Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with a little write-up of my time spent on the set of Don Coscarelli's episode for the Masters of Horror TV series called AN INCIDENT ON AND OFF A MOUNTAIN ROAD, which was chosen to kick off the series starting tonight!

I wasn't asked to hold this write up until release, but I've just gotten so behind since I visited the set over the summer... I've done no less than 3 film festivals on top of my regular duties of interviewing, reviewing and nightly updating. I kept pushing this one off because it didn't premiere until the end of October. October has lasted all of 3 days as far as I'm concerned. The month has flown by and I just realized that the damn thing airs tonight.

So, here it goes.

They shot this sucker up in Vancouver, a town I haven't been in since 2001 when I journeyed up there for the Vancouver Film Festival (this was a good fest, one where I saw BROTHERHOOD OF THE WOLF on the big screen for the very first time and was introduced to a little filmmaker named Takashi Miike with a flick called ICHI THE KILLER.) I've been to Toronto in the years since and I must say... I greatly prefer Vancouver. I'm a sucker for green hills and the town just has a cooler, more laid back vibe.

I spent two weeks on the set of Don Coscarelli's previous directorial outing, the indie feature BUBBA HO-TEP, which has since gained a large cult fanbase. In the interest of full disclosure, Coscarelli and I have been friends since we met at a local showing of all his PHANTASM films back in 2000, but my appreciation of his work started when I was very young and saw PHANTASM 2 and BEASTMASTER on HBO.

The following is a completely honest look at the trials of shooting an hour long show almost entirely on location with night shoots in only 10 days. There is drama, success, frustration and, of course, humor. Enjoy!

My first day started with a van ride into the wilderness outside the city of Vancouver. We went to a beautiful wooded location that had a giant still lake. I was told by some of the crew that some of LAKE PLACID was shot here and I don't disbelieve it.

This was a half and halfer day. Half daytime, half nighttime. The daytime was spent gathering all the flashbacks for our main heroine and the nighttime was focusing on the chase in the woods between our monster and our heroine.

The story is about a girl that hits a lone car that is hidden around a curve of a windy mountain road. She goes to see if anyone else is hurt, but only finds an interior covered in blood, a door open with the blood trail leading over the rail and into the woods. She calls out, trying to find the hurt person and someone finally comes out of the woods. Unfortunately for her, it's a giant psychopathic albino with gold teeth who is dragging behind him the still squirming ex-occupant of the hit car.

From here on out our heroine is being chased through the unfamiliar woods by this knife wielding killer. During the cat and mouse chase, our heroine (played by a young actress named Bree Turner) flashes back to her relationship with a survivalist (played by Ethan Embry). She uses these memories of him teaching her how to set traps to help get an edge against her pursuer.

So, what I first saw shot was a scene toward the end of Bree Turner and Ethan Embry's rocky relationship. She's becoming fed up by the lonely living, the distance he's keeping her from her friends and how roughly he's been treating her. They're arguing as they approach their cabin in the middle of nowhere, both sweating and carrying huge backpacks. They've been on a long hike.

The framing (2 35mm camera set-up) was an over the shoulder of Bree looking at Ethan and the lake and mountains behind him. He calls her "weak" and offers her a hunting knife. She fumbles it while trying to perform a knife-flipping exercise and gets a stern reaction from her husband. She attacks him with a sweep of the leg. He dodges, happy that she's showing some aggression and easily graples her, humiliating her with an ass-slap. She responds with a healthy face slap. In reality, she was really hitting Embry hard across the face (his insistence, although after the 2nd take of betting belted in the face he let out a "Jesus Christ, woman!"). She actually draws blood before this flashback scene is over.

Coscarelli's direction kept guiding Embry to play the character darker while guiding Bree to be less strong and more vulnerable. Good call. The scene worked better on the last take than it did at the first, which is the goal, isn't it?

The next set-up was dubbed the "Wet & Sexy" scene. This flashback takes place earlier in Embry and Turner's relationship, in much happier days.

Rain machines and a golden gel on the lights made this a pretty nice looking scene. It has Embry and Turner pull up to the Cabin in his 4X4 (with Oregon plates). He runs immediately into the cabin, getting out of the rain while Bree stays to enjoy it. He slowly comes back as she flirts with him. The scene ends in a big ol' sloppy wet kiss.

While doing the dry rehearsals for the scene, Embry was noticeably more happy and energetic. "When do we get to make out?!?"

After this was lunch. I met Joe R. Lansdale many times before when he, Bruce Campbell and Coscarelli were touring around with BUBBA HO-TEP, but we met up again during lunch. Lansdale's a funny as shit guy in person and I found myself hanging with him and his son for the 3 days I was onset.

Lunch was spent on the lake-side, swatting mosquitoes as the sun went down. Quite a nice, relaxing time, actually.

After lunch I met Moonface for the first time. Moonface is the killer, that freakish giant Albino. He was played by a giant Canadian named John De Santis. He's a big guy, but not like bulky wrestler big. He's tall, meaty, but still somewhat lanky. The trench coat his character wears gives him some more bulk, though.

His make-up was up to KNB standards. He wasn't just white, but had many veins crackling their way underneath the milky skin. With the make-up on he looked cool, but I was only intimidated when he spoke. He had a voice even bigger than he was. Seriously, it was like Tim Curry's Darkness voice from LEGEND without the technology to deepen it.

However, as is always the case, he was the kindest and nicest of guys in person. He was even a bit on the goofy side, cracking weird jokes and flashing them gold choppers often.

