Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with a bit of an experiment. I recently interviewed James Gunn, writer and director of SLITHER. Gunn has also written a few flicks I wasn't too hot on, like SCOOBY DOO and the DAWN OF THE DEAD remake (before the screaming starts, I respect what the DAWN remake did right, but am in the camp that thinks it was a huge mistake to call it DAWN OF THE DEAD while abandoning most of the character work and social commentary).

I was asked how long I wanted with Gunn. I figured 20-30 minutes would more than do me. I was given an hour. I was told he was a horror geek and we'd get along really well, so I'd want that extra time. Well, my hour tuned into 2 1/2 hours. I caught an hour and a half on my micro-cassette tape.

The experiment part comes in here. I ended up not interviewing Gunn. Rather I recorded a conversation between Gunn, myself and my friend, Kraken, who had shown up to take a photo or two as he usually does. We're all three horror geeks, so the below conversation is probably much like the conversations you have with your friends. It could work, it could be unreadable. We'll see.

We do talk quite a bit about SLITHER, so if you just want info on SLITHER, that's there, too... you'll just have to wade through a bunch of me geeking out with Gunn.

Thanks to the lovely Martha for transcribing this monster for me (so, all grammatical and spelling errors can be blamed on her! hehe). All this below is only part one, ending just after I had to switch sides on the micro-cassette tape.

I'll have Part Two up soon, with the pics that Kraken took as well. Enjoy the chat!!!

JAMES GUNN: We did this junket last week, and it’s just… I get so bored then I just kept talking. Probably sometimes to my determent cause I say stuff that I wouldn’t say but it’s like I’m just so bored with it. You know you get the same questions all the time and then you have the answers, it’s true, it’s a true answer and then after you say it so many millions of times you get kind of sick of it.

QUINT: You’re on auto pilot, you’re not really saying it, you’re just…

JAMES GUNN: Yes, I’m remembering what I said the first time I answered the question.

QUINT: Yeah, I don’t like to do interviews on set for that reason, you know. Sometimes the occasional set interview works ‘cause it can be fresh, excited and talking but you know usually I like the one on one type, kinda outside the junket and stuff so on... So has the reaction been and press been pretty good so far?

JAMES GUNN: Oh yeah yeah the reaction was great. So far I mean….you know, this has all been bull shit… the web guys you know genre press and web guys… so yeah, no its been really really positive.

QUINT: So how many people have been spotting the little Easter eggs that you threw into the movie?

JAMES GUNN: Ooooh, you know some of them people spot easily… Henenlotter is. Uh Henenlotter is… Know who Frank Henenlotter is? He directed “Basket Case”, I looooove Frank Henenlotter, I love him. He’s like one of my favorite directors especially from that era but he’s also the guy who just doesn’t, like, people talk about directors satirically like with all these people, I mean they never talk about Frank Henenlotter. And to my mind, “Basket Case” is like this low budget, like, in your face gory movie but like it’s the best. You know, one of the best.

QUINT: And I love it. Belial rocks.

JAMES GUNN: Yeah right, and its got this grimy 42nd St. feel to the movie that makes you feel like you’re really…

QUINT: I remember sneaking views of that movie on cable when I was younger… it was one of those movies. I was allowed to watch R rated movies when I was a kid so it wasn’t a big deal but it was one of those movies where I was like worried that I’d get caught. I can remember watching it thinking that if I get caught watching this I’m in trouble.

JAMES GUNN: Yeah I felt like that about maybe “Saturday’s Lover”. Do you remember that thing? Did you ever see that in Cinemax….Skinemax? Oooh “Saturday’s Lover”… But anyway, with the bar where they all dance and everything, it’s kind of a modern Shadow Lodge. But there’s tons.

QUINT: Well the first I noticed was the reference to R.J. MacCready, a nod to Kurt Russell in THE THING.

JAMES GUNN: The gun store is Max Renn from uh “Videodrome”. And uh, I mean its everywhere. I mean the gun, the radar, in the beginning that they use is The 3000’s. So it’s like every thing, every street sign, everything. And there’s a lot of stuff that got cut too. I mean, we had all these little lines, little throw away lines. Anytime they’re talking about townsfolk they’re always the characters from some other movie. You know when they are the Ragland ranch, which is, um Ragland is Oliver Reed’s character in “The Brood.”

