The Bite #113

Stanny And The T-Rex: An Interview With Stewart Raffill, Tales From The Stitch And MORE!

June 09, 2020

In this Issue:

Horror History: Stanny and the T-Rex
Image of the Week: No. No! No no no no…
Tiny Bites – This Week’s Best Horror Headlines
Things We Love: His Bite Was Outta Sight
Hey, That’s Us! – Shudder in the News

HORROR HISTORY

Stanny and the T-Rex

It’s no secret I am a Stanny (that’s “Tanny + stan” for the uninitiated). Even before I saw the gore cut of Tammy and the T-Rex (1994) — or as the title card inexplicably reads, Tanny and the Teenage Rex — I was hooked. Not only is it my particular flavor of bonkers, but it’s also an important entry in the queer horror canon as it features a gay, black character named Byron (played by Theo Forsett). That kind of representation is rare in the genre, even by today’s standards. So I reached out to director Stewart Raffill to find out more.

This interview has been condensed for length and clarity. You can find an unabridged version of the interview on the Shudder blog.

Stewart Raffill: [Etka Sarlui] says, “I have a T-Rex. And I have it for two weeks…you want to make a movie with it?” I said, “Yeah, is it trained?” [laughter]

Sam Wineman: What was the timeline between when he told you he had the T-Rex and when you started shooting?

SR: Three weeks.

SW: What? No.

SR: Yeah. It’s happened to me two or three times [with movies]. I thought to myself, obviously Sarlui was inspired by Jurassic Park. He wanted to cash in on that to a degree. But the dinosaurs were amazing in that film. You’re going to make a sci-fi movie about a movie that costs Universal over a hundred million dollars to make and I’m going to make it for under a million?

So here you go: you’re me. And you have three weeks to write a script, find the cast, find the locations, hire the crew, get the permits, and live with whatever you go for. You see the dinosaur and it’s really bad. It’s corny. It can hardly move. No budget in there to do CGI. So how do you save yourself? You’re doing a movie now that could be the worst movie ever, so the only way to go is to accept that fact and go for camp.

Once you decide that, anything goes. Any innuendo, any acceptable crudeness, we’re going to go for it. We’re just going to put it all in. So we finish the movie, Sarlui sees it and he’s furious. He brings in his own editor and recuts the movie, takes all the gore out and half of the jokes because he didn’t understand them. “I want to make a family film with this dinosaur.” And he just recut the movie so I walked away. I said, “You’re crazy. It’s not going to work and this is the only thing that will.”

SW: I feel like your characters are people I don’t expect to see or haven’t seen a lot of. How do you choose them?

SR: I just choose people that I think are interesting and most people are so boring. Do you know what I mean? I want colorful characters in a movie. So that’s what I try to do.

Theo, right from the beginning, had his character down. If you see the opening scene when they go in the door and she introduces him to Paul, they’re laughing. They laughed all the time because Theo was so funny.

SW: When I first saw it, I wondered if maybe they were just laughing because he’s gay.

SR: No, they’re just laughing because he was a smart comedian. He had comments about them that were insightful. I kind of gave people [freedom]; I said, this is the dialogue I wrote. Do it any way you want to do it. Have fun with it.

When you write a script, the two main characters get all the attention. You never have time for all the others. And you fence yourself in if you’re not careful because people will bring their own thing if you give them the space to do it. You have to cast in a certain spectrum of people but the humanness that they bring … you can’t come up with what Theo came up with.

* Sam Wineman is the writer and director of multiple short films including the award-winning The Quiet Room and the segment “Milk and Cookies” in the Christmas horror anthology Deathcember. He’s directing the upcoming Shudder original documentary on queer representation in horror.

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

No. No! No no no no…

Justin Lubin captured some amazing stills from the set of Get Out including this amazing behind-the-scenes shot of director Jordan Peele working with star Daniel Kaluuya.

Staying in for this long would make anyone want to crawl out of their own skin. New members can try the platform free for 30 days when they sign up online with promo code: SHUTIN

TINY BITES

ARI ASTER, QUEER HORROR AND MORE

Explore Queer horror during Pride with Rotten Tomatoes’ list of 30 essential LGBTQ+ films from Dracula’s Daughter to The Perfection.

FANGORIA and Birth.Movies.Death. have gone on strike following disturbing allegations levelled against their parent company, Cinestate.

Vanity Fair wrote about why Hollywood is still so oversaturated with white creators, and why simply responding to protests isn’t enough.

Folks said these 17 horror movies were too terrifying to revisit.

Looper lists some of the creepiest basements in horror movies that definitely scarred us.

This BuzzFeed article proves that horror can live in even the safest spaces – Pinocchio, anyone?

If you’re looking to give yourself the creeps, Elle recommends these 30 horror films.

Learn more about Canuxploitation and Canadian tax-shelter-era horror in the new documentary Tax Shelter Terrors.

25 Years Later explores the changing themes in 1970s horror cinema.

Ari Aster teases that his next film will be a four-hour long “nightmare comedy”.

Continue your exploration of the cathartic power of horror in Midsommar.

Vogue has some horror-inspired beauty trends you can try … if you dare.

There may be a psychological reason you’re so terrified of the Grady twins in The Shining, and Bustle’s here to tell you about it.

THINGS WE LOVE

His Bite Was Outta Sight

Chelsey Scully, the immense talent behind Tales From The Stitch, is currently auctioning off a different crocheted doll every week in support of Black Lives Matter. This week’s doll is Blacula.