We are less than a week away from Frightfest 2023, and continuing our bumper coverage we spoke to director Stewart Sparke about UK indie horror How To Kill Monsters.
How soon after Book of Monsters did you start thinking about your next movie?
We were buzzing with ideas for our next movie even during the filming of Book of Monsters! I always had it in my head that moments after the final scene of the movie, Armed Police would have burst through the door and taken Sophie and her friends straight to jail for killing all those people! After all, the authorities would never believe that Monsters were real, and it felt like a fun idea to move the action to a police station for what would have been appropriately called Book of Monsters Vol. 2. After all, Assault on Precinct 13 with Monsters was a film I wanted to see!
Once my writing partner Paul Butler and I started scripting the movie however, it quickly became clear that the very nature of a sequel placed us in narrative handcuffs and relied too heavily on audiences having seen the previous film. So instead, we decided to take the best parts of the idea and reshape it into an entirely original story with fresh new characters and an even more exciting array of monsters!
How to Kill Monsters might not be a sequel to Book of Monsters, but fans will find our same brand of blood-soaked popcorn horror and a few familiar faces playing some very different characters! The movie will certainly satisfy fans of Book of Monsters whilst delivering genre fans a bigger, better, and even more thrilling throwback monster movie they can sink their teeth into!
Was it always your intention to crowdfund the film?
We were lucky enough after the success of Book of Monsters to have some incredible people reach out to offer funding on our next project, arming us with a significantly bigger budget on How to Kill Monsters from the moment we started writing the script. At the same time, we really wanted to continue our direct relationship with the horror fanbase who made Book of Monsters possible through their incredible response to the crowdfunding campaign we ran for that film back in 2017. We saw an opportunity to continue that relationship and offer fans a way to join us in making How to Kill Monsters, whilst also giving the film a little bit more budget so that we could really go all out on the practical effects this time. We also wanted to expand the story beyond just the movie and so our Kickstarter backers have funded the creation of an awesome tie-in video game and comic book which will be released later this year!
How do you aim to up the ante with How to Kill Monsters?
Paul (co-writer) and I treat every film as a learning experience and Book of Monsters as no different. Even on set there were things we just couldn’t achieve due to budget or time and so there were so many fun, gory things we knew we would save for the next movie! We read every review, good and bad so that we can learn what people want to see more of and what we can improve so all of that was poured into How to Kill Monsters.
I often joked during shooting that How to Kill Monsters is the ‘Aliens’ to Book of Monsters ‘Alien’ and that’s more than true with the finished film. You’ll find a relentless movie filled with action horror set pieces, buckets of blood and some great characters that brings together the pure popcorn entertainment we want the film to deliver. It’s a rare moment that characters aren’t running around screaming or fighting off monsters in this movie and I’m proud of how we’ve kept a thrilling pace that I really think audiences will enjoy.
What sort of monsters can we expect this time around?
I don’t want to give away all the monstrous surprises we have in store outside of what you can glimpse in the trailer, but we deliver a diverse variety of monsters in this movie, all of whom are fully realised with old school slimy practical effects. We used every trick in the book to bring these creatures to life, from people in rubber suits, tentacles on wires, puppets, to scale miniatures! I have a huge reverence for the incredible work done on classics like Alien, An American Werewolf in London and Gremlins and we wanted to bring that same, authentic charm to How to Kill Monsters with every monster in the film.
I think horror fans will be delighted by some of the monsters that show up in the movie and we’ve intentionally kept them out of the marketing so that the audience can meet them for the first time when they watch it! There are homages to popular monster archetypes and some very twisted surprises that I guarantee you will never see coming! Lovecraft fans are also in for a treat with one particularly tentacled chap that is very hungry for human snacks!
Tell us about a typical day on set?
We had the absolute privilege of shooting most of the movie in a professional film studio so the cast and crew would arrive for a 7am start and we would all fuel up on copious amounts of coffee and croissants before diving into a jam-packed day of slaying monsters! The day always began with the cast getting into costume whilst our special effects team prepared several buckets of fake blood and guts to throw at them!
The fun about making a movie where your cast are covered in blood for much of the film is that we had to make sure the continuity of that blood was consistent every morning. So, after the cast got into costume, we would then splatter them with blood to match what we shot the previous day. This blood has a tendency of becoming a lovely, crusty consistency over the course of the day, so we had to make sure that the cast were regularly topped up, much to their delight!
With our sets getting progressively bloodier over the course of the movie (monsters always make a mess when they are cut in half with a chainsaw) we shot mostly in order, with the walls and floor slowly becoming a sticky puddle of blood and body parts which made walking around the set a challenge in itself! I still have nightmares about the “schlup, schlup” sound of shoes on the studio floor, although not as many as our sound recordist! We always wrapped shooting by 5pm at which point the cast ran to the showers, leaving a trail of bloody footprints behind them.
So, a typical day was always a sticky, gooey experience for all involved and I swear that the cleaning staff at the studio must have absolutely hated us by the end of shooting! The hardest part of the entire shoot was taking down the sets at the end where the blood had bonded the actual sets together like gory glue! David Cronenberg would have been proud!
How great does it feel to be heading back to Frightfest?
This marks the third time Frightfest has hosted the world premiere for one of my feature films, starting with The Creature Below back in 2016. I’ve been a regular ever since and I wouldn’t miss the festival, even if How to Kill Monsters hadn’t been selected. Ian, Greg, Paul and Alan are incredible supporters of independent horror films and filmmakers, with initiatives like the First Blood strand making it possible for people like me to show our work on the big screen! I am so excited to screen How to Kill Monsters on the Cineworld Superscreen this year and we’ve got almost the entire cast coming along to celebrate with the Frightfest audience so it should be an electric atmosphere!
I also produced Nicholas Vince’s I Am Monsters! premiering on Monday 28th in Discovery Screen 2 at 11:20am which I am super excited about! We worked with Nick to adapt his one-man show into a feature length film and I’m incredibly proud of the movie we made together. Nick’s stories from working with Clive Barker on Hellraiser and his early life as a gay actor in Thatcher’s Britain are utterly fascinating and from the heart. Nick is one of the warmest and all-round nicest people I’ve ever had the privilege to work with and I urge everyone attending the festival to see I Am Monsters!
As usual, I’m also planning to see as much as I can over the five days, particularly other Discovery Screen films on offer! A few must-sees for me are Tariq Sayed’s Issac, Andy Edwards’ Punch and Short Film Showcase 2 which kicks off with Tony Hipwell’s Lure, a fantastic, witty short which I had the pleasure of working on!
Catch How To Kill Monsters at Frightfest 2023.
Bloody Flicks 