QUINT: I just got a Brood one-sheet actually.

JAMES GUNN: One of my favorites, love “The Brood”. That’s my… I love “ The History of Violence,” actually but um, “The Brood” has always traditionally been like my favorite Cronenberg movie. But I liked “The History of Violence” so much. I don’t know.

QUINT: Yeah, it’s hard to pick. I love “The Fly” but you know I love it in a different way than I love “The Brood” and I love “Videodrome” on another level entirely. It’s like.,.

JAMES GUNN: I liked “Naked Lunch” too.

QUINT: Naked Lunch was awesome. Um but I just saw the R.J. MacCready reference and I was like ok, I think this movie and I are on the same level, same like wavelength.

JAMES GUNN: Yeah, I think it’s my favorite, we totally…we talked about that movie all the time on set. All the time. You know that the problem is, well “The Thing”, they had like a year and a half to do those makeup effects beforehand. And we had like a few months, we got greenlit so quickly, you know, cause we did uh….I did “Dawn” and then I wrote the script in like two months. And then I gave it to Gold Circle and then we got greenlit like the next morning. It is cool but it was so rushed cause originally we were gonna going to try to put the movie out at Halloween but they made “The Fog” after we made this movie, they put it out on Halloween.

QUINT: Yeah I was hoping that movie wouldn’t suck but…

JAMES GUNN: You can’t do a movie with all those effects and everything and get it done. I mean if it’s a comedy then you can get it done and cut and everything else. But not something with all those effects.

QUINT: Well there’s also a trend that I like to see people get away from, casting teens only. SLITHER has a few teens in it, but your leads are Michael Rooker, who is most certainly a man, Nathan Fillion who is definitely not a teen. It’s what I love about Carpenter’s stuff. Even the high school kids look like adults. Even in“Halloween” they don’t look like kids, they don’t look like models or something.

JAMES GUNN: Yeah yeah, P.J (Soles)’s ooooh, oh my god, she’s like my all time crush.

QUINT: I went to the “Halloween” 25th anniversary screening at the Cinematheque in LA…..and she was there, and I’m like I had to, you know I had to talk to her. “Rock and Roll High School,” man.

JAMES GUNN: Yeah oh my god, I’ve pleasured myself to thoughts of P.J. probably dozens of times in high school.

QUINT: She was great in “Devil’s Rejects” too.

JAMES GUNN: I thought the acting over all in “Devil’s Rejects” was great. I was shocked, I mean some of those people are not good in other things, and they got a great performance. I asked him… you know he has a cameo in “Slither”, Rob Zombie. He’s on the phone with the doctor. That’s Rob Zombie. But I was like how did you get such, how did you get all those great performances out of those people, that naturalistic style, and he’s like “I don’t know”. (laughs) It’s natural I guess.

QUINT: I really took to “Devil’s Rejects”. I didn’t like “House of 1000 Corpses” too much but I really dug Rejects. I mean it’s great, it was great to see how much he improved, I mean it’s a huge step up.

JAMES GUNN: I can’t wait to see what he does next.

QUINT: Yeah, especially if it’s another step up as big as “Devil’s”.

JAMES GUNN: Yeah, and one of the interesting things now is that these guys who are, so many of the guys who are doing horror movies, are guys who actually want to do horror movies. I mean like in the 80’s, a lot of those movies were made by guys who wanted to do something else and was always trying to do something else and could only get a job as a horror movie director.

QUINT: Yeah, you get that feeling from some people like Wes Craven. I get this feeling that he’s actually not too hot on horror films, and you can evidence of that today. CURSED was shitty, but RED EYE seemed to have a little passion behind it. He has greats. NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET is still an amazing film and SCREAM gets shit… I think “Scream” suffers a little bit from the “Police Academy” syndrome where people forget how good that first movie was. You know because the 2nd and 3rd movies were just kind of recycled.

