At long last, we’re finally here. It’s been a journey, I’m not going to lie, and I’m glad you’ve been able to take it with me. After all these years, we’re going to excavate a treasure trove of bones from the blood-soaked cinematic soil that is CARNOSAUR!
With director Adam Simon, nonetheless!
For those of you just tuning in, Simon and I previously spoke about his first two feature films, Brain Dead and Body Chemistry 2: The Voice of a Stranger. We shed a spotlight on stories and insights previously unilluminated. It’s with GREAT pleasure that I can say the same about our discussion on Carnosaur. In fact, we talked so much that I’ve decided to break this interview into three parts, one for each hour.
In Carnosaur, “A genetically manipulated and very hungry dinosaur escapes from a bioengineering company and wreaks havoc on the local desert town. A security guard and a girl environmentalist try to stop both it and the company’s doomsday bioweapon.“
As always, you can find the FULL TRANSCRIPT of part one of this interview on my website, www.giallojulian.com. Not only that, but you’ll also be able to check out my previous Direction Dissection interviews, as well as full transcripts of the New Blood Drops interviews, news about upcoming indie horror, currently released indie horror, and my brand new page—CRITIC OF THE LIVING DEAD—when my great friend CptBlackVest reviews your favorite zombies movies! Plenty of stuff on there, and I’m going to do my best to keep it coming!
But I digress. We’ve all been waiting with stomachs rumbling for our saurian main course, and it’s finally here. Without further ado, let’s present the feast and sink our serrated, strangely rubbery teeth into this first installment of my Carnosaur Direction Dissection with Adam Simon!
Dread Central: Here we are! This is going to be the BIG ONE. We’re talking CARNOSAUR!
Adam Simon: The end of my [Roger] Corman era.
DC: Yes!
AS: As Roger used to say, “The most successful film of his entire career.”
DC: And you know what? I believe it! I mean, $1.8 million, right? Somewhere in that ballpark?
AS: He ultimately made so much more than that because of the foreign sales on it, and the video sales, and it’s still out there. Then the fact that he squeezed [Carnosaur] 2, [Carnosaur] 3, Dinosaur Island, and all this shit [out of it].
DC: He was able to milk it for all its worth. He did [The Haunted Sea], where he took one of the suits from the second movie, or the first movie, and… that took place on a boat, with a weird snake head. He just used everything he could out of that movie! [Laughs]
AS: [Laughs] That’s right.
DC: For the last two interviews, we discussed your love of sci-fi, we discussed your love of noir, and this time, I want to discuss your background with monster movies. You mentioned before that you’re a “Monster Kid.” I was wondering what your relationship to horror is, specifically, creature features. What films hooked you into the subgenre?”
AS: I came at the tail end of what’s often generationally referred to as the “Monster Kids Era.” Like, say, John [Landis]—who’s probably 15 years older than me—is on the older edge of that generation, and I’m at the very end of it. I think for most of us—from John’s generation, and Joe Dante, and those guys through to me—literally grew up with there being a TV show called Creature Features. Which all had to do with the fact that the Universal… horror films suddenly were moved onto TV in a way that hadn’t been available before.
They got packaged as this group of films… so a lot of us kids grew up with the idea that on Friday or Saturday night, there was this thing called Creature Features that was going to show you these classic horror movies. So I have to say, for me… the attachment was precisely to that pantheon, as it were — Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolf Man, up to the Creature. Because the Creature is still Universal, but it was starting to be something else, right?
DC: Yeah, that’s way at the tail end.
AS: At the same time, I certainly grew up with the Godzilla movies.
DC: Oh, hell yeah!
AS: But it took a long time, I have to admit, to appreciate them. I appreciate them probably more now than I did then, you know? They were not really my jam… I grew up not really liking all those giant creature movies of the ’50s and early ’60s.
