Fickman Talks RKO Horror Remakes

I Walked with a Zombie and more

Next week sees the release of Andy Fickman’s Race to Witch Mountain, a Disney redo starring The Rock versus beings from another world. Ed Douglas, who occasionally contributes here at Shock, recently conducted an interview with Fickman about his latest effort, and in their chat the director talked quite a bit about his involvement in the bevy of RKO remakes that are in development.

CS: The RKO thrillers are pretty interesting. Of the ones you’re developing, I’ve only seen “The Bodysnatcher”. I don’t think I’ve seen any of the other ones and they’re really kind of obscure, unless you’re a really really diehard horror fan. Were you a fan of all those movies?

Fickman: Yeah, I loved “I Walked with a Zombie;” I thought it was one of the most beautiful… I remember catching it on a big screen at some revival house. I thought it was one of the most beautiful horror films in terms of the looks with shadows. “The Body Snatcher”, which is the one that of all of them, “Body Snatcher” will probably be the one that I’ll direct and I thought that it was great in terms of the medical community today, and there was a lot of stories that were in the press. “Bedlam” was also another one that I remember Boris Karloff and how creepy the world was. Then we took one of the RKO movies that had not been from the Val Lewton library, which was “Five Came Back”, an old Lucille Ball movie, and it’s more of an action-drama. We came up with a spin that really worked within the confines of what this horror world was. Yeah, these were movies that I loved because, like, “Cat People”, which was also part of that library, they were coming in the ‘40s after Universal really laid the groundwork with all the creature features, with “Frankenstein” and “Dracula” and “The Wolf Man” and “Mummy” and all of that. RKO didn’t have as much money and so they really had to go for the classic smoke and mirrors. We’ll do it shadows, we’ll do it with fog, we’ll do it with lights, and people like Robert Wise, one of my favorite directors, cut his chops on those movies. Yeah, I looked at it as a great challenge. They’re not titles that even sometimes the strongest cinephiles that I speak to are vaguely familiar with one or two of those, usually “Cat People”, they’re like, “Oh, okay, I know that.”

CS: Most people probably know the remake of that one.

Fickman: Yeah, so it’s a great world to explore because I think there’s a wonderful tradition there and I sort of have this dream that it would be fun to have on the DVD like… when we put out the “Reefer Madness” DVD, Showtime also put the original “Reefer Madness” movie on the DVD. You could watch the original 60-minute film, and then you could watch our musical version of it. I had that dream with RKO, the same way that they would put out a rerelease of like, the original “I Walked with a Zombie” in conjunction with our version.

CS: I was thinking about these movies before talking to you, and besides Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff back in the day, who were both huge movie stars, they don’t really have those kinds of big stars consistently working in horror. Sure, you have characters like Freddy or Jason or that kind of stuff, but not really actors. So are you trying to find that caliber of actor for these?

Fickman: It’s a really great point because there was that period of time with the Lon Chaneys and the Boris Karloffs, and Vincent Price. I mean, even as you got into “The Hammer Series” with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, those guys they all sort of represented horror. You know, Bela Lagosi, you’d see their faces and you just knew it was the new face of horror. Now, you know, the new face of horror, you’d almost have to sell it as the character of Mike Meyers or Freddy or Jason. You’re less likely to sell it as Robert Englund.

CS: I guess Robert was the last one.

Fickman: Yeah, I think that he became a face and by the time he was doing things like “V” and bouncing around like. To this day, I think you can still go down and sometimes see a horror film that will come out and they’ll definitely put him front and center. But you don’t have John Carradine, you don’t have those faces that you so associate with it. Also, you’d read these stories where a lot of these great Shakespearian actors, including Robert Englund, they found themselves in these horror films and that became their career. I’m blanking on the gentleman’s name from “Hellraiser”, but he was this great stage actor who found himself like, “Look, if we stick a thousand pin needles in your face – do you mind?” and he’s like, “No, that’ll be good.” Two thousand movies later I’m sure that sometimes he’s like, “You know I can also do a monologue.”

CS: I also wanted to ask about your feelings about the ratings on horror films. If any of those RKO films were released now, they’d probably be PG because they’re so tame by today’s standards.

Fickman: Oh, very much so.

CS: Are you trying to keep the remakes to a PG-13, or do you feel like some of them need to be R? Like, the zombie movie is kind of challenging, and it would probably need to be R to work, right?

Fickman: Yeah, you know, I think I want to go movie by movie because I think some lend themselves to maybe a little bit more of an R treatment just in terms of maybe some of the visuals and what you can do. Others, if you can get away with the PG-13 and you can sort of bring more people in, I’m always a fan of that, too. I don’t mind R-rated as long as also the R was designed to–like in “The Exorcist” or something where it really was sort of so scary and so visceral that it made sense. I would hate to just simply have an R-rating because we have one shot of an arm getting chopped off. I remember in “Anaconda”, they were threatening us with an R-rating because the MPAA told us we had 13 seconds of additional bone crunch sound. I mean, when they told it to me, it was the most arbitrary, like, “What? You’re going to give us an R because we have 13 seconds of…?” Then I think there was a meeting at some point where they determined what the appropriate level of bone crunch was, like literally they’d be like, “Well, as far as bone crunch goes, of course eight seconds is as much bone crunch as any person can have.”

Read the full interview here.

Source: Coming Soon