Fun Box Monster Interview: Ted Nicolaou (Subspecies) Interview (2021)

This is an interview I did with Subspecies director Ted Nicolaou over zoom during quarantine in 2021. We had no place to go, so we covered a lot of ground, including Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Roar, and of course Subspecies & Terrorvision. 

Tristan: What is the current status of Subspecies 5? 

Ted: Current status is, script is ready, actors are happy to do it, Serbia is the location that we’re probably going to shoot it in, and we’re just waiting for Covid to settle down, to make it safe to go travel and shoot. 

Tristan: You’re traveling so that adds a level of difficulty. 

Ted: Yeah. Whole other set of problems. And, like, vampire biting necks is a really intimate activity. 

I scouted Albania as a possible location, but Albania didn’t have the looks of the castles or the Neo-gothic look of the cities so we looked around for other places. Somebody suggested Seribia, and that looks like it’s gonna be the place. Because Romania has become too expensive for us now.

Tristan: Is that still Charles’ deal or has it been taken over by somebody else? 

Ted: Yeah. Castel Films. He lost the property and everything back when Full Moon had it’s financial difficulties back in, what? Early 2000’s? Early on. And gradually got taken over, and now I think it’s completely owned by Vlad Păunescu who was the cinematographer on Subspecies. 

Tristan: Interesting. That guy’s a talented dude. 

Ted: Yeah. Super talented, a really smart business man. 

Tristan: Speaking of… One of the things that I have always loved about your films, and one of the things that puts you on another level from a lot of directors in the “b” genres is your scouting. You have such a knack for finding perfect locations. Is that a thing you pride yourself on? 

Ted: I don’t pride myself on it, but I’m driven to keep looking until I feel like I’ve seen every possibility for any location. I drive people a bit crazy because if we’re scouting nature I keep just want to keep going over the next hill, over the next hill,  just to see what’s there. And I got super, super lucky on the Subspecies films because Romania had just opened up so you could shoot pretty much anywhere in all of these national properties that were the most mind-boggling things that I’d ever had the chance to shoot on. I mean, Dragonworld also we had the same thing. We travelled all over England looking for the right Castles, and the right kind of manor houses. So yeah, I enjoy that process a lot. 

Tristan: So, speaking of Romania. What did the locals think of you coming in to shoot a vampire movie? Were they excited about vampires as part of their national identity? 

Ted: No! The general population thought that vampires were just a stupid invention of the west. They did sort of believe in shape-shifters or werewolves. It struck me a little bit funny that vampires were ridiculous, but werewolves were like, normal. For the original Subspecies we did talk to some folklorists and got the idea for that ceremony in the village. I mean, they did have beliefs in the undead. Someone who was buried but not dead and could bring misery and tragedy to a village. So there is that sense of the undead, but that embodiment in a vampire drinking blood was not part of their folklore. 

Tristan: I had heard about Subspecies that because of the locations and that you were so far away from everything, supplies etc. you had to rewrite a bunch of stuff on the fly. How much of that happened. 

Ted: You know, the script was pretty solid when we went in to shoot. I did have to revise the ending somewhat, but not for locations or for anything other than time, and the actors were revolting constantly, and wanted to leave as soon as possible. And that especially went for Michael who played Stefan the handsome vampire. Hated being there. Wanted to get out. He had an out date, and we were coming up on that date and running out of time. The sword fight that they had was scheduled near the end of the shooting schedule, they would get so drunk that I would have to cancel the whole shooting day and the stunt man was encouraging us to go ahead and shoot, to be a little bit drunk in a sword fight is a good thing. So it was like, what the fuck man. We lost about two days to drunkenness. And so we had to kind of revise that scene where Michelle drives up and sees Stefan drinking the blood of a wolf. I can’t even remember if that scene is in the film anymore. We did shoot it. So he left and then right near the end of the schedule, Laura Tate was sleeping in her hotel room, she woke up and there was somebody standing over her. So she freaked out, and got on the next airplane home. Leaving us with a week’s worth of shooting to do for her. So we had to scramble and find kind of a lookalike Romanian student girl and cut her hair to look like Lara’s, and I had to shoot around that for a number of scenes. So that was more technical than revising the script. So you see when they go to talk to the old witch-storyteller-lady in the village and she’s wearing a mask. She puts that mask onto the face of Laura. That was the girl. 

