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(women screaming) (ominous orchestral music)
- I drew comic books as a child
and I think that's the beginning of filmmaking in a sense.
Comic books have to give you direction
and you have to come up with a plot.
You have to draw in a sense, a story board.
That's what a comic book is.
And I did not go into it,
my parents would not let me go into film.
They said, that's not a business.
That's not a business for a nice Jewish boy.
You gotta get out of that.
And I didn't realize
that half of Hollywood was Jewish at that time.
I didn't know that.
- I was in the Roman Catholic seminary
for almost seven years and left to become a filmmaker.
It was a very, very hard decision
because I felt I had a vocation,
but ultimately, I felt I was not really destined to that
and I think the seminary felt the same way.
- I was doing a lot of trailers for all kinds of films,
mostly action films.
I worked with Dino De Laurentiis on "White Buffalo"
for Aquarius releasing, for Monarch releasing.
And I got involved with a film called "Snuff"
in which I shot a specific scene
to change the film from what it was to what it became.
The marketing was brilliant.
They should have given an Oscar to Allan Shackleton
for the marketing of it
"cause he did beautiful stuff to really get into the news.
And I saw that the opportunity was there
in the low budget film area.
There was a way to get into it
and perhaps climb into the kind of films we want to make.
- The film "Nightmare" was,
I guess, a quasi-nightmare experience.
We were directed by Roman Scavolini,
an Italian director who had,
I think, an impeccable eye
for composition and movie-making,
but his ear for American dialogue
was perhaps not as extensive as it should be.
So he cast the film basically from the crew.
So the still photographer became one of the actors.
I, who was a producer, became one of the actors.
I agreed to do it only with a very, very small part.
I was the psychiatrist who was talking to the killer
long distance as he was traveling.
Despite the fact that someone else
got credit for special effects
who I think was the show maybe a day or so,
I did all the special effects,
the arm being cut, the alginate for the arm.
What not else?
All of those were figured out by me
and actually executed by me on the set.
I was on the film every day it was shot
and never met Tom Savini.
I believe what happened was after the film was shot,
they went back and did a couple of other close up effects
by Tom Savini.
He was a huge name at that point,
so special effects by Tom Savini was on the film.
And did Tom Savini do special effects?
Probably for a day on the film.
And you know, that's a marketing ploy.
It's not reality.
- I told you you're not allowed in here.
- A doctor should make that decision,
not at attendant.
- How the hell did you get into ward I?
You can't just wander around there without clearance.
- It's a plot.
They're spying on you.
They're all out to get you.
- I was writing a number of stories
which had the same motif in a certain sense.
It was about an individual
who gets roped into a situation
where he or she finds the world against them,
everything going against them.
"Silent Madness" was that
about the time of insane asylums,
which in the '80s were very,
there were many articles and movies about them.
And I came up with that story of somebody
who did not commit a crime
who becomes a criminal because of it.
- There were a lot of people being released
for financial reasons from mental institutions
because they didn't really have the money to care for them.
So marginal people who were sort of safe on the street
were being let loose on the street.
But it happened again because of budgetary things.
I then started to think well,
what if they then released the wrong guy?
They got one guy too many,
a guy who may be the same name or a mix up.
- John Howard.
Howard Johns?
Oh my god, they released the wrong man.
- Discussed it with one of the writers
who was was working with me,
Bob Zimmerman,
and he said he develop that story.
And we worked back and forth.
I'm not as good a dialogue writer as he was,
English, not being my primary language.
- Bob Zimmerman was involved
because Bob at that point had a computer.
And I, before that, was writing scripts by hand
and having them typed, and I didn't type,
and it was a nightmarish thing.
So Bob was also a writer.
Came in with me on it.
Contributed to the script
and basically was the typist, computer guy, et cetera,
in that very, very early stage.
- Bill was already working with me,
Bill Milling, the producer of the film.
And he also started to write.
- I had been a huge fan of Nelson long before this began.
Had read all of his books.
Contacted him early on
to turn one of his books into a screenplay,
which he did.
So Nelson and I became friends.
When I was about a third of the way through the script,
I contacted Nelson and said, you know,
would you like to be involved in this project?
He said, yes.
I went out to his house, I think, in Seaford, Long Island.
We spent the day together kicking around ideas,
et cetera, like this, to be involved in the script.
- The first version of "Silent Madness"
was more of a drama, suspense, action, drama.
