant is out for a night of potential marital indiscretion with Brenda (Brenda James) when the two stumble on the remnants of the meteor in the woods. Out of the wreckage pops a small slug which burrows it’s way through Grant’s chest and up into his brain, taking over his body in order to use him as a vessel for world domination. Grant takes hold of Brenda to use her as the womb for a giant breed of slugs set to unleash on the unsuspecting citizens of Woolsey on their way to taking over the world. Out to try their best to stop them is Chief of Police, Bill Pardy (Nathan Fillion), who also has long since held a torch for Starla. Also somewhat concerned with the situation is the mouthy, brazen town Mayor Jack MacReady (Gregg James). The slugs are everywhere and spreading quickly.

During the course of our tour through the sets, we saw some pretty impressive and often overwhelming set pieces. One of the craziest set pieces was intended for one of the last scenes of the movie. At this point, Grant and Starla’s home has been completely overtaken by his new "form," with tentacles stretching in all directions mixed with the bodies of humans and animals that have been overtaken by the alien slugs. The sets were extremely intricate and detailed. Nasty-looking slime was all over the floor and the veiny tentacles of the final monster were pretty stomach-turning. Slither promises gross gore a-plenty. Universal Pictures

Curiosity killed the cat Another interesting set piece was the giant orb which serves as a massive womb for Brenda James’ character. Giant and gelatinous, the thing essentially looks like a large breast. It also felt kinda like one, to be perfectly honest. There is a hole in the center where Brenda can put her head through for the make-up team to meld her head to the orb and give her the final look of a gigantic, slimy womb.

In between speaking to Gunn and Rooker on set, we observed one of the film’s final sequences being shot. In the scene, Nathan Fillion was on the ground outside Grant and Starla’s home wrestling with two of alien Grant’s attacking tentacles. Watching this moment play out in front of us looked pretty ridiculous, but that’s just par for the course when you watch a horror movie filmed. No genre looks quite as cheesy and ridiculous, but having now seen the finished footage I can promise you that the effects work of Slither is quite impressive - a very cool mix of animatronics and digital work. Universal Pictures

Grant Grant is going through some changes Speaking to Gunn about the origins of the project, we asked him if there was a connection to the classic Universal Monster movies of the past. "I think it’s a mixture really," says Gunn. "When [we] didDawn of the Dead, we wanted to do a little more ’70s style, a little more grittier... When I was writing this film, I wanted to do something a little more in-style of the 80’s movies that I love. Cronenberg films, Carpenter movies - we’re thinking more over the top, more extreme, and had a lot of different types of things happening in the film. I think I got back to finding out something that I really love about horror movies. Ever since I was a little kid I was fanatical about the old Universal horror films. And the thing that I really liked about doing this movie is that we have a monster, a character who’s not just a creature, but he’s murderous, and awful, but at the same time there’s something very human about him. And because of that it reminded me a lot of what I loved about Frankenstein and Creature From the Black Lagoon."

"Those are exactly some of the images that come through," adds star Michael Rooker. "Creature from the Black Lagoon, King Kong, all of these creatures that have this human emotion of a passion for another being. There is a constant battle throughout pretty much. The creature has to follow its instincts, but there’s still this little tiny essence of Grant Grant’s humanity still there somewhere in his brain that is still going, turning around and going away, you know, when he’s about to get her. And he goes and gets someone else."

Gunn describes Grant’s possession: "Rooker is inhabited by ’the long one’, who’s sort of this spore that goes from planet to planet killing everything it can... [Grant is] the newest creature that is taken over by ’the long one’. ’The Long One’ loves being Grant Grant because he’s human for the first time, he’s usually a lower life form (animals and things like that), and now he gets to be a human being, sort of learning what it’s like to be human. But at the same time it’s his murderous nature and impulses have taken over his living consciousness, and he goes from host to host, killing them over."

Once the creature takes over, there is no turning back. It burrows into the host’s brain and steps into the driver’s seat. "No, there’s no cure," says Rooker. "No, once the creature takes over Grant Grant, the creature develops and has his own goals and instincts to follow. But even though the human Grant Grant is dead and passed on, those memories, those emotions and that love - I think love is the key, and it spans that distance and it connects, because the love for Starla is what keeps the creature semi-human, and it also is what, basically in essence at the end of the movie; it destroys him because he’s got a heart. This guy is so desperate that almost all of his instincts are being focused in on her as opposed to taking over the world or whatever. But you know he’s created a shrine and he’s got to have her and all of his energies are focused in on getting her back."