Tristan : That’s very smart.

Ted: It worked out. Nobody notices it really. Difficulties like that just made that film so problematic. The availability of cheap alcohol. Anders Hove, who I love, but he was drinking so much that he was getting in trouble and getting arrested on occasion. Michael Watson and he were big buddies and they were getting super drunk and just like every night was just madness at the hotel. 

Tristan: Vampire movies are a nice cheap way to make a movie. No makeup, FX or anything…just a couple fangs. Why did you make it so difficult on yourself making a capital “M” monster in Radu? 

Ted: I always felt that vampires were not pretty, not Bela Lugosi, not Twilight. But, for me Nosferatu was sort of the ideal creature from the grave. Luckily Anders was able to sustain that makeup day after day and create that character from the inside out.

Tristan: Such cool monster. I would imagine he’s going to stand the test of time. 

Ted: It seems like it has so far. I’ve been very lucky. Terrorvision started out being really hated, and over time it’s been like a rite of passage for a lot of young people. Turning their friends onto it. Subspecies, they’re flawed movies, I don’t have any sort of illusion that they’re great art or anything. They’re sort of hypnotic in their own way, and so they lend themselves to repeat viewing. 

Tristan: Obviously you know that there is a cult following for Subspecies, are you aware of the instagram hashtag #radutober? 

Ted : No man! I’ve gotta look that up!

Tristan: Some great comic artists, Alex Delaney, Tom Neeley some of these guys instead of doing inktober, they did this based on a Hunt for Red October pun? And every day they did another piece of Radu artwork all October long. 

Ted: That’s great! I’ll have to send that to Anders! 

Tristan : How is he? Do you guys talk? 

Ted : Yeah. I talk to him occasionally because we’re hoping to go and do Subspecies 5 in the springtime. He’s doing well. They’ve got a play up in Denmark. He’s with the national theater, the Royal Theater. So he manages to keep working.

Tristan: That’s great to hear. He’s so good. 

Ted: He is. He’s a great actor and a really great human being. 

Tristan: This may be a stupid question, but I’ve always wondered, are the little finger monsters the Subspecies? 

Ted: Yeah.

Tristan: Were they always meant to be stop-motion? I’d heard that they were originally guys in suits. 

Ted: Basically, the Subspecies were Charlie Band’s thing. He likes little characters. And he always…the way they would make films back then at Full Moon was he would come up with poster ideas and have an artist do the poster and then present the poster to a filmmaker and say, “What do you think…Does this appeal to you, do you want to do it?” And when he showed me that poster, he had a script written for the first one, I said, “Yeah, I like the idea of a vampire movie but can we get rid of the little creatures?” Because I really do not like them,  did not like them then, I don’t want them in the movie, but he was like, “sorry man, they’re on the poster we have to do it. We’ve already sold the film.” So we had Subspecies. So the idea, there was this movie, The Gate that was released about that time, that made really great use of forced perspective for the little demon characters. 

Tristan : Those were rubber suit guys. 

Ted: Yeah. So that’s what we were going to do. So in Romania, because it’s so inexpensive to work at Buftea Studios at the time we had them build a giant over-scale throne, a giant cell with its metal bars, a big bloodstone, about this big (holds hands approximately 3 feet apart) and Greg Cannom and his guys designed the Subspecies suits. Latex masks and everything. We got stuntmen to put on the suits, and we shot. We filmed with Irina, the actress, way up high shooting down past her to the Subspecies down on the ground, running around and throwing the net over her. Shot all of the scenes for the Subspecies. The problem was A: The Romanian stuntmen were WAY uncontrollably over-the-top.  The sound stages were so grimy from years of not being cleaned and years of dust and stuff, that the skin colored suits like after a couple of takes were dark, dark grey. So when we got back to the states, we were looking at the dailies and Charlie went, “This is stupid. We can’t use this. We have to do stop motion and get Dave Allen involved. Dave Allen was part of that whole troop who were working with Charlie at the time. So we just ditched all that footage and salvaged the back plates and started over again from scratch. 