And it became much more of a semi-slasher, you know,
with the effects of the drills, and the guns,
the darts, and all that stuff,
steam steaming into people.
That came afterwards, development of the story.
That was not the main storyline.
That was just added for the effect of the 3D.
- We wanted it to be more story tension
than bucket of blood slasher.
And it was a little bit of a risk because at that point,
you know, slasher means blood splatter literally.
We kind of did not want to do that.
We felt as filmmakers,
you want to try to, as I said before,
respect the genre and yet sort of transcend it.
- [Narrator] Inside your head,
the screaming never stops.
"Silent Madness."
- The idea was don't let it be out there in the press,
this title,
because by the time it's released, it's kind of old hat.
You want it to be fresh.
So we would always write the script under a title
that we never knew would be released.
Consequently, I think we shot it under "Omega Factor."
And then my favorite title was always "Silent Madness."
- I went to every 3D movie I could find.
I loved the idea.
I didn't care about the blue and red glasses.
If it gave me a headache, it was worth seeing it.
The excitement of seeing something in a dimension
like a theater on film was very exciting.
I saw "Dial M For Murder" in 3D,
which I thought was wonderful.
- I was very fond of 3D.
Very, very early on, I was fascinated by it
and looked into how we could go about doing it.
So I approached the people who were shooting "Jaws 3D."
I approached Arri because they had ArriVision,
which was their 3D camera.
And we, at that point, owned an Arr camera.
We owned an Arri BL,
myself and two partners,
and said getting the material that the lens system,
which fits in front of our camera,
I wanted to rent it.
At that point, it was on "Jaws 3D."
They made us next in line.
So as soon as "Jaws 3D" stopped shooting,
we got that basically mirror box.
We found Gerry Feil who had done a 3D movie,
"Friday The 13th."
We had a good meeting.
He was willing to do it.
And that's how this whole film came about.
- The way I got on to "Silent Madness."
I know it was soon after I was out of school,
NYU Film School,
and a friend, one of my fellow students,
gave me a call and just says,
hey, do you want to work on a feature film?
And I was like, whoa, that was quick.
Like, right? (laughing)
Like a couple months.
I think it was the summer after I got out of school.
And he goes,
they need somebody in the special effects department.
They're looking for a PA or an assistant in special effects.
And I go, oh, I'd rather work with the effects department.
He goes, well, have you done it, effects before?
I go, on my Super 8 movies, you know?
I'd love to do it.
So they called me in, met them,
and it was the makeup effects lab guys from L.A.
It was Ken Myers, Allan Apone.
It was like super quick.
You're on the show.
- Looking at all the effects,
I tried to make those as unique as possible.
Now, it's clear that films afterwards
may have done some of those gimmicks,
but at the time,
I thought I wanted to make every one of those deaths
be kind of unique,
which was in the tradition of slasher films.
You know, the killer instead of just shooting someone,
goes through these crazy elaborate lengths to kill someone.
And that was part of the genre,
part of what was kind of expected
in those movies at the time.
- 'Cause I remember everyone said that on this film,
there could be no flowing blood.
That was like a big thing because up to then,
slasher films had flowing blood.
And we specifically could only use blood gel,
which is like a thick mixture of blood
so that we couldn't have blood sprays or blood splashing.
- An Omega sister can't be bothered with a little blood.
- Part of the respect for the genre
was understanding that when you're doing a sorority movie,
that's what people go there and expect.
You're going to have not a typical sorority.
You're gonna have a movie sorority,
which has all these gorgeous girls in peril.
- Hey, why don't you guys come with me to Fort Lauderdale?
- I'm sure you'll enjoy yourself.
- Who, me, with all those guys?
- What makes you think the guys are gonna look at this face?
- You know, it was a long time ago,
but I do remember going in
and they talked about sorority girls.
And can you do, you know, you're a dancer,
so would you be comfortable moving around and maybe singing?
My cat was named Reagan
after the little girl in "The Exorcist,"
I will say.
Yeah, my dad used to take me to horror films
'cause my mother wouldn't go.
My brother didn't go.
So, we would go to see all of the stuff
that you probably shouldn't see when you're 12 and 13.
And my cousin used to write horror books.
His name is Jack Ketchum.
He's my cousin on my dad's side,
which is the crazy side.
He and I just always bonded at family events
because we were both sort of the carnies, the outliers.
And he was the outlier of the outliers,
but I just, I loved him.
I was really sad to lose him.
