Men call them Freaks. Women call them . . . all the time.

THE MAKING OF FLESH FREAKS

or AARGH ... PRODUCTION

So ... I'd worked on several small productions, the longest being just over an hour, and I of course was itching to begin work on a feature. As usual in these cases, it was a combination of elements which led the start of production - first, finding that there were many commercial outlets for no-budget distribution;

second, reading the much-cited Rebel Without a Crew (well, most of it, anyway ... see, my money situation was such that it was much more sensible to just read as much of it as I could in the bookstore. And, thanks to these new, cushy, Oprah-inspired bookstores, I pretty much read the whole thing); third, and probably most importantly, I got access to a digital video camera. At the time - Summer 98 - this was a newer and less well-known thing than it is now. Anyway, I decided to take Rodriguez's advice and 'use what I had.' The reason I had the digital camera was to document an archaeological expedition in Central America, so I thought that I could, without too much difficulty, shoot some of my own stuff on the side and incorporate it into a feature.

Now wait, you may say, how could you possibly incorporate the Central American footage with stuff shot elsewhere? How could the locations match? Well, you got a point, but see, I took it as an exciting challenge (which, I've found, is usually the best way to face stupidly big challenges and roadblocks such as this). I've always enjoyed those low-rent exploitation movies which took hunks of other movies and strung them together into one (fairly) cohesive narrative. Sure, movies like They Saved Hitler's Brain and Vampire Men of the Lost Planet ain't exactly Lawrence of Arabia, but they do show some degree of ingenuity in the way that a new story is wrapped around existing footage. I decided to take this approach in working the Central American stuff into the final movie. Now, my first idea was to have the CA sequences at the beginning, since they do occur first in the chronology of the story, but dramatically it made more sense to put them elsewhere.

I started with a detailed outline which kept changing depending on what scenes I could get and what I couldn't. Then, after the CA footage was shot, I wrote a script around it. The rest of the story took place in Toronto, where I live. Ultimately, the CA bits took up 30 of the script's 100-odd pages.

THEN:

Came the rest of it, a parade of horrorific stories of special effects, bloody freezing weather, and that dreaded devil dog of any movie production -- weapons confiscation. That last bit happened, luckily enough, on our last day of shooting -- we were shooting in the dusty, industrial basement of a large school and, as I was setting up materials for 15 or so zombie extras, a hall monitor about to leave for the day passed by and saw our foot-and-a-half long machete, which he promptly confiscated. We had to work around it, which was particularly difficult since some of the zombie head effects were designed specifically to work with it. But, with some improvisation, a pair of scissors, and a large metal plank (which was lying quite conveniently in a pile in the basement), we managed to make some decent substitutions. In the final cut of FF, two zombies who were originally meant for death by machete met it by other means: towards the climax, one gets stabbed with scissors and another is cut in two by a sharp piece of metal (which the

heroine just conveniently finds propped against a wall). Watch for it --- then amaze your friends when you watch the movie and regale them with these incredible production stories! They'll be posolutely dumb-flouded!