Tristan: Man. Do you have any of that footage? Did any survive? 

Ted: Yeah. I think it exists on the BluRay and the behind the scenes featurette at the end. I bet you can find it on Youtube as well. 

Tristan: So you’ve been pretty vocal about not liking the little demon things. You never made a Puppetmaster movie, which is shocking. But this is probably where Bloodstone Subspecies 2 comes from. The little guys show up to re-attach Radu’s head, then boom. Gone. 

Ted: Yeah. Partially an aesthetic decision on my part because I really don’t like them, I do understand even as I say that, that there’s a lot of fans that love those characters so I can’t be too mean about them. Yeah. So we had them do their thing and then take a hike. I love working with people and the working with miniatures is just time consuming torture for me. 

Tristan: Bloodstone is gorgeous. That is a wonderfully shot movie. There’s some full on Argento looking opera house moments. The shadow work is so cool. I don’t even have a question. That movie is just great. 

Ted: You know, the first Subspecies, Vlad was already a very successful director of photography of Romanian films. We started the film shooting on ORWO stock this Russian film stock and did about a week of shooting, and when Charlie saw the dailies, he wanted to fire Vlad and bring Adolfo Bartoli the Italian cinematographer, who’s a great cinematographer over to finish the film. By that time, I understood that Vlad was my connection to the whole crew. And Vlad and his girlfriend at the time, now his wife, Oana who was the costume designer, who is a fucking brilliant costume designer. They had taken me into their home, and introduced me to the theater in Romania, and we would go out to dinner, and get drunk together. They were my kind of, safety cocoon in a very foreign weird place which Romania was at the time. I loved them, and I knew that the movie couldn’t go forward without him. So I had to go to Bucharest and fight with this big council that was like something of out of a Bertolucci movie or something. It was like the Romanian council of cinema. Because they didn’t want Charlie to fire Vlad, and I didn’t want Charlie to fire Vlad, so I had to tell them why I defended Vlad. So we succeeded in keeping Vlad. Adolfo came to Romania and brought some lenses and brought some lights, and kind of told him the difference between the way he was shooting and the way that Charlie was used to seeing things is mostly a matter of backlight. Vlad learned those really well and when we did the second Subspecies, we had a lot better equipment, and again we just had the run of the country for locations. The city of Bucharest figured into it more. And Bucharest was just coming out of the gray period of communism, but there were these elegant buildings built at the turn of the twentieth century, and they were all kind of going to shit, but they had this beauty. And the symphony hall is just the most gorgeous place I’ve ever been able to shoot. So yeah. We were super, super lucky. And Vlad’s crew was really talented with what they had to work with they pulled off a lot of magic tricks. And part of it is the costumes, man. The costumes of that film, Oana just really, my only note to her was a lot of textures you know, a lot of layers of things. She really brought those characters to life. So if you have great locations, you have great costumes, and the actors look good, and the lighting looks good, you’re almost home. 

Tristan: One of your earliest gigs was working on Texas Chainsaw Massacre. You were at ground zero of arguably the most influential horror movie of all time. That’s got to rub off on you somewhere. 