JAMES GUNN: Yeah, well I thought the first half, up until Jamie Kennedy gets killed, it’s great but Jamie to me was the heart and soul of the “Scream” movies. And so once Jamie gets killed then the whole thing that makes “Scream” different from other horror movies was gone. He was that out side voice. And the thing is, what happened was, was then everybody started making, you know it happens in everything, I mean it happens in rock and roll.

I mean the easiest comparison is like Nirvana, Nirvana comes out and they’re a great band. They’re doing something, you know, pretty unique, everybody loves them, and then the next year there’s 1000 copies coming out. And the next thing you know you have Candle Box which is like a xerox of a xerox of a xerox of Nirvana, and they’re awful. And that’s what happens with all these horror movie cycles.

I mean “Scream” comes out and then you end up with…, And it’s like you know, it’s those teen pretty WB actors….it was sort of interesting to have those teen pretty actors in “Scream”, I mean it worked ok, it was cool. You know, but then they keep doing the same thing again and again and that’s why I’m really scared about the next year. Because with, I mean cause I like them all, I like “Saw”, I like “Hostel”, I like “Devil’s Rejects”. But we’re gonna have now a million guys… But when we have somebody who doesn’t give a shit about these things, you know, a commercial director directing what is a copy of a copy of these roughy horror films, they’re going to be, there’s nothing worse than trying to cash in with those movies that are by their very nature something that’s not like aggressive, it’s going to be awful.

We’re going to have the worst horror movies of all next year. So, you know and listen, I mean, I’m not a big “Ring” fan, I didn’t really like the original “Ring” that much. I actually think the remake is better than the original because of, it’s shot so well and it’s so damn creepy,

QUINT: And it clarifies the story, too.

JAMES GUNN: …and it clarifies the story although the story is still like, it doesn’t go anywhere, it doesn’t have any progression. It’s like this big mystery that never really pays off, but there’s things about it I really like and it’s really creepy in certain ways but then we have all the copies of those. You know, all the Japanese remakes. There wasn’t an... I don’t think there was a single Japanese remake that I can think of that was good besides “The Ring”.

QUINT: Yeah, well I mean like with all those kind of movies, I love Ju-On, the original “The Grudge”

JAMES GUNN: Yes.

QUINT: I saw that, I was at AFM, I was sneaking in to the movies at AFM and, this was like 3 years ago… before it came out. It was way before anybody knew anything about it. And it was one of the most tense movie experiences of my life.

KRAKEN: I was calling you man, sorry.

QUINT: It’s alright.

JAMES GUNN: Hey. James.

KRAKEN: Kraken.

JAMES GUNN: Nice to meet you.

KRAKEN: Cool is it alright if I take a, grab a quick shot.

JAMES GUNN: Of course, make sure it’s while food’s in my mouth.

KRAKEN: Yeah, yeah or you know do it up the nose, but get it at a good angle.

JAMES GUNN: I swear I wasn’t picking my nose. (laughs) So, some of that Japanese stuff I like but I actually like some of the Korean stuff more. So, like, I love “Tale of Two Sisters”. I love that movie. Oh but I do love, I do love the (Takeshi) Miike stuff. I like uh, not all of it, I can’t like all of it.

QUINT: Well you can’t, I mean, I don’t think there’s anybody that likes all of it, because Miike does like 8 movies a year. I don’t think he even sees half the stuff he shoots.

JAMES GUNN: I love, I love “Audition”. And I really like “Visitor Q”.

QUINT: Well see I saw “Ichi The Killer” first. I was up in Vancouver in 2001 and I had never heard of Takashi Miike. That Vancouver film festival had “Brotherhood of the Wolf” there. And it had Ichi. I saw both movies there. And it’s just… I don’t know… I’m watching the beginning of Ichi and I’m like, they just had the title appear out of cum ….and I was flabbergasted, it’s like the whole movie my jaw was on the floor.

JAMES GUNN: Yeah, I know it is like that except Visitor Q is more respected in some ways. Those guys are kind of odd, they’re you know like, to me like Miike... He’s his own thing.

QUINT: I’ve had many conversations with Kraken about Miike. We have a theory that Miike doesn’t like directing and that he’s just trying to get fired every time he makes a movie, so he does the most bizarre and, wow this will never fly, you know lets see if they fire me.

JAMES GUNN: That happened on the Showtime thing. “The Masters of Horror” They’re not going to show it on Showtime.