I have to admit, also, I was not necessarily ever, like, a dinosaur kid. In a way, I think lots of kids — that’s like a whole obsession that they have. I saw it with my own kids, and I think it was probably very true in your generation. Obviously, Jurassic Park and Carnosaur really fed that, but it was always there. Whereas for me, I didn’t need dinosaurs because I had monsters. You know what I mean? But [when] the chance to actually, finally… do [a dinosaur film came], sure.
So yeah, I guess it was more classic, supernatural type of monsters rather than the mad science types of monsters. There was just this whole run of everything made gigantic, I guess, because of Godzilla and others. You had a giant rabbit movie, a giant beetles movie.
DC: And a gila monster!
AS: Probably the only one of them I ever really loved that scared the shit out of me—and I still like it, and it is an influence on Carnosaur—is the movie, Them!
DC: Them! is fantastic! That’s one of my favorites!
AS: Really, really good. It really holds up. There are a couple of others like that. They’re all shot in those same kind of high desert not far from here, these very bleak settings, and you get these giant creatures ambling through them. So I would suppose Them! was in my mind for sure.
DC: Well, Them! was pretty much a police procedural that just happened to have giant ants in it. You barely see them for the whole movie. It’s really good.
AS: Absolutely! That’s also part of why I have the whole running thing in Carnosaur with the sheriff.
DC: I can see the inspiration from it for Carnosaur, with it being… not just a monster going out and killing things. It does have that, but it also has the more investigative part. There’s a lot more character building, and I think that really works.
The next question I have is —
AS: Wait! By the way, the one exception to what I was saying before is that — of course — we all still worship the original King Kong.
DC: Oh, for sure!
AS: That’s the ultimate creature movie. That’s a huge part of us all. That was the one giant creature movie that every time it came on TV as a kid, I would be sitting right there and watching that.”
DC: I mean, you have great effects by Willis O’ Brien.
AS: Oh my god, incredible!
DC: “M.C. Cooper directing it. It has all the great actors in it, like Fay Wray. I would say that without King Kong, the [giant] monster genre — I won’t say it wouldn’t have ever existed, because King Kong was built off of The Lost World from back in 1925. Someone would have eventually done it, but King Kong is definitely the catalyst for literally every giant monster movie that came out [afterwards].”
AS: I think that’s true.
DC: So next question. How did you become involved in the production of Carnosaur? And once you were on board, how did you initially prepare to tackle the film? I know you read Harry Adam Knight’s—aka John Brosnan—original novel, and that you considered it a little “cheesy,” if I remember correctly from a quote way back in the day. Did the book factor into the production at all? How much creative control did you have over the film’s story?”
AS: I had 100% creative control. That was part of the deal with Roger.
So this is post-Body Chemistry 2. At this point, unlike the very beginning of our conversations with Brain Dead… I’m starting to work pretty regularly as a writer on bigger Hollywood things, as a rewrite guy, as a script doctor, and I also sold a couple of pitches and was writing scripts. I was not looking to do another Corman movie.
Roger called me up to say, “No, no, no! This is something really special that I’m saving up for you! You’re the guy to do it!” Yada, yada, yada!
It was special to him for lots of reasons. He had been planning it for some time because he had gone out and bought the rights to Brosnan’s novel. That’s John Brosnan — the real guy who wrote under the name Harry Adam Knight.
DC: HAK.
AS: Exactly! HAK. He was actually a lovely guy. He’s no longer with us, but he was a really funny, smart, interesting guy who horror fans should know. He was one of the pioneers of writing good books about monster movies, horror movies, and sci-fi movies under his real name.
So Roger said, “Look, I bought the rights to this book.” He had bought the rights to the book when Jurassic Park—the novel—came out. He probably knew the novel was coming out before it came out, because he was actually friends with [Michael] Crichton. Roger knew he was going to want to do something in the same way he had done Piranha in relation to Jaws, [or] Battle Beyond the Stars in relation to Star Wars.