Ted: Yeah, you know, the truth about Chainsaw Massacre is that myself, Daniel Pearl, who was the director of photography on the film, had just graduated from film school at University of Texas. We were raised on film history and art films and our heads were full of art movies. When we went to work for Toby, we were a little bit snotty about the whole thing, you know? It wasn’t evident what a great movie it was until after a year of editing and sound work finished it. We were really well educated in film school in terms of preparation, editing and all the elements that go into making a film. When we got on Chainsaw Massacre first day of shooting, Tobe Hooper and Kim Henkel spent hours just figuring out what they were going to shoot that day. And every day was kind of that. A couple of hours figuring out what are we doing? Huh? What I learned from that is kind of the negative of, holy shit…this isn’t the way you’re supposed to spend a very tight schedule. And the 27 hour shooting day…which you’ve probably heard about.  There was one day the actor who played Grandpa, had the appliance makeup and after they put it on, he was like, fuck this, I’m not putting this on again. We have to shoot this whole scene and so we shot twenty-seven hours, from start to finish, that whole dinner scene. So we learned a lot of negative lessons really from Chainsaw Massacre. But then the ultimate lesson was that Tobe had a vision. He had a hard time expressing it to the crew. But he knew what he wanted to do.  And Bob Burns could make a house that looked like the inside of a crazy person’s brain. So we learned a lot about creating tableaus. Like the scene of Pam being hung up on the meathooks, and her boyfriend getting chopped to pieces. Like the magic tricks of cinema, where you don’t have to show too much but what is being suggested is beyond horrific. I guess the ultimate lesson was this crazy haphazard crazy ass shooting schedule we did, after x amount of months in the cutting room, turned into this movie that was a powerful horror film experience. I guess the lesson is, don’t give up and editing will save your ass in many ways. 

Tristan: The best directors always know how to edit. You yourself have quite a bit of editing experience. Your next gig was editing Tourist Trap.

Ted: Yeah. With a little stop-off on Roar. You ever heard of that one? 

Tristan: OH YEAH. I definitely need to talk about that one. Fuck it. Let’s talk about that now. That is obviously one of the most insane things that has ever happened in the history of cinema. Screw Tiger King, where’s our Roar documentary? 

Ted: You know what, Animal Planet did a documentary on Roar a few years ago. They interviewed all of us that worked on it, Tippi didn’t participate in it, and Melanie Griffith didn’t. But it kind of told the story of it. I mean, it is a movie that is completely insane. I came out from Texas, a lot of my friends had preceded me coming to Los Angeles, and were encouraging me to come. My friend Courtney Goodin was a sound man on Roar, he encouraged me to come out. Basically, it was a movie that, if you came out to LA, if had just gotten out of prison or whatever, you could get a job on Roar. I came out here, my first job was synching dailies six cameras shooting lions with no slate. So I would just have to sit around and watch for a lion’s tail to hit a wall, or for someone to speak and lined up six cameras. Very quickly I edited a scene and Noel Marshall liked the scene a lot and I was moved up pretty quickly to being editor. And when Larry Carol who was the head editor before me moved on to do Tourist Trap I was upgraded to head editor. It was insane. In fact, that movie is like a biblical epic story. Because here was Noel Marshall who produced the Exorcist, was studying to be a priest but when they found out that he was an illegitimate child, they kicked him out of the priesthood. Then he made a deal with the Catholic Church to do the Exorcist and he took that money and used it to make Roar. Set himself up with a hundred lions and tigers in this little compound, none of them trained. He was in the middle of shooting the film when a lion kinda grabbed him by the leg and dragged him out of the shot. He had a big gash in his leg and was sent to the hospital. A few days later this rain came that threatened to overrun this dam that was upstream from the set. So we were building a dam to try to hold back this potential flood. The dam broke. Washed the editing room away, took a million and a half feet of work picture and took it down river. All the lions and tigers got out, the sheriffs were shooting them. Noel had gangrene in his leg. He heard while he was in the hospital, that they were rounding up lions and shooting them, he got out of his hospital bed, drove to the set with a gangrenous leg. Got his favorite lion on a chain. The lion circled around him, the chain squeezed the gangrenous leg, and kind of cured it by popping out all of the gunk in it. Like the most fucking horrible thing ever. So it was biblical. The whole thing just seemed to me to prove the existence of God and The Devil. 