QUINT: Yeah, well I think that was more of an Anchor Bay thing,. They need to have something unique to put out on DVD.

JAMES GUNN: Really?

QUINT: Well, I mean, they’re putting it out on DVD so...

JAMES GUNN: Yeah, I uh, I actually haven’t watched any of those.

QUINT: For the most part they’re pretty disappointing

JAMES GUNN: That’s what I hear. I kinda don’t wanna have to go and see those. I respect those guys so much. Like Tobe (Hooper) He’s a big supporter of “Slither” He’s awesome.

QUINT: He’s a super nice guy

JAMES GUNN: Yeah, he is.

QUINT: I love “Poltergeist” still love “Chainsaw” and “Chainsaw 2.” “Lifeforce” is pretty great..

JAMES GUNN: Yeah, yeah he’s a cool guy though.

QUINT: His Masters of Horror episode isn’t very good, though.

KRAKEN: Carpenter’s is pretty good.

QUINT: Carpenter’s is good. I mean, it’s not perfect, but it was good. I liked a couple of the Masters of Horror episodes, but on the whole I wasn’t impressed.

JAMES GUNN: Well, you know, these guys… those episodes are a million bucks a piece. I mean it’s not like it’s hard to do.

KRAKEN: I think it’s more the schedule, they’re screwed on what they can shoot. They have them a million bucks but they wouldn’t let them hire their own crew. And then you have what was it 10 days, or...

QUINT: Yeah yeah, they had to shoot it in 10 days. You know I went out, you know and spent some time on the set of Don Coscarelli’s episode. It was stressful, you know, ‘cause it was all exteriors, he adapted another Joe Lansdale work. A short, this one called INCIDENT ON AND OFF A MOUNTAIN PASS, about a girl that crashes into a car on a curvy mountain road and this big albino killer, you know, chases her through the woods the whole time, so it’s all exteriors, and he had 10 days to shoot an hour.

JAMES GUNN: How was John McNaughton’s episode.

QUINT: Uh which one was that?

KRAKEN: Was that the one about the necromancers.

JAMES GUNN: I don’t know, I haven’t seen any of them. He actually mixed his, we were mixing at the same studio that we mixed “Slither” in so I was next to McNaughton. And we’re both friends with Rooker so I knew him. Yeah he did HENRY, he did a bunch of cool stuff…he did “Wild Things”.

KRAKEN: If I’m right then they do something about the necromancer. Really really bad. I mean you just can’t blame the director...

QUINT: Well I mean they had this whole “Hey, we’re giving them the freedom to do whatever they want,” but they have to use a certain crew, a Canadian cast, you know…

KRAKEN: They have to only cast Canadian, they have to, except for maybe like one or two exceptions. It all looks too bright, they’re using the same… I think there’s like two DP’s that rotated.

JAMES GUNN: Who were the DP’s you know?

KRAKEN: Uh… one of the guys worked on X Files predominantly.

JAMES GUNN: I would imagine Miike would be better working at that budget and schedule than anyone else would be...

QUINT: Yeah, 10 days is like a feature length shoot for Miike.

JAMES GUNN: You guys see “Three Extremes”? Was that good?

KRAKEN: Yeah well I liked Fruit Chan’s.

QUINT: That definitely was a great one. That’s the best one.

KRAKEN: I like the Miike one and all but the uh, the dumpling one…

JAMES GUNN: The Miike one was hard to watch man.

QUINT: It felt very long and it was the last one, which wasn’t a great choice.

JAMES GUNN: Wait, that’s not last, it’s first right? Isn’t it? My DVD has it first.

QUINT: It was first on the print I saw at AFM. They probably rearranged it…

JAMES GUNN: For me it’s a little too weird for the sake of being weird, which is you know made with kinda downgrades it a little to me, but I still, I enjoyed it. There’s good stuff in it. When I write stuff. I write stuff like, if there are 2 or 3 things or something that I really like, then it’s great, you know?

QUINT: Some people watch movies that way, too. Harry gets blamed for watching movies like that. I mean… he liked “Van Helsing” and…

JAMES GUNN: He liked “Van Helsing”?

