Nightmares of a maniac killer in a baby mask inspire a writer’s new script. But as his life begins to spiral out of control, he discovers Big Baby’s murderous rampage may be more than fiction. Big Baby is a meta-slasher written and directed by Spider One (Powerman 5000), and the film stars Brandon Scott (Descendent), Krsy Fox (Little Bites), Adam Marcinowski (Bury the Bride), Catherine Corcoran (Terrifier), Chaz Bono (American Horror Story) and David Howard Thornton (‘Art The Clown’ in Terrifier franchise).
As Big Baby prepares to release on VOD platforms in Australia on September 9, Nick L’Barrow spoke with the film’s writer/director Spider One and actor/editor Krsy Fox about their love for horror, and the technical side of creativity that leads to pulling off effective kills and scares.
Nick: Spider, I’d love to start with you and ask about expanding on this concept that you made in the short film you made for your anthology film Allegoria. What were the elements and ideas you were excited to explore in Big Baby that you may have not had the chance to do before?
Spider One: Yeah, when you’re doing an anthology and you’re dealing with short form, it’s almost like you have to write as if it’s a joke, a punchline. It doesn’t give you time to explore characters. And a lot of my favourite movies are character studies. I love 70s cinema where you just get to live in with people and their strengths, flaws, and conflicts. So, being able to expand this to a feature really gave me an opportunity to create some real people with a real lived-in life that we could get to know. I have always loved the slasher genre, so I wanted to balance the horror elements of that with a great masked character, but with this writer’s desire to make a great slasher. Just to do a little bit more with the genre and give it a couple of extra layers.
Nick: Part of those layers is the character of Kate, and for you Krsy, I’d love to know what you saw in the script that was your emotional in for this character? And how did you evolve her to be this anchor that the character of Adam needs to stay in reality?
Krsy Fox: It was interesting to me that she wasn’t just the victim or just the girlfriend. There were all these layers to their relationship and that helped the emotional stakes. They had been together for a long time, and certainly having a partner that seems to be going mad or dealing with a mental illness becomes an even deeper challenge. I really liked growing with Brandon [Scott, Adam] through that relationship. We were really lucky that we got to shoot a lot of the earlier, foundational stuff about the relationship first. So by the time we get to the climax of the movie, it’s this very emotional thing, especially being attached to these characters and their journey together. I thought it was super interesting, the fact that Kate gets to be the emotional heart of the story. But, she also makes mistakes by not believing her partner when he’s telling her that he is struggling.
Nick: Even with this more human core, you don’t skip a beat on leaning into the slasher of it all. What is the process of finding the balance between paying homage to the tropes of the genre that people love with bringing your own unique flair to it?
SO: I mean that’s the most fun part about working in this genre. If you go back to the 1930s Universal monster movies, think about what Frankenstein’s monster really represented. What Dracula really represented. Even the bigger monsters like Godzilla and King Kong. I mean, they weren’t just monsters, they represented society or a political statement, you know? For me, that’s the most fun aspect of writing this stuff. You can start with a real life scenario, and then represent it or explore it in a fantastical way with a monster, or a killer, or a ghost, or whatever. I think that’s how I start with something – I find what emotion resonates with me. In this case, it’s being a writer whose personal challenges affect his relationship. But, it’s just so much more fun to insert a giant man in a baby mask with an axe into it!
Nick: Does that sentiment also align with your relationship with the horror genre, Krsy?
KF: Yeah, horror is my favourite genre in general. The thing that’s beautiful about it is that it can also be all of these subgenres depending on your mood or what you feel like you can handle. It’s interesting to play with something so fantastical but also high stakes and that can really mean something with the underlying messages. I don’t know many genres that can do that. In fact, you get all genres – action, comedy, drama. It’s a really incredible place to live as an actor and creator. People always ask why we produce within the horror genre – besides personally loving it – and I just feel like it’s because it is so universal. It works in every country and language. It connects people and makes you feel something.
Nick: If I were to meet Adam in real life, I think I’d have a very spirited conversation with him about all the reasons why horror films rock! I’m curious to know what horror movies kickstarted your love for the genre?