- I got the film after I had done a previous horror film,
"Sleepaway Camp,"
which was a classic cult horror film
and got the audition for this one afterwards.
And I was excited
that it was a little bit of a different role for me.
- Jane, what is the rush?
Your parents aren't expecting you for about three days.
- What was interesting about Jane
was that she was actually the most normal
sort of character I played in a while.
I played a lot of bitches and I was so happy,
even though she tended to maybe be a little bit,
you know, a little uptight here and there.
- I had a modeling portfolio
and I opened it up and I loosened all my pictures, okay?
And I literally took them out of the plastic
and just put them, laid them in the portfolio.
And when I got there, it was a complete cattle call.
(cattle mooing)
And it was like, give us your picture.
Thank you.
Give us your picture.
Thank you.
So of course,
I'm right behind somebody
and she starts to walk out of the way,
and I tripped.
And I, oh, I'm so sorry.
And my pictures went everywhere.
And I went, oh, I'm so sorry.
I'm so sorry.
And I let them start to pick them up and hand them to me.
And he said, oh, you're a model.
I said, yes.
And I'm putting the pictures away.
And he says, wait a second,
'cause I had all the pictures.
He said, do you have any acting experience?
And I'm like high school performing arts, Carnegie Mellon.
Well, I have some.
And he said,
would you be interested in reading for the part of Pam?
And I said, sure.
(upbeat music) (thudding)
- Don't smile.
I just arrived in New York and I had my actor card.
And I started waiting tables.
And one of the other waitresses at the restaurant
told me about this film she was auditioning for.
And I kind of pumped her for the information
and it was "Silent Madness."
And I got the casting director's name
and I sent him my headshot and my resume and nothing.
And my father was one of the first people
I ever knew who had a cell phone.
It was like a shoe box in his car.
And he owned this company, the handheld radio company.
And he had provided these radios for movies in California.
And he just out of the blue,
he said, yeah, some movie in New York called me
and said they want to use my radios.
And me, the enterprising, young,
brand new actress that I was,
I said, oh my gosh, dad, that's the movie.
That's the movie I sent my picture in to.
I said, call them up and tell them
you'll give them a really great deal on the radios
if they put your daughter in the movie.
- It's very lonely.
Girls are all I have left now.
- I was very, very fond of Viveca Lindfors.
In looking at her prior work,
I felt she added the gravitas to that character.
She was a person who was not like at that point,
of course, she had this incredible early on screen presence
and I kind of wanted to tap into that filmic history.
- [Carl] I just knew she was an old Hollywood actress.
I didn't really know anything about her.
- Yes, I can talk about Viveca.
First of all, to be really honest with you,
I had no idea who this woman was.
My dad was an actor in New York
and I remember going home
and saying, I don't know,
And I had called him
and then I went down to his house for dinner.
I remember that.
And we're standing there.
I said, Viveca.
And he said, Lindfors?
I said, yeah.
He said, oh, she's a legend.
- It was very exciting to work with her.
I, of course, knew who she was after looking her up
and seeing all the incredible films she had done.
And it was a little intimidating at first
because she looks you dead in the eye
and there's no escaping in the scene.
She is that character.
And it's definitely,
you have to be there, and show up, and be present.
- They called the night before and they said,
we think we've decided
that you need to be braless for that scene.
And I said, okay, kind of don't want to do that.
And they said, well, you know, think about it.
I said, well, how about you think about like a sexy bra?
And so we went back and forth and back and forth.
And I did say;, I wasn't gonna do it.
It just wasn't something I was comfortable with
and I didn't quite think it was the kind of movie
I wanted to strip for.
- Stop!
You stop that!
You slut, you! - Mrs. Collins!
- You whore, you stop that!
- But ultimately, we get on set and we do the scene
and Viveca Lindfors kind of has a cow.
(cattle mooing)
And she's, I thought you were going to,
why my, I have no motivation!
What are you doing, you know?
And I was like, sorry, man.
Like, talk to the director "cause we made a deal,
and you know, it was really tense.
- Mrs. Collins, we were only kidding.
- Yes, I'm sorry.
I sort of overreacted.
- You know, I was doing the scene
and all of a sudden she reaches out
and she pulls me into her.
Like literally, almost my face into her shoulder.
A little temptation is good for you.
It takes you a long away.
You know, we shot half of it and then it was lunchtime.