QUINT: He loved it.

JAMES GUNN: I think, I never saw it because I didn’t want… I mean maybe I should watch it but it’s like those guys are, you know I love those guys so much and to see that they blew their wad like that was like going and making “Justice League of America” movie and having it suck.

KRAKEN: I think they’ll do well with “Wolfman”

JAMES GUNN: Well we’ll see we’ll see....well I mean yeah well writer from “Seven.” I mean I bet the first draft will be great. But to get that all the way from there to the end and I’m sure they’re going to go PG-13 with it so. I’m just glad that it’s Victorian period, you know I think that’s really cool.

QUINT: Is it Victorian period?

JAMES GUNN: Yeah it is.

QUINT: Because like in the first Variety article it was saying how they were gonna totally contemporize it.

JAMES GUNN: No, it’s supposed to be a Victorian period piece, so we’ll see Yeah I hope. I hope they give it the “Braham Stoker’s Dracula” treatment, you know that would be…

QUINT: And they also said they were using the best modern technology to make the werewolves and like I can see if they put a budget behind it, like a big budget where they can utilize sort of “Kong” type of technology, you know if they could do that then… I don’t know. I love “Wolfman.” It’s my favorite, Universal monster, I have a lot of love for it.

JAMES GUNN: I really like Frankenstein. I’ve got a soft spot for “Creature from The Black Lagoon”.

QUINT: I mean I love “The Invisible Man”, I love the first three “Frankenstein” movies, they’re all you know really excellent movies. But I don’t know… for some reason “Wolfman” when I saw it, it was just one of those that grabbed me from the very beginning.

KRAKEN: The Wolfman could be you, you know? That’s the scary part about Wolfman.

JAMES GUNN: You know I think I related to Frankenstein for some reason. He’s like an outsider and like I don’t know, he just wants to have friends. The 2nd one’s my favorite. The first one’s great, too, though.

QUINT: Well, then there’s really 4 Frankenstein movies cause you have to put YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN on after SON OF FRAKENSTEIN.

KRAKEN: Yeah that’s another problem with “Van Helsing” cause that they didn’t make what’s her name (Kate Beckinsale) the bride of Frankenstein at the end when she dies. Instead we get to see her in the clouds.

QUINT: So when is “Slither” coming out?

JAMES GUNN: March 31st.

KRAKEN: I’ve been looking forward to it since Comic-Con.

QUINT: Well, you’re talking to a couple of people who like grew up compulsively watching and re-watching “Night of the Creeps”.

JAMES GUNN: You know I never saw “Night of the Creeps” before I went into this movie. It’s cool man, but it did freak me out a little when people started saying (my movie sounds like Night of the Creeps). I had the very small screening of like 40 people to show them the movie which I kind of regret ‘cause I showed my brothers and everybody the movie before there were any effects in it, originally all those tentacles at the end we did practically and it looked like shit and we had to replace them.

And then I showed them the movie and got feedback on it and Simon came up and he said “Ah, you know it’s great I love the movie, it’s like “Night of the Creeps”, and I’m like, “Oh yeah,” you know nodding and acting like I knew what they were talking about and then I went and I got it and I watched it and I’m, “Fuck.”

The thing that’s really weird… because the thing is we rip off the same movies so like the beginning is like “The Blob”, right? And then we have the creatures, “They Came From Within,” and then the tone is somewhat similar.

But the weird thing is we both named the cops after famous movie directors. Cause the cops all have the last names of famous movie directors and so do his. That was like the really, and also kind of like opening, there’s a couple weird things.

KRAKEN: Well, dude, getting compared to “Night of the Creeps” is not a bad thing.

JAMES GUNN: No, but it does bums me out a little bit, some people saying, “Ah, you ripped off “Night of the Creeps”,” because if someone says I ripped off “They Came From Within”, then I’m cool with it because I did. And also “Puppet Masters”.

KRAKEN: You know, my thing is that if you made a good movie who cares. I mean, there’s always going to be the drunk asshole that says, “Oh you ripped off this….”

JAMES GUNN: It’s so weird with this movie because I don’t think it’s bad, but to be having people think that I ripped off so many different... I mean I get “Resident Evil” all the time, “Resident Evil” things I don’t know about all the video games. That’s a total rip off of that, total rip off of “Deadly Spawn,” totally rip off of “Night of the Creeps”.

