David Slade: “We took great pains to, actually. I’ll just chime in at this point. It was first of all I was handed such a fantastic premise as Sam said, something which should have been thought of a hundred years ago, and then of course now here it is. But one of the most amazing things of this premise is that what we’re talking about is, ‘We’re vampires, we’re the real thing. We hide behind the myth of the vampires,’ so that’s fantastic for me because I can make these vampires anything I want them to be.
I can make them very realistic and this is what we wanted to do. Yet at the same time, the schism was, okay, to make this a horror film and a very scary one, which I believe we succeeded in doing, you can’t go into the realms of fantasy. So this was the biggest schism because of course, Ben’s illustrations were so fantastic. We wanted to hang on to that so there was this really kind of difficult kind of balancing act where we were taking this fantastic template and some of the details that Ben is talking about is literally reproducing fabrics on dresses to look like the fabrics that were drawn, to the look of a particular character: the tattoo on her head, t-shirt designs. Finding ways using the sacrifice of cats and magic to make vampires look the way that Ben drew them, which is not really possible with traditional prosthetics and the things that you use. And so such rich source material, but yet my ambition was to make a truly terrifying film. And of course, those are the two things that had to meet, the fantastic fantasy beautifully drawn thing and the gritty, real terrifying thing.”
Steve Niles: “And that was something, when Ben and I were doing the comic, I think we were both really aware of was that vampires aren’t scary anymore. They hang out with you. Teenage girls date them on TV. They’re not scary. We made them too human. We had to strip away all that and the idea of a creature that looks pretty much like us, that looks at us like cattle, like food, and that is it. That was something me and Ben really wanted to do, make actual frightening vampires again. I think that worked in the comic, especially with his designs.”
In most vampire movies there is a sort of erotic and sexual tension between the vampires and humans. Is there that in this movie?
David Slade: “These ones aren’t. They don’t say a little Rimbaud poem and then take the arm. No, they just jump and rip off and eat and feed because you know, one of the things I didn’t want to do was rely on the supernatural because supernatural isn’t scary. What we wanted to do was say, ‘Well, look if this is the reality of this, if there is a race of whatever these things are that are vampires, that live, that have to live nocturnally, that feed on blood, yes they would use all of these things to their advantage, and absolutely not would they be any of these things.’ Any of these, you know, Anne Rice putting things that, no disrespect to that, because that’s a whole different genre.
I don’t really see this film almost as a vampire film in that sense because yes, the only thing that it has going for it within those genres, is that it’s none of those things. So, you know, I mean one of my goals again was like, when I first saw Max Schreck, I’m like, ‘Oh my God!’ That was scary. Now, of course, it’s camp and it’s funny and it’s strange now. We wanted to come in and we wanted to say, ‘Well, listen, we want the audience to have the same reaction. To say, okay, we’ve seen vampires but these don’t look like the vampires we’ve seen before.’ Ben created a fantastic template with the shark-like teeth, the black dead eyes, and it was up to us to figure out how to do that and make it real and convincing.”
Josh Hartnett: “I was actually going to actually touch on that point for a quick second. It’s something that also drew me to this story, that I thought was fantastic, is that it deals with the idea that vampires have become this mythological beast. They’re not really taken seriously as a horror entity. It deals with that in the way that they’ve maintained their mystery. The way that they maintain their mystery is by doing things like this, but staging it as though it’s an accident so they don’t ever get hunted. Like they have to be asleep during the day or while they have to be out of the sunlight, they will go to a town or do go to a town, cut it off completely, and slaughter everybody involved, no witnesses, and make it look like…they can keep doing this for awhile because it’s the way they’ve operated forever. It’s a different take on the whole situation."
Steve Niles: What’s really kind of cool, do a Google search for Arctic Circle disappearances, you’ll get thousands. So there’s actually a little something there.”
How did you set about recreating the comic? You shot this in New Zealand?
David Slade: “We shot in New Zealand. Some people will ask me, ‘Why did you go to New Zealand?’ It’s the obvious thing to do because you can’t get to Australia. It’s too far, and Tasmania is too small, but they do have mountains. I remember you almost [indicating Josh Hartnett], chugging for hours on end through the snow and you on the top of the mountain. All of us getting altitude sickness and suddenly being hit with a whiteout. We shot on the south islands where they have beautiful snow fields. [We] did spend some time using magic, too, to make some of the mountains disappear to get the Alaskan feel."
Page 3: The Characters, Creating Vampires, and Danny Huston