And I think it was one of the girls,
I forget who,
but one of them leaned over to me and said,
you realize she's trying to upstage you
by pushing your face into her
because then you can't say your lines.
And I was like, is that what it is?
The second time she tried it after lunch,
she started to pull me into her
and was like this, you know?
And I'm like fighting her, you know?
And after like one shot,
they were like, okay, okay.
You know, maybe not so forceful?
- But I keep thinking about all those helpless people
back at the hospital.
- Belinda Montgomery, she seemed totally professional.
She was sort of like on and off, but she was the lead.
I think we started shooting around her
before she came in from the West Coast.
I do remember Belinda was like queasy
about like any blood on the set.
Like she sort of like
thought it was so distasteful or something.
(muffled screaming) (drill whirring)
The drill through the head.
She was like freaking out about that.
I remember some of it,
she was like a real, what do you call it?
Method actor, where she would break down and cry
and then you needed a long time for her to recover.
- I'll go along with that,
as long as I know the girls are safe.
- Belinda and her costar,
he was like literally this tall and Belinda was this tall.
I mean, this is like the difference, okay?
And they were talking and coming toward us.
And I remember the director saying,
Simon goes, to the guy,
could you crouch down just a little?
'Cause he didn't want to relight the whole set.
So he crouches down about an inch.
Again, next time, he says,
could you crouch a little lower?
And another inch, he's crouching.
You know?
And so I think it was the third or fourth time,
Belinda goes, oh, for heaven's sake,
you're gonna have him on his knees pretty soon.
Just light the damn set the right way.
And of course, everybody went (gasping),
you know, a woman spoke up.
And of course, remember,
you know, in the '80s,
it was still that kind of thing of like,
oh, a woman speaks up, she's a bitch.
You know, a guy says something,
oh, he's just saying it, you know?
And I'm not trying to be like.
I didn't care is what I'm trying to say.
We just kind of accepted how things were.
But I remember that feeling
that it took courage for her to say, look,
let's let the guy play the scene the right way.
And I really was impressed
that she stood up for her coworkers.
- Belinda was just sort of the beacon of sanity
and I watched her.
I remember watching her a lot
just because she knew her stuff.
She was professional.
She was pleasant.
So I remember just sort of sneaking
and watching whatever scene I could watch of hers.
- Howard Johns?
- The person that I mostly admired
was Solly Marx who played the heavy
'cause he was a stunt man, a wonderful stunt man.
And we discovered him,
what he's trying to teach a stunt to an actor
who wanted to play the.
Oliver looked and said, this is the guy.
- His wife was an actress who had worked with me.
That's how I met Solly.
And then became very close to Solly.
- [Female Speaker] No!
- I got the concept of making the killer a mute.
It's sort of,
and I'm not sure whether it was chicken and egg,
where I saw we had Solly as a stunt man already.
And we weren't casting the lead.
And the idea that he could do all of his own stunts
and he looked very much the part,
shaved his head, et cetera, for the part, et cetera.
We gave him a screen test and he had never acted before.
And Simon and I looked at each other
and Simon said, yeah.
- They went through a lot of character designs
for how he should look in the movie.
And that was a lot of tests.
And Simon and the producers would come in
every time Allan and Kenny Myers had a different look.
It started elaborate
and they sort of started trimming it down.
We did weird things with his hair, his teeth.
I know it started out like a much heavier makeup
and then they streamlined it.
- Every day, I would look at Solly
and say, this is what I'm thinking.
And Solly would say,
but Bill, did you ever think of doing this?
And then 99% of the time,
I would say, that's a better idea, Solly.
Let's do that.
- When he wasn't needed on set, he would hang out with us.
And then he told us a lot of stories
"cause he had worked on a James Bond movie.
I think it was "For Your Eyes Only" when a stuntman died
and that was like a major thing.
- A lot of the stunts had to do with special effects.
He, of course, had the ultimate word with safety.
He would say, we could do this even better
but with more safety if we do it this way.
(ominous orchestral music) (thudding)
We were in the mansion upstate
where we're filming a scene
where Belinda Montgomery falls down the stairs.
Now, Belinda Montgomery is an attractive blonde,
average size to smallish thin woman.
Solly Marx is a tall, athletic, well-built, bald man.
- And you don't remember how fucking big he is.
- And when she's supposed to fall down the stairs,
we were figuring out how it's to happen.
And I was looking forward to cast a stunt double for her.
He said, Bill, you don't have to do it.
I'll do it.