QUINT: Is “Friday the 13th” a rip off of “Halloween”? Is Halloween a rip-off of Psycho?

KRAKEN: Yeah probably, but after a while people stop saying, “Oh you just ripped off Michael Meyers,” Jason became his own thing. Who cares, you know?

JAMES GUNN: Well I’m pretty, I’m a little touchy about it I think cause I would like it, I would like to acknowledge the people who I actually did rip off of. Cronenberg and Henenlotter and, both “The Blobs”, I liked both “The Blobs” actually both are movies that I love.

KRAKEN: Well if you want to feel better you should put that “Simpsons Did It” South Park episode in your DVD player and just play it over and over and over and over.

JAMES GUNN: It’s alright. It’s nothing compared to when I had to put up with “Dawn of The Dead”, doesn’t even come close. I got death threats on “Dawn of the Dead”.

QUINT: You wouldn’t have heard a word from me about the movie if they hadn’t called it “Dawn of the Dead”.

JAMES GUNN: Well I really learned how much power you guys had. Because when Harry first found out I was writing it, he went crazy. I mean my life was insane for a while. But then when he wrote the positive review of the script everything died down by easily 50%, easily. So you know, the weird thing for me is I don’t know how the fuck I ever wrote “Scooby Doo”, you know I mean it’s like that wasn’t my… I didn’t start out doing something like “Scooby Doo.”

KRAKEN: Right, you write “Scooby Doo” and it’s a huge box office hit and then they let you go rock your horror films…eh fuck it. You have to take a little heat for writing it for a while but…

JAMES GUNN: Well “Scooby Doo” was helpful in another way for me because especially in the 2nd one, we used a lot of… the reason I did the 2nd one was just so I could learn everything about effects. And I was able to learn so much about how to do effects for the kind of movie that I wanted to do. Because of that I was able to do “Slither” for, you know, one tenth of the budget of “Scooby Doo”.

QUINT: Although, I wouldn’t admit the fact that you learned effects from “Scooby Doo”.

JAMES GUNN: Hahaha, “Slither’s” much better than that so… It’s a very practical part of it, you know, the way the 1’s and 0’s fit together that’s all. And the way you can get fucked by mixing practical and CGI and how you can’t.

KRAKEN: So did you use practical at all?

JAMES GUNN: Well, we actually did a lot of slugs practically but again they just didn’t work that well. There are some practical slugs in the movie still, in the bath tub and out in the garage, but it’s for the tight shots, so there’s practical slugs in there but also I mean if you have 27,000… I mean I knew that once they explode, there’s 27,000 slugs, this is no way I was going to be able to do those practically.

QUINT: You’ve seen the movie with lots of audiences by now right? Is the bathtub scene the one that people seem to react to consistently, cause that was the big scene for the audience last night.

JAMES GUNN: No, there are certain things you know, I mean frankly the people’s favorite scene is the exploding scene. Which I like, too, ‘cause I think it’s the most unique thing in the movie. So, last night was unusual actually, people did seem to react more to the bathtub scene more than usual. Man, that theatre is like, it’s cool I was excited to be there, but I was bothered by the bands playing next door.

QUINT: Yeah well, it’s South By. You usually don’t get that, I mean there’s maybe once every six months where you kinda can hear music from the clubs around the Alamo, when it’s not South by Southwest, and usually the owners would tell them to turn it down.

JAMES GUNN: Those fucking movies they were playing before hand were awesome. I’m like how the fuck am I going to follow that?

QUINT: Like the lady dancing with the big fake cobra?

JAMES GUNN: Yeah, she was hot. So, we had a lot of (screw ups)… you know it was like these puppeteers, they get stage fright or something ‘cause we practiced all this stuff, and that’s what I really like doing. Like Grant out in the field, that’s all practical.