This was my favorite stuff of the first day. Darkness had fallen and the hard working Canadian crew had built a giant treefall in the woods about a 20 second walk from the Cabin, but will appear to be a completely different location in the episode. Mist was creeping around the trees, the set lights making it eerily bright. Bree is trying to find a way through the treefall when she is spotted by her pursuer. He is lit from behind, but not overly lit. Very atmospheric and theatrical.

Coscarelli got many different takes of Moonface flipping his huge knife so he can grab it by the blade and toss it off camera. There was a set of knives... a real steel one and a couple of rubber ones. He was throwing the rubber ones, of course. He got the fluid motion of bring the knife up, catching it right and throwing pretty early on, but couldn't quite luck out in the subsequent takes.

The next set up had Bree reacting to the knife impacting the wood next to her. Of course, in classic movie-trickery fashion, the hero steel knife was already plunged into the tree and Coscarelli whip-panned the camera to give the illusion of following the knife's trajectory, stopping with it already stuck in the tree. There's a finger-hole in the knife's hilt and through this hole, when the camera whips and stops is Bree's wide eye. Pretty neat shot and it only took a few takes to time it right so Bree looks over and is aligned with the eye-hole. They also did a couple takes without the knife there. I guess in case the shot didn't look right and they needed to digitally put the knife there.

She scrambles under the treefall and gets her ankle grabbed by Moonface. All this was claustrophobic and hand-held, shaky-cam stuff.

The next big set piece as the cold Canadian night inched closer and closer to daylight was the trap Bree sets on the other side of the treefall. It's a pair of small scissors (from her purse) that is jimmy-rigged on a spring trap. The didn't shoot the building of the trap while I was there. This scene had her running away from the trap, muttering "Take that, motherfucker..." as she runs by camera.

Apparently, Bree had a problem with that line and argued to change it to "Take that, you fuck!" Coscarelli didn't quite agree and after some discussion she did it as scripted.

The trap that is set up works, nailing Moonface in the soft flesh under the eye. They shot Moonface bellowing, holding his eye as he stumbles to his feet. He doesn't pause too long, though, and continues after our heroine.

The night was running long and they were going into overtime, the producer all of a sudden standing closer to Don and the cameraman than he was the rest of the night. After a talk between Coscarelli and the producer they decide to go ahead and get Bree's reaction shot to Moonface's off-camera bellow, which is supposed to be coming out of the woods somewhere behind her. The shot was already half-lit, so they finished and nabbed some takes before the day was wrapped.

The next day I rode in the production van with Coscarelli and Ethan Embry. We went to a different location up in the mountains outside of Vancouver and the ride was about 45 minutes. In that time I got to chat up Embry a bit. You see, I love DUTCH. Of John Hughes' work from this era, only CURLEY SUE gets more shit than DUTCH (which, like PRETTY IN PINK, he only wrote, but it still feels like a John Hughes movie to me), but I love Ed O'Neill and Embry's interaction in that flick.

Embry had fond memories of working on that movie. He told Don and I a story about how conservative Hollywood really is, despite its liberal face. He was apparently kicked off the Universal lot during the DRAGNET show that reteamed him with O'Neill because his car had an Anti-Bush bumper sticker on it.

That led into some weird 9/11 Conspiracies which in turn had Embry show Coscarelli that infamous trick where you fold a US $20 bill and it shows the twin towers with smoke billowing out of them. Fold it another way and it looks like the pentagon on fire.

Before you begin to think this was all a liberal jerk-off session, let me say that this occupied about 4 minutes of the drive, the rest was Embry talking lovingly about his children, his love of motorcycles and answering questions about his previous work.

It was a spectacularly beautiful summer day in the mountains of Canada. The green was vibrant, white snow was still visible on peaks that weren't all that far away, the sky the perfect baby blue, the air crisp and pungent with the smell of wilderness.

They had two primary locations for this day: a field with the tree-covered and snow-capped mountains in the background and about 200 feet to the right of this Moonface's cabin was built.. The latter set was nicknamed Crucifix Alley because of Moonface's tendency to keep the bodies of his victims set up on either side of the wide dirt path that leads up to his front door.

Coscarelli was off setting up a shot for later in the night, so after some bullshitting with Lansdale and his son, Justin, about '60s and '70s horror movies, Stephen King books and dirty jokes, I went to explore the gore as it were.

I ran into Howard Berger (the B of KNB) who I had met on a few occasions and watched him prepare some of the mummified dummies. Moonface has a penchant for drilling out the eyes of his victims, but the dummies still had their eyes, so Berger's job was to fix that. These dummies were tied to their wooden mounts with nasty looking razor wire, limbs contorted and twisted in unnatural ways.

Berger brought one of the crucifixes down, dug out his pocket knife and cut into the head of the poor schmuck. The schmuck was made of foam and after a little burrowing, Berger had him eye-less. The yellow foam was quite visible, so Berger took some black spray paint and darkened it up inside. As he lifted the crucifix back up, he looked at me and said, "I'm Jewish. My people are good at doing this..."

The actual cabin itself was set up so it's nudged just up to the edge of a precarious cliff. Run down and horror movie-lookin'.

Since the show airs in a few hours (on Showtime, check your local listings!) and the rest of my report details some really spoilery stuff, I'm going to cut it off right here. I'll be back with the conclusion tomorrow night, which has car crashes, more corpses and the time crunch really putting the pressure on the production! Until then, this is Quint bidding you all a fond farewell and adieu!

-Quint