I said, Solly, there's no way,
you can put on all the wigs and dresses in the world,
you aren't gonna look like her.
He said, Bill, trust me.
He puts on the wig.
We got another dress.
He puts on the dress.
The way it was shot and he directed the whole scene,
where the camera's gonna be and whatnot else.
You watch that movie,
you would swear it was Belinda Montgomery
falling down those stairs.
- You know, If you're gonna get killed by somebody
who looks kinda terrifying,
it was awfully nice that he was just really sensitive,
like the sensitive giant kind of guy.
(ominous orchestral music)
So initially, I was going to die by drowning
with a water hose down my throat.
But that got changed.
I don't know why.
I don't know why it got changed
because I'm trying to imagine that image.
It's certainly phallic, I guess.
But they switched to something
that they could go to later
and show off some special effects makeup.
(woman screaming)
I remember being in that harness once I was dead
for an unbearably long time.
I thought they forgot me.
I was really, really not comfortable hanging in that.
I was lifted in the air for hours and hours
with all of this fantastic fun makeup on my face
as a steaming victim.
You don't get a lot of steaming victims on your resume.
- I had been training with him on the inversion boots
because they were gonna expect me to be hanging upside down
between six and eight hours is what Solly told me.
And so when we did the scene,
he was very caring
and he really understood what I was going through,
especially because he had trained me on it.
So he knew how to play it
so that it would get the optimal response for me.
Oh!
Oh my god!
- He said he'd never make a movie again.
He did play a bike rider in "Savage Dawn,"
my next film,
but only because he wanted to make sure
that nobody got hurt.
He went with the bikes,
but that was about as far as he wanted to act.
He said, don't make me act anything.
(people screaming) (ominous orchestral music)
- No, please!
- Bill Milling contact me.
He knew I just finished starring in a movie,
"Sleepaway Camp."
And he said, Pauly,
you think you'd be interested in doing a movie with me?
I said, sure, Bill, whatever you're doing, man,
you know you can always count on me.
I brought people to the set.
I got like Ricky Aiello.
I think that was his first movie he did.
- Paul Deangelo and I were to "Sleepaway Camp" together.
He played Ronnie.
And you know, you can't miss Paul.
He's got incredible buff build and a sweetheart of a guy.
And then we both ended up in "Silent Madness" together,
which was so nice
because whenever you're starting a film,
you know, it's that first day of school feeling
where you're very nervous on set and meeting people.
And it was so nice to have someone there that I knew.
- Kathy was really cool.
We go back, man.
She was on one soap, I was on another one.
She was on All My Children.
I was on One Life to Live.
And it was a lot of fun though,
I mean, working with her.
And then for us to hook up again, man,
honestly like, wow, you're doing this feature too?
Like, yeah.
The way Simon and Bill wrote the script
was I'm in the van with my girl.
And what happens is we're making out
and I'm supposed to take her top off
and I'm supposed to start fondling her.
I'm reading the script
and what happened was I went and I saw Simon.
I said, Simon, I can't do this.
My mom will kill me.
She'll think I'm doing pornos.
And he was laughing and Bill was laughing as well.
He said, Paul, you gotta do the scene though.
I said, Bill, I'm not doing it, man.
Anyway, they said, okay, we'll rewrite it for you.
So, he rewrote that scene as well.
- Paul found us so many nice locations
throughout New York, Jersey City,
this whole New York Metro area.
It seems like everybody knows Pauly Deangelo.
- I had relationships like with the city of Jersey City.
And I brought him over to the hospital.
- So when Pauly reaches out and says,
hey, can my friend Bill shoot at this hospital?
They said, yes.
- [Carl] The hospital was pretty amazing
"cause it looked like it was abandoned
and a lot of things were just left intact.
- I don't even know how they got permission
to go in that place.
It was dank.
I don't think they got a certificate of,
I don't know.
It was not a nice place.
- Like we would wander around
and walk into operating theaters
and the utensils and every scalpels were all laid out
like it had been operating the day before.
- I remember walking in and thinking,
okay, this is not right.
There are people that died in this room.
- I did have second thoughts when I was down there,
just thought might get tetanus.
- There was just this chill you felt.
You'd walk through cold spots in the room
and you just kind of felt that something was there
that was unhappy.
- It was really creepy and it smelled terrible.
- I don't remember it smelling this bad.
- I mean, it was literally.
I think OSHA would have a problem
with people working down there.