QUINT: Yeah, I was going to bring up that scene with Grant in the field…

JAMES GUNN: And so when the tentacles are able to move and they’re practical, it’s like it may not even look real but I don’t completely care, what matters is that it looks interesting. People don’t always, you know, people don’t think puppeteer when they think CGI or they think practical. So it’s cool to be doing something where people don’t know exactly what it is. And so I’ve wanted to do that more with the worms but it’s just…

KRAKEN: Well if you want to look at a good example of effects, it’d be “Spiderman 2”, what they did with Doc Ock’s tentacles. They go back and forth between CG and practical on that.

JAMES GUNN: Well yeah, that’s what I was going to say. Their puppeteer budget on “Spiderman 2” was probably about the budget we had on “Slither” as a whole. So, it’s a little but different.

QUINT: Where are you going with it next?

JAMES GUNN: St. Louis, which is my home town.

KRAKEN: What do you think about all these clips for the movie coming out on the internet? I saw one of the clips hit, the one that had the cop getting split in half and I’m really glad I saw it in the movie first.

JAMES GUNN: And why did you think that?

KRAKEN: Well because that’s one of biggest unexpected… just like wow this movie is kicking it into high gear and to see that beforehand…

JAMES GUNN: I have a different reason for not liking it. My reason I don’t like it so much is because of the low resolution, it looks like shit to me. I mean I can’t even watch it, I start to watch it and I’m like get away from me. It makes the effects look way worse. The effect looks really bad and I worked really hard on the effect and I really like the way it looks.

QUINT: It’s probably my favorite effect in the movie.

KRAKEN: You always get that thing where you split someone in half and they just do that clean break, but I love the fact that his guts spilled out.

JAMES GUNN: That’s all real I mean we all, we just composited that onto his body. Yeah well we had to pick clips early on, early on it was really controlled and we to pick and choose what images we let people see but at a certain point it gets out of my, I have no fucking idea about what’s happening, you know.

KRAKEN: I just miss the old day trailers like AMERICAN WEREWOLF, where you just see some blood going through the river or just….I wish that people would start maybe filming stuff, like they did with the first “Spiderman” teaser where they filmed the bank robbery and it’s not in the movie. I wish they would start putting in a little bit of extra budget and just film some stuff that’s not in the movie. You know and put that out there.

QUINT: Yeah, but there’ve always been trailers that gave away too much of the movie. If you watch the “Howling” trailer, it gives away everything… even the big on-television transformation at the end.

JAMES GUNN: I guess the thought is the kind of people who get it in their head and the movie comes out a couple months later and they forget the scene. Well you always have this tension because you don’t want to give away stuff because it hurts it for people in the theatre but you want to give away stuff because it gets people in the theatre.

KRAKEN: Right and I think the problem is now is with people being on the internet. Because if, when I was younger, I’d see a trailer for a movie and go oh man it’s great and the movie came out a couple months later and I could go see the movie and forget some of the stuff that was in the trailer, and now that it’s on the internet, you can literally watch it the day that you are going to see the movie and keep watching it over and over and over again to where you memorize the trailer, where if you saw it in the theatre, you got to see it one time. You might see it again in another movie, but you can’t sit there and compulsively frame by frame it and people do that you know.

JAMES GUNN: The next movie I’m doing, I have an idea for a series of teaser trailers. You have to make your film in such a way that people know that footage is not in the movie.

So, yeah I don’t know my reasoning behind it is, I don’t know, I don’t like the way that stuff looks on that little tiny screen. And especially that streaming stuff is so low res, that it really bums me out, but everybody disagreed with me so, what am I going to do?

It mostly had to do with the quality that it was put out at, that if we’re going to put it on there, lets put it out at high def or at least give people the option of having it in high def.

QUINT: You know, if Universal’s hosting the file people can always link to it, I know that you wouldn’t get sites like AintItCool or BloodyDisgusting to host something, like, a 50 meg file.

JAMES GUNN: Right that’s the problem, that’s the problem. And nothing against BloodyDisgusting, but who has that (clip) is it BloodyDisgusting or HorrorChannel? I think originally, it’s from HorrorChannel, and so I don’t know. I mean you know, by Universal’s reckoning, the amount of people who will go see the movie who actually see that is fairly small.