He knew this was going to be huge, and he wanted to be prepared… Everybody was going to say, “Oh, here’s your knockoff of Jurassic Park.” He knew in ADVANCE he wanted to be able to say, “Oh, no, no! This is our adaptation of this book, which was published BEFORE Jurassic Park!”
DC: Got that flex!
AS: Right! He’s got that flex… He had a famous interview with Connie Chung, the same one that I was angry with him about, because he lied about how much money he spent. But I do remember him… saying that he knew Crichton, and Crichton was a very honorable guy, and he was sure that Crichton didn’t MEAN to borrow so much from Brosnan’s novel. [Laughs]
DC: [Laughs] Oh yeah, I watched that! It’s funny, because those two novels—Carnosaur AND Jurassic Park—were predated by a Judge Dredd story from, like, back in 1978 that had the exact same premise.”
AS: Oh, that’s interesting. I don’t know that I’m [familiar], and I’m a big fan of those British comics, and of Judge Dredd in particular.
So when he brought it up to me, he said, “Look, this is going to be the biggest thing I’ve done. I’m going to spend more money than I ever spent.” Obviously, it wasn’t going to be a Jurassic Park-type budget, but I think he said, “It’s going to be at least $5 million. Maybe we can get more.”
He already had Diane Ladd attached, who was a very important and interesting actor. He said, “You’re going to be free to do whatever you want as long as it’s called Carnosaur, and we’re going to say it’s based on the novel.” Roger actually said to me, “Don’t bother reading the novel.” And I was like, “You’ve already paid for it, I want to read it. Anyway, it sounds fun.” I had actually read one other Harry Adam Knight novel. I think it was The Fungus, or something like that. That was really fun.
So when I read [Carnosaur], I went deep into… the chicken side of it. [Laughs] Though to be fair to Brosnan… he was a science guy, too. He was a science journalist… who read a lot of science fiction. His science in that book is actually very clever, and—arguably—more accurate and believable than Crichton’s.
DC: For sure, because chickens are dinosaurs. Frogs aren’t dinosaurs.
AS: That’s right! And you got to remember, this was the period where—you take this for granted, but I remember living through this—it was a big revolution in how we thought about and visualized dinosaurs. When scientists said, “Oh, wait a second. Dinosaurs are functionally not giant lizards.” Which the name implies, right?
DC: Terrible lizards.
AS: Which is what everybody thought they were. They’re really… related to birds, and that changed everything about how we saw dinosaurs. They were brightly colored, some of them had feathers, and that their [descendants] were still walking the earth. Every time you take a look at a goose’s foot, or the talons of an eagle, things like that, you go, “Oh yeah, that really does look like a dinosaur!” Brosnan was all over that. As was Crichton in a way—particularly with the Velociraptors—but not with getting the DNA from amber and all that sort of stuff.
DC: When you were officially in production on Carnosaur, I’m sure you had other ideas on how to bring the dinosaurs to life, and I’m curious as to what they were. I mean, stop-motion, I know Corman never really cared for that. I’m sure CGI [Computer Generated Imagery] was never an option.
Were there any other techniques considered before landing on John Carl Buechler’s effects?
AS: Yes, I had a ton of ideas. I know Buechler’s got lots of fans out there, and people who love his stuff — I was not necessarily a huge fan. He’s a good guy, and I loved all the people working around him, but I didn’t love [Buechler’s style]. I was really afraid that — in the end — it was going to turn into a rubber suit. Which at times [it did].
Roger spent way more money than I would have chosen to spend on the giant T. rex [Tyrannosaurus rex], which looked like one of those things you see sometimes, like, as a roadside attraction if you’re driving out in Palm Desert or something. It looked pretty cool, especially from a distance, but it couldn’t really move for shit. It had these little hands that could move a little bit, but it didn’t really do much, you know?
DC: Great for close-ups. It looks nothing like the puppet.