Tristan: Holy fuck. I didn’t know any of that stuff.  So, you were the editor, did your editing floor just look like faces of death? Were you just dropping scenes with people getting scalped and losing hands? How much was caught on film? 

Ted: That moment of Noel getting dragged off camera was caught on film. The scene where Jan De Bont got scalped was not. He was in a hole in the ground, kind of, shooting up. They dragged me out one day, because they heard I was a sound man too. Dragged me out to the set and said Ok. We need a second sound man. Sit right here, here’s the Nagra, and Noel Marshall…the only training that they did with the lions was like with a wooden cane, like with a curved end. And like if a lion comes up to you, just pop him on the nose. They gave me a cane, there was a hurricane fence along one side where all the lions were, the crew was on the other side, hurricane fence went down to the water of the lagoon, and they rolled cameras called action, the lions kinda went along the fence, went down to the water, swam around to the crew side of the fence, and started going crazy around the crew. Noel Marshall, was like, “GODDAMIT!” He was like a big screamer. He came over and took my cane out of my hand and went chasing off after lions. After that I was like, “Fuck this. I’m never going on the set again.” It was like, ASPCA would not have approved. Safety administration would have shut us down immediately. It was insanity. 

Tristan : I want to talk about Roar all day, but I don’t want to forget about Terrorvision. As my friend Matt would say, Terrorvision is a perfect movie. How did a movie this weird come to be? 

Ted: Like everything else with Charlie back in those days it was a poster first. And the poster was a goofy looking monster, not anything like the monster we ended up with, coming out of a TV set and a satellite dish. So basically it was monster comes through a satellite dish out of a TV set, that was the concept. He said, “What about this film?” And at that time I had edited enough of his movies and had edited enough John Buechler the creature FX guy’s work to kind of know what the strengths and weaknesses were. I said, “Alright Charlie, I’ll make this movie but can I make It a comedy?”  Even though Charlie was not known for comedies at the time he said, “yeah.”  So I took that idea, decided to make all the characters a little off-putting so that you wouldn’t care when they all got killed and then did a lot of research about survivalism. It was all kind of based on how the world was like at that time in Los Angeles. The script was the script, it’s pretty much the same script that you see on screen. But, what elevated the script beyond anything was the production designer, Giovanni Natalucci this crazy Italian guy came over to Los Angeles to meet and talk about the film. We spent days looking at Valley houses, not going there, but looking in location books, and talking about the craziness of this house. He went back and designed these sets, that when I finally went to Italy and looked at these sets…it was so much crazier than I had ever imagined it would be. The second thing that elevated it, was Buechler, who was tasked with creating the Hungry Beast we had a lot of fights about the monster. Because I wanted something asymmetrical, something with a lot of appendages. The tentacle with the eye and a big stupid tail that would wag like a dog. Looking a bit like a giant booger or something.  It kind of defied what he wanted to do, so we fought a lot about it, but he and his team of incredible sculptors created this creature that was really wonderful. The next thing that elevated it was the casting. I wanted Mary Woronov to be..I saw Mary Woronov a lot at a club called Club Lingerie in Los Angeles…it was kind of the New Wave days I guess. I saw her there a lot. I got it in my head that she would be great as Medusa, the horror hostess. We sent her a script, she came in to meet with us. She said, you know this character Medusa, I could play this. This is the character that most people would just immediately think of me to play but what I’d really like to play is the mother. Mary Woronov is like the least maternal person you’ve ever met, but the idea of her playing the mother was like… “Wow! Okay!” Some times in casting you just get totally surprised. And then Gerrit Graham came in and just nailed the part. The two of them together, and then when we found Diane Franklin and Jon Gries the move was elevated another level. So, got to Italy, saw the location, saw the sets and was just like, mind-blown. Making the movie, Gerrit and Mary just kind of set a certain tone. Diane Franklin was able to reach that tone as well and Jon Gries was worried that it was too over the top, but he met it and exceeded it. It was a happy accident of all of those elements.