KRAKEN: But at the same time the small percentage of seeing it are going to be your most rabid audience. That’s ground zero….I don’t think you’re going to have too much to worry about that, I think the movie’s going to be fine. You guys are hitting this window right now where horror is really strong…

JAMES GUNN: And we have a pretty good date, broken up against “Ice Age 2”, “Basic Instinct 2” and so on. I don’t think anybody’s going to see (Basic Instinct 2). You think anybody’s going to see that movie?

QUINT: Yeah, that one looks pretty bad.

KRAKEN: , You have… what do you call it? Counter programming? Well plus too, it’s been a long time since a quality version of the mutant horror flicks and I really hope that “Slither” kinda kicks off another age of monster films cause you know in Asian horror I love that stuff but everything in horror all of a sudden, there’s creepy voices coming out of the static.

JAMES GUNN: It’s that and now the roughies, so now there’s going to be all those, all the “Hostel”/”Saw” imitations.

But you know the thing is, again what I would really hope, what I really wish for, cause I think this is true, I think horror fans would love it if they saw a whole bunch of different types of horror movies all the time instead of seeing like one type of horror movie, you know it’s like….one of the of the reasons why, while I was writing “Slither”, I think it wasn’t this calculated when I started writing it, I just had this idea to start writing the idea but while I was writing it, I had this feeling that I was filling a hole of a fun type of horror movie that people don’t make. And I had a budget, you know it’s not like we had a huge budget, but we had a decent budget compared to almost any other movie that was done in this horror comedy genre. So but it’s like being able to do a movie that’s different because how it is done is that one type of movie will be a hit and that’s the type of horror movie you’ll see for the next three years and another type of horror movie was a hit, it’s that horror movie you see for another three years.

QUINT: And the studios forget that one of the reasons why those movies hit is because they are different.

JAMES GUNN: Exactly, that’s what people want, but (the studios) don’t think like that, they don’t think like that at all. I mean I’ve had it so many times, I mean I can’t tell you about the amount of times I would be working on a film script or something and then in that weekend “Charlie’s Angels” would come out and be a big hit and they’re like there’s this twist in “Charlie’s Angels” at the end and it’s like this and this and this, and I’m like but it doesn’t really make sense, I don’t really think anybody went to see the movie because of the twist. Think we should really put something like that in this movie?

But I mean most horror fans, they like good horror movies with serious stuff, rather their “Hostel” or “The Ring”, I mean a lot of the horror fans like all those types of movies you know. And I think as long as it’s good it’s fine.

QUINT: I think most horror fans just like good movies, if it’s a twist on the genre or if there’s something slightly different than what’s the norm, you also get that kinda underdog thing. It’s like…, I don’t know, my favorite movie from the 80’s that I absolutely adore and worship but I couldn’t really call a good movie, it’s “Sleepaway Camp”, and…

End side one – I continued on about my love for SLEEPAWAY CAMP and Gunn said he hadn’t seen it, but it was recommended to him before.

QUINT: There’s still something really creative and new about the movie cause it is this movie that’s a play by play “Friday the 13th” rip off until that last act where everything just goes out the window and we start seeing these weird flashbacks of gay sex and like all this weird like what the fuck movie am I watching and it works, it still works. But I don’t know if I would have that rabid love for it if it was say “Raiders of The Lost Ark”, everybody loves “Raiders of The Lost Ark”, it’s like you have this thing where it kinda feels special because you’re like hey I saw this flick, I loved this movie.

JAMES GUNN: Have you seen “The Curious Dr. Humpp”? Yeah, that’s a good one man, it’s like a Mexican movie with this other stuff and it’s like from like 73 or something and it’s in black and white and it’s part monster movie, part sexploitation, part a brain in a jar movie, it’s the weirdest thing. It’s weird, it’s crazy, it’s my favorite.

CLICK IT HERE TO READ PART 2!!!!!!

There you go, squirts. End of Part 1 of the massive horror geek conversation. Congratulations on making it all the way through... Except for you... Right there, reading this part. I know you just skimmed through. Shame on you! The rest of you are okay, though.

Check back soon for Part 2 where we talk about how goddamn creepy pregnancy is and a bit about Gunn's experiences writing the DAWN OF THE DEAD remake and seeing it realized onscreen. 'Til then, this is Quint bidding you all a fond farewell and adieu.

-Quint