AS: I was really into forced perspective, and… was very influenced by a guy who actually supervised the effects from my side, not from John’s side. I had a guy named Alan Lasky, who had worked a lot with Jim Cameron. He led a mini-second unit for me to help do all the effects that weren’t being done by the Buechler people, and by adding stuff that I thought was better.
Because he had worked on a number of films with Cameron… we spent much time looking at… LaserDiscs of Aliens, and of The Abyss, and of other Cameron films, to see how even then he was really minimizing and being very precise about when he did use digital effects. He was trying to use not just lots of physical and mechanical effects, but… a lot of old-school optical effects, particularly the idea of forced perspective. So we were hoping to do more stuff that way. There is, I think, some forced perspective work in there.
I think the best stuff in there was… the puppeteering stuf, like the Velociraptor [Deinonychus] that we have in there, rather than the suit or the giant one. I wish they could have done more of that kind of thing, because that was much more effective in its type of movement.
DC: Oh, I agree.
AS: The creature that you see attack the eco-hippies and rip off the girl’s leg — that was actually a pretty nifty puppet… I kept saying, “Can we just get an even smaller version of that? And even a small version of the T. rex? We’ll do forced perspectives to use it.” But they didn’t. They were pouring all their money into building the life-size T. rex.
DC: That you use for, like, three scenes.
AS: Exactly.
DC: So it was like, [sarcastically], “Thanks, Corman.”
AS: But that was also… tactical on my part, initially. I knew how Roger worked at that point. You remember when we talked about Body Chemistry 2, the ways in which I kind of made the movie I wanted to make? I didn’t do many of the sex scenes and used up my budget, knowing that then he would say, “But I need more sex!” And then we would go find a way to do that. So similarly here, he cut the budget back so much, but I wanted all the human stuff, I wanted all these other scenes, I wanted the whole plague thing, I wanted all the rest of that.
I somewhat purposefully undershot the dinosaurs at that time, knowing he would then go, “Okay, we need more dinosaurs.” Forcing him to put up… about another—I don’t know what—half a million dollars, or something, to pay for a lot more things. And then we got what I think are some of the best, most effective scenes in there, like when the kids in the car get attacked by the Deinonychus. Which was done by just me and that smaller unit that Alan Lasky was running. We did a bit more stuff with the big guy, and with the suits, and stuff like that.
It’s a poker game when you’re dealing with Roger. Like, what can you get away with? What can you force him to do? How can you make him give you a little bit more of what you want? How can you get it close to what you’re trying to do?
DC: And you played enough to be like, “Alright, I know how to play this game of chess exactly.”
AS: It was sort of like — What’s he going to do? Because there was no way I was going to end up making another film for him at that point. [There are] people like Jim Wynorski, who happily would spend their whole career under Roger, but I was already three-quarters of the way out, and was not envisioning [staying longer].
DC: [As Adam Simon] This is my grand finale!
AS: I’m going to do this, I’m going to squeeze everything I can out of him, and if he’s pissed off or says, “Okay, I’m not going to do it.” Now, that wasn’t the result. He would have loved to have me do more.
DC: I was going to ask [about] the scene where Diane Ladd… just rips her stomach open, and the dinosaur comes out.
I was wondering if that was a reference to Alien, Humanoids from the Deep, or The Terror Within?
AS: [Laughs] Probably all of the above! I liked The Terror Within. He was one of the people I liked most at Corman’s, and was a friend. I thought it was really good.
Yeah, it was all that. It was to bring in the body horror and the Cronenberg side of it, for sure. And definitely the Alien side of it, no doubt… We had to find a way to pay off this idea about the eggs, the pregnancies, and what that was.
DC: Especially since you already did it before with the diner waitress giving birth to an egg. It’s like, “Well, we can’t just do that again. Let’s do something different. Rip her stomach open!”
AS: That’s right! You’ve got to do much bigger. We wanted to actually have the creature come out and have that little moment with his mummy, you know? [Laughs]
“The funny thing is I didn’t know it at the time. I don’t think I knew until we were finished shooting that—what’s her name? You just mentioned her. She plays Thrush.