- We shot free for I think several weeks in that facility.
The offices of the medical staff were there.
The sheriff's office was there.
Obviously, all the medical stuff was there.
Corridors were there.
The basement was there, the spooky basement.
They're running through the boiler room, et cetera.
The only thing we had to do
was get the elevators working again
because they weren't and we needed them.
We had so much fun and so much access there.
That movie would have cost us a fortune
if we had to go and hire other locations.
- And it was a scene that we were playing
in the psychiatric ward.
Bill had asked me.
He said, Pauly, man, like you know,
you have to get some people
who are really different or whatever,
that could act a little nuts,
or whatever and all.
I said, I have the perfect people for you.
Bobby Deandre was a funny guy, man.
Bobby, he was in a movie, "A Bronx Tale."
He was doing his dance moves in there.
He made like, he was a disco guy.
Charlie Friedman.
I used to call him Cuckoo Charlie.
I met him at the gym where I used to work out
and we became good friends.
I figured this would be perfect for him.
- Walking around,
we found like a standing set
from the original "Toxic Avenger" they had shot there.
I can't remember if it was reshoots
or something they had done.
And we set up an effects lab in the hospital.
(ominous orchestral music)
- I envisioned that as an incredibly frightening scene.
The genesis of that was "Coma."
And that stuck in my mind,
that harvesting of human bodies,
that idea that humans are being grossly sort of mistreated
in an area where they're supposed to be helped
was interesting to me.
(ominous orchestral music)
- Pam?
Cheryl?
Come on, guys.
- The basement at the hospital
doubled for the basement of the sorority house,
which thinking about it, seemed pretty odd.
It was a pretty massive industrial looking basement.
I remember it was sort of musty and dirty in the basement
and everyone was wearing face masks.
We built some of the props.
I remember even some of the pipes were made
that were not there,
that we needed more pipes in certain shots.
The drill goes through the guy's head in that basement
and we built a dummy for that.
And at one point, I was dressed up as the character.
I think it was one of the ambulance drivers
and I was gonna double for him.
But then they yanked me out of the scene
because everything had to be SAG.
(woman screaming) (ominous music)
I know that the biggest effect in the film,
it was very abbreviated, but it was a head crush in a vice.
And that effect took a lot of work
from earliest pre-production to the end of the shoot.
That was shot at the estate in upstate New York
and I think it was shot in the garage
where our lab was set up.
That was like almost an entire day shooting that.
And when we saw the dailies and went to the rushes,
that was a huge conversation.
And I think it was decided at the dailies
that it wasn't gonna be used in the film.
The 3D effect just didn't work on it.
Whatever the effect was with the head sort of cracking open
like didn't work with the 3D.
It was too, too exaggerated in 3D.
(nail gun blasting) (woman screaming)
- I remember there was some discussion
about who was going to get shot in the forehead
between the eyes
and who was going to get shot in the back.
And I'm not sure.
I think I have these really light eyes
and I think they thought
that me getting shot in the forehead
would be too strange looking.
So they shot Lori-Nan in the forehead
and they shot me in the back.
And I think that might've been
about the deepest thought that went into it.
(nail gun blasting) (woman screaming)
I guess they had decided
that they needed some boobage for the movie.
They needed someone to take off their top.
And I just remember Simon going around and saying,
will you take off your top?
And it was like, no, Simon, no.
And then he'd ask every actress.
It was no, nuh-uh, not gonna.
- From what I remember,
like one of the nail gun victims,
she wasn't an actress
and they sort of told us ahead of time she's coming in.
She doesn't have a lot of time.
She was like very busy and she was a prostitute.
And she was open about it.
- So she said, I think the body's beautiful
and I have no problem showing my breasts in the movie.
And we were all like, okay.
- While she was in the chair,
she was telling us all these stories
and scheduling customers and everything.
And I don't know how she got on the film,
but it was it was a weird film
because I remembered not much nudity
and it seemed like they got her specifically
"cause she didn't have a problem with nudity.
And I remember they put like a wig on her,
so she didn't look the same.
They were sort of disguising her identity, I guess.
- One of the girls who's shot with a nail gun
is climbing a ladder.
She gets hit with the nail gun and she falls backwards.
I was envisioning she falls 15
or 20 feet down onto her back on the floor.
So Solly, of course, says,
well, she doesn't have to be up there
"cause the camera's close.
So in effect, she was on the second rung of the ladder.
She was about 18 inches off the ground.