Rooker on his character: "Grant Grant is a former Marine. Grant Grant is not really too good with women, and he’s not really a romantic guy, but he is loyal and committed - or he should be committed... (Laughs) No, he’s a committed individual, he loves his relationship with his wife, she’s beautiful, she’s emotionally way beyond him, she’s a very romantically inclined individual and she’ll never get it from Grant Grant, of course, until Grant gets taken over... In essence, Grant Grant dies, and because he’s regenerated so quickly by the alien creature, in my opinion, the memory, the emotions, all of the things that are inside the human being, Grant Grant, all of the love that he feels for Starla, he just doesn’t know how to show it, doesn’t know how to give it properly, it manifested in a positive way in the creature. So instead of becoming a creature that is ugly and mean and ferocious, kind-of creature, kind-of monster stuff, Grant Grant now enters the creature and the monster becomes a more caring, loving, human individual, more caring and loving than he ever was as a human..."

"This one’s challenging in many different, on many different levels. The character is not just your average, everyday run-of-the-mill monster bad guy. I didn’t want to do that, and Mr. Gunn didn’t want to do that as well, you know, it’s fairly naturally played, um, but the levels of the character are extreme."

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Till death do us part? Casting Slither, Gunn got the chance to go after some of his favorite actors rather than simply taking the more obvious route of casting the hottest WB star of the moment. "Honestly, each of the actors have their own story about how they came to be in this movie, and there were a number of factors that were real important to me. I’ve tried to cast Michael Rooker in so many things for so many years, and he really may be my favorite actor. For years I wanted to cast him as a good guy, but here we’ve cast him as sort of the main villain. Again, he’s this guy who’s taken over by this thing, I don’t really think of him as a villain really, he’s just acting according to his nature."

"Gunn was the guy that has got all of the answers," laughs Rooker. "I’m just the actor. He hollers at me on set and I do whatever he says. But we spoke when I first went in for an interview and audition, and we’re both big fans of horror and the horror genre, especially the earlier versions in the ’70s and earlier than that even - you know, Creature From the Black Lagoon and all of the creatures that end up, that kind of got a little soul to them, a little character to them... in your monster’s life, you know? Anyway, and they’re really truly only doing stuff that comes natural to the monster; how can we judge one for that, for pursuing your own instinctual needs, right?"

For his hero part, Gunn turned to Nathan Fillion, who is probably best known to genre fans as Malcolm Reynolds on the show Firefly and the feature film version Serenity. "Nathan Fillion was awesome. They all auditioned and he was awesome in the audition and I met him right away and here was a guy who was not only going to be good for the movie, but he’s going to be somebody who’s going to bring the whole set alive. I’m extremely fortunate for every actor we have, and I mean that from the bottom of my heart. Nathan was a big surprise actually because I only knew him from Firefly, and when we did this, he was really great."

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Reconcilliation might not work Gunn started out as a writer for infamous B-movie house Troma films, the studio best known for the Toxic Avenger franchise. The director says he learned a lot at Troma and still has a certain affinity for that kind of campy horror movie. "I love a lot of horror movies, and I love a lot of stupid horror movies, but a lot of horror movies, the characters are just something to be chased, or something to be fed upon, and there’s nothing going on there, you really don’t get to know those characters, or care about them, and truthfully, the horror is more horrifying when you have a character that you care about and who you love."

Slither is kind of an amalgamation of Gunn’s favorite influences, a film designed to make you jump and laugh all at once. We asked him which scene was the most bizarre. "I don’t know if there’s one crazier scene than the others. It pretty much gets more and more f***ed up as it goes on. They work in such different ways. The scene that we’re going to shoot starting tomorrow, where Linda explodes, and give birth to 35,000 wiggling parasites as all extensions of Grant’s mind... I think of this movie a lot as Terms of Endearment, so I try to make it a lot like that..." (Laughs)

"I actually think that it’s really just my own thing. It’s rougher, we have a lot of handheld stuff, I think the visual aesthetic is a lot like a Nirvana song, because there’s these long patches that are rather quiet, and very intimate about human beings, and all of a sudden the chorus comes and there’s this f***in’ incredibly ridiculous gory scene, then it goes back to a little bit of quite for a little while. As the movie goes on it keeps building and building up to the climax, and then we have Kurt Cobain screaming out his lungs and going sort of insane."