KF: The first ever horror movie I saw when I was three-years-old was The Fly in a hotel room. And it was one of those hotel rooms that had like a single bed. So my mom and her boyfriend at the time had a bed each, and then I slept on the floor in the middle. They were watching The Fly and I was convinced he was under the bed, and I did not enjoy that! I mean, it’s a great movie, don’t get me wrong. But when I was three, I did not enjoy it [laughs]. Then a few years later, I somehow found myself watching The Texas Chainsaw Massacre by myself, and I was so horrified that I could not move. But I immediately also wanted to watch it again because it just did something to me. I had all of this adrenaline but I was so terrified.
SO: I got into horror and sci-fi and comic books at a very young age. When I was growing up, on the weekends we would have a thing called “Creature Double Feature”. You never knew what you were going to get, but it was a lot of the old Godzilla movies or things from the 50s. I was so drawn to that stuff. I loved things that were outside of the norm. So those movies really were the beginning for me. Then being a teenager in the 80s, it was all about VHS culture and going to the local video store, heading straight for the horror section and looking for the most disgusting cover artwork you could find! Basket Case, Faces of Death, Texas Chainsaw! And these were the days where you would just grab something off the shelf without knowing anything about it. Those were my formative years. I think Adam, our character, fashions himself as a bit more of an elevated horror guy. He would definitely like The Shining. I mean, that’s one of my favourite movies of all time. But he would absolutely appreciate watching The Shining.
Nick: As a musician yourself, Spider, do you have a different relationship or process with how you create and listen to movie music as opposed to a rock song?
SO: I mean, it’s different in the sense that in a band, you have three minutes to get the impact of a song across. In a movie score, it’s a different animal. But, as we know from Jaws and Halloween, these movies are so affected by their score. I don’t do the music for the film myself, and it’s kind of nice because I get to experience it then as the audience. It’s the same with the editing. Krsy does the editing, and even though I’m involved in all of the processes, it’s nice to see a first cut that I haven’t put together, you know? You can get so locked in to a vision, or script, or performance, that it’s nice to have things like the music done by somebody else and get somebody else’s point of view. Then we just go back and forth until we land on the right thing. But maybe I will tackle movie music someday. Who knows!
Nick: When it comes to the editing that Spider mentioned, how do you execute the a scare in the edit? Is it focusing on holding a shot for a bit longer to build tension, or is it about enhancing the jump through sounds or other visual editing tools?
KF: That’s a good question. I feel like having a background in music too has helped me learn to trust how something feels. You kind of just know when something feels right. There’s no real rule. So, I approach editing the same way. If something isn’t quite landing, I’ll tinker with it. I’m an insane person when it comes to sound design. If I don’t have music to put in, I’ll put temp music so that I feel like the experience is there. And then we can also give references to our composer, Alexander Taylor, about how we want certain things to feel, and then he can go do his thing. I really like experimentation and having nerdy, alone, quiet time to work on the films. I’ve been lucky that one of our last few movies, Spider has gone on tour after we finish shooting, and I have a month to cut together the movie myself based on my own personal experience and feelings. Then I show a few people, touch a few things up, then work with Spider on making it punchier or fixing something with the storyline, or add more gore there. We actually had a whole pickup shooting day where we made scenes grosser, which was so much fun!
Nick: While we’re talking about the gore and grossness, I’m curious to know how a filmmaker chooses their kills. Do you match certain kills to characters, or is it just picking something you feel like would be cool for a particular scene?
SO: It’s not really a spoiler… but a lot of people die in the third act of this movie [laughs]. They’re all people who have been connected to Big Baby at some point, so we had the ability to do whatever we wanted there. They didn’t have to fit into a particular geography or timeline because the character of Big Baby works with one foot in reality, right? There were really no rules. But with other specific characters, in particular Amanda, who is the centrepiece of Big Baby’s backstory. It’s in the trailer, but she gets killed in a pool, which connects to the trauma and backstory elements, so it was nice to have something like that be a full circle moment in the narrative. So, sometimes it is story based. Other times it’s literally just like, “Wouldn’t it be cool if we did this?” It’s nice to have that freedom, because sometimes in a traditional slasher, you have to work to the parameters of a singular location, like a cabin in the woods. In this case, we could do whatever we wanted.
Thank you to Spider One and Krsy Fox for their time, and to Lightbulb Films and Walkden Entertainment for organising the interview. Big Baby will be available to rent or buy on various VOD platforms from September 9.