She falls back like from here to here and we say done.
A couple of weeks later,
she files for a stunt in SAG.
And we're saying, stunt, what stunt?
That's not a stunt.
She got stunt pay.
- You inherit $100.
- You're wiping me out.
- The sorority house was a pretty big mansion
on an estate in upstate New York.
And we shot there for a long time.
- But I just remember being cold all the time.
And it was just dark and eerie
"cause we were the only ones there,
and echoes, a lot of echoes.
And just a little creepy.
- I remember Belinda trying to hide from us
that somebody had died there.
- There was a big garage, almost like a barn,
and we set up the makeup lab there.
Once in a while, we would go on set,
myself and Neil, the other assistant.
- One of the scenes that stuck in my mind
was the roto-rooter scene
where Belinda is trying to escape
and the killer is dropping a roto-rooter
down on top of her.
I'd never seen that anywhere
and that slashing blade coming toward you
was so frightening.
And the way I did it was a process that's as old as cinema.
It's called Pepper's ghost.
The camera was on one side, her face is here,
and the partially silvered mirror is there.
So the camera's shooting through at her face
and also reflecting the thing dropping from above.
Now, Belinda was never in danger
because the roto-rooter was dropped straight
and the camera hit a mirror.
So the worst case scenario would have been
it would have maybe hit the glass of the mirror,
but we had another protective shield
of thin plastic protecting her.
Even if that should happen,
she would not have been hit with a glass shroud.
- It took a long time specifically at that location,
a lot of the shots, because of the 3D process.
The director of photography would always,
like they'd have to really map things out.
- Ease up.
It's more important that we don't make any mistakes.
- 3D takes a lot of time to prepare and to do it well.
- Gerry Feil, the cameraman,
was anal about every single shot.
He exposed things within a third of a stop,
which meant critical lighting.
- He brought very good people around him,
his assistants, and the gaffers, and the sound.
And we tried to go
for the best possible of everything in it.
And that takes time.
- There's a term that was used.
People always say like, we got to hurry up and wait.
- I just remember it was time consuming on the set,
like a lot of measurements and angles.
- My scenes were literally stationary
because they only had one spot for the inversion bar.
So it wasn't as though like with the other people,
they could have the people move.
I had to stay still and they had to move.
- You couldn't just do the scene.
You had to remember the angles,
or put your hand a certain way,
or don't put it a certain way.
So it was a great challenge.
- Allan and Kenny from makeup effects lab
were like at that time, the kings of 3D effects,
so they knew a lot.
And the makeup effects labs
have worked with the DP before on "Friday The 13th 3D."
There was a lot of discussion on set
of how to shoot specific effects.
- That was new to me.
I said, oh, 3D.
A knife comes at you,
it looks like it's coming at you.
It's a little more difficult than that.
That put on a wire.
It's very complex.
- In 3D in the early days,
really fed itself on things coming at the camera.
So almost every shot,
we had something poking into the lens
or moving into the lens.
And nowadays, that's kind of passe,
and like hokey, and nobody does that anymore.
But in those days, it was kind of expected.
You waited for that thing to come out into the audience.
(woman screaming) (ominous orchestral music)
- We tried to shoot the hatchet
coming at the camera and the light went away.
The sun went off.
It looked like it was gonna rain and didn't work.
And Gerry, our DP, said, that's not working.
I can't see it.
It looks like a blur.
So we went through our optical house,
which unfortunately did not have a lot of 3D experience.
But the man who owned it, Bobby Pincus,
he loved 3D and he wanted to do it so badly.
He said, let me try it.
I swear I can do it.
I'm gonna read books on it.
I'm gonna look at geometry.
I'm gonna get my machines to do it.
And he did it.
It was hokey though.
I mean, you could really tell.
It needed more blur,
which today, digitally, it can be done easily.
On film, it's a little harder to do.
- I don't seem to be doing very well right now.
- You seem to be doing all right to me.
- Well, I'm not so sure.
- We had one very difficult day
in a restaurant that was not properly set up.
One of the things you need for 3D is large sets
SO you can use the lights,
which is the effects that you use
to make the 3D effect real.
And they have to be far apart.
They can not show in the movie.
And in this restaurant,
which was the only one we could find
because of budget and time,
Gerry, who was my guide on this.
He was the person who knew.
He said, yeah, I think I can make it work.
He couldn't really make it work exactly the way,
so it was a very painful day and they throw us out,
but we got the shot.