Michael Rooker must undergo a very extreme amount of make-up in order to make his transformation throughout the film. "I don’t even think about the make-up," Rooker says. "The make-up is the icing on the cake. As far as I’m concerned the make-up and I are hopefully working in unison and not against one another. Physically, we’re working against one another, because it’s just brutal, it’s brutal to be in the make-up. You know, every day you’re discovering different aspects of the make-up..."

"This particular make-up has been real demanding. It’s real demanding make-up. It takes about four and a half, five hours. We’ve gotten it down to about four and a half hours and hopefully by this point in time - this is, I think, my last day in this particular make-up - and I hope, I cross my fingers that we’ve gotten it down and I’ve gotten it down to a science so that we work together, me and the make-up. Because I’ve got to tell you, if you’re in the chair and you’re kind of sitting a little crooked in the chair, if the make-up is glued on wrong, you’re like this all day long. I’ve done that already, where like the second time through I found my neck and my head was a little [cocked] the wrong way and it was really hard. But I make it a point to stay erect and straight and allow them to do their work on my body so that when they’re done with the make-up at least my spine is straight and my head is straight on my shoulders so that helps a lot."

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Foul-mouthed mayor Gregg Henry Slither promises a large amount of "wink, wink, nod, nod homages to some of Gunn’s personal faves. For instance, Gregg Henry’s character is named Macready - the name of Kurt Russell’s character in Carpenter’s The Thing. "Throughout the whole movie, almost every single street name," says Gunn with a proud smile. "The name of the bar is Henenlotter (as in Frank Henenlotter, director of Basket Case), and all sorts of characters from Cronenberg movies, and everything is pretty much a nod to some other horror movie that I love..."

"Slither hasn’t changed that much actually [from the original concept]. It’s really stayed pretty much the same. The movie is pretty much like I really envisioned. I’ve said it before in other things, but the thing that really set me off I think, although I’m talking about all these 80s horror movies, but I read this comic [and] it was so intense, and so wonderful and so creepy, and I think creepiness has been lost from a lot of horror movies, there isn’t enough creepiness in horror movies anymore, that sort of dread and something that’s off, but you don’t know what’s causing it, and where it’s coming from, and something that isn’t a boo-scare. Boo-scares are good and they’re a lot of fun, but they only go so far, and nothing that makes your skin crawl a little bit. I also starting thinking a lot about The Thing, which is a movie I watch a couple of times a year."

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She’s due any day "This film is the directorial debut for Gunn, who has previously had to leave his work at the hands of the director’s final call. "The first experience is hellish. It’s like having your spine ripped out, and your life sucked away. And then the experience becomes much more difficult physically and emotionally and mentally, but much more fulfilling. For better or worse, this movie is what I originally intended it to be. In most cases where I’ve written screenplays and they’re directed by other people, most cases it’s not what I had originally intended to be. So I’m more comfortable doing this than watching somebody else direct my work."

So where does the inspiration to make a movie about giant slugs come from? "There’s a couple of things. The first was...about 6 years ago I was sitting with my brother Brian, and we’re like, ’God, I really want to write a horror movie, I want to write one that’s really, really f***ing scary, for the only reason to really do this is to scare someone and have people have heart attacks while they’re watching it.’"

"That was my goal. I said, ’What’s the scariest thing you could think of?’ and right away this image that stuck in my mind of a woman with a parasite in her mouth, slashing it’s tail, going into spasms in her mouth with lots of blood spewing everywhere, her eyes flipping in the back of her head as it’s trying to burrow into her brain. I thought, ’That’s pretty scary, I could do something with that...’ and then I kind of forgot about it. That’s sort of the centerpiece of the film, that image of the woman. The other one was thinking of the title Slither and thinking that’s a cool title, I think I’ll use that as the center."