- At that point,
this was sort of the dawn of the skateboard phenomena.
Prior to that, we did three movies
and I shot documentary of these people.
Myself and my cameraman were the only guys
as we went to these swimming pools after hours
and did all this.
So I knew skateboarding really pretty well at that point.
And I said, let's open this 3D film
where this beautiful sorority girl
skates through the college,
Wagner College at the time,
meeting every one of the people
who we're gonna see later in the film.
So we kind of prefigure all of the people
who are going to be major actors in the film.
And then she's gonna come toward the camera
through this archway,
and this figure is gonna step in front of her,
grab her.
The skateboard is gonna go through her legs,
into the camera,
and stop in the opening credits of the film.
Freeze frame.
That was kind of this, in my mind,
this incredible opening shot.
So I advertise in New York for an actress
'cause we're gonna go SAG,
an actress who could do skateboarding.
No SAG actresses came about who could do it,
and so a non-SAG actress applied.
She said, I'm a terrific skateboarder.
To my detriment,
I did not have the time to go out and say, prove it.
I took her word for it.
So we're on the set.
It is clear she's never been on a skateboard in her life.
We can't shoot it.
So we're gonna come back a week later and shoot it.
In the meantime, she's hanging out with her boyfriend
and she's back every day, hanging out with him.
In the end,
she puts in for stunt work
every single one of those days
when she was not on camera,
lied to us about what she could do,
and then turns out that it's barely
with all of Solly's magic, et cetera, like this,
makes do that we got the shot.
- The rest of it was okay.
I wish I had another three weeks to shoot
"cause we could've come up with more contrivances,
but we didn't have them.
- We were hoping that that film in 3D
was going to be released with Myriad Theaters.
I think we had some
The theaters all had to be prepped
with projectionists who understood 3D,
who understood this lens system
that they were being delivered in advance.
They had it all tested.
We ran our film.
We sat there and hey, it was beautiful.
All of these theater,
I mean, I didn't go to every theater,
were projected perfectly.
I think it was a week before we were about to release
that "Nightmare on EIm Street" was released.
They co-opted all of our theaters.
- Kruger's release program has really benefited everyone.
- And we were relegated to release flat in 2D,
which meant because of the over and under system
that we released it in,
it was less than half
of what this beautiful 35 millimeter film was.
- I remember going to Times Square and seeing the movie
and I was so excited.
And I took I think I took my friend
or boyfriend at the time to go see it.
And nobody was in the movie theater and it wasn't in 3D.
And I was like, oh, I rented the theater for you!
- I went to see it in New Jersey.
It had a pretty wide opening in the New York City area.
When I'd see the film,
I was obviously surprised a lot of effects
that weren't in the film
or things that seem like they were abbreviated.
- And you could see some of the stuff
that was supposed to be in 3D that wasn't
and it kind of looked a little odd.
- At that time,
I had no idea if there were cuts for the MPAA.
The film would have been much huger if they went unrated
and just really went off.
- Not that many people got to see it in the 3D
that it was designed to be.
- And then just sit in the theater and see this thing
that could have been shot with a wind up Bolex
was really disappointing to all of us.
- So the few people who saw it saw it from rip offs on VHS,
which were basically pirated copies.
- I actually just watched it recently on YouTube.
And I said to my friend,
I said, you know,
I think, I'm also in like a present day scene.
Let's see if we can find it.
And sure enough, like there's my face
just plain as day as an extra.
This was such a low budget film that they needed people.
- There are people who come up in the conventions
and will either bring a poster of "Silent Madness"
or something and I'm thrilled
because I feel like it was a forgotten film
and it's so good,
so I'm so excited for people to get to see it.
- So I'm really happy now this is coming out
and the producers of the DVD, the Blu-ray,
really took the chance to do really a phenomenal job.
- It's the best news I've had since the mayor dropped dead.
- It's like looking at a picture
of a painting that's fantastic.
When you see the painting,
it's different from seeing that flat image in the magazine.
And now, maybe they'll see the painting.
- And we're seeing this in the 3D glory
that we had always hoped to see this movie,
albeit a few decades later.
(ominous orchestral music)
(funky jazz music)
- I remember thinking,
you know, one day somebody is gonna interview me.
And I'm gonna get to tell them I got my SAG card
by being shot in the back with a nail gun by a mute in 3D.
(laughing)
So, here it is!
Here's the big interview!