DC: Oh! Jennifer Runyon!
AS: Jennifer! Jennifer was actually pregnant while we were making the film, but she didn’t tell us, and we didn’t know.
DC: I remember this from that podcast!
AS: She finally told us late in [filming] that she was. That’s why she had to take more frequent breaks and stuff. She was tired.
But afterwards, I’m thinking, “Gosh, I hope that works out okay.” There’s a lot of pregnancy horror in it, and yet she’s actually walking around quietly in her first trimester, or whatever.
DC: She’ll be able to tell her kid, “Hey, I was pregnant with you while this scene with horrible, pregnancy, medical-horror was [filmed]! You were there! You’re in the movie, too!”
AS: [As Runyon] “You’re in the movie, too!”
It’s also, though, that there were going to be these big-scale effects. We didn’t know how they were going to be, and I wanted to match this up with a lot of micro-effects, things that were much more controllable, that could look cool and gory. Like the Caesarian, or like one of my favorite things in there, when—I think it’s Harrison [Page] or his wife [Michele Harrell]—a character who’s trying to just make eggs in the morning, but the eggs keep coming out all disgusting.
DC: Yeah, because she’s making breakfast, and he comes in… like, “You’re sick! Get out of here! I’ll do it!” Then each egg is progressively more disgusting than the last.
AS: That’s a very effective little scene, and the effects in it are really good because it’s all physical and real. The guys actually put things in those eggs [and] sealed them up, so they totally looked real. He cracks it open and, “Oh!” [acts disgusted]
DC: He was like, “Oh, it’s green!”
AS: That’s small and micro, and yet you can make it seem real in a way that’s going to be a lot harder to, you know, make the T. rex seem real.
DC: For sure, as obviously a reference to Green Eggs and Ham, right? [Laughs]
AS: Exactly! [Laughs]
DC: The score is unlike anything I’ve heard anywhere else. It’s dramatic—a theme not out of place in a mad scientist’s lab. At the same time, there’s a sadness to it, a hopelessness. It crescendos to an evil and almost triumphant roar, and then it drones into long, melancholic notes, nearly foreshadowing the film’s story. Everything builds up to an epic showdown, then abruptly descends to a sad, hopeless end—leaving us doomed.
How did you and Nigel Holton create this memorable, unique score? What was the inspiration? And why aren’t there any physical copies anywhere?
AS: I wish there was! Same with Body Chemistry 2!
We talked about Nigel a little bit because he came in and did—to me—the achingly beautiful score for Body Chemistry 2, and wrote the incidental songs in it that are also pretty fun. So I definitely wanted to work with him again. He’s really a talented guy. He just died really young, not that many years after that, I believe… He should have had a big career. I think he had it in him to be absolutely [like] Hans Zimmer, or somebody like that.
DC: For sure!
AS: He was just a really, really, really gifted composer. We talked about a lot of things, like [Stanley] Kubrick’s use of classical music. We talked a lot about [Richard] Wagner and these “Wagnerian” themes, but also a lot of what we now call the “holy minimalism”—[Henryk] Górecki, Arvo Pärt, and that kind of thing. He also really captured the fact that [Carnosaur] had all these different moods.
We talked about this a bit in relation to Body Chemistry 2, and even to some extent with Brain Dead. Part of the fun of getting to do a Corman movie is that you don’t have to do the conventional happy ending, and I did not want to. I wanted it to be this other, much bleaker ending, and wanted that to have some emotion, because we’ve been with these people in this whole town the whole time. And he completely delivered on that.
He just was a really lyrically-gifted composer, and we didn’t—I mean, what I would have loved is if he had gone on and lived longer, and broken into the world that I think he would have broken into, to have heard what he could have done with real orchestras and stuff. Because all that [in Carnosaur]? He’s generating all that sound himself, because in a Corman movie… he [Corman] would not spend money on having any live string players or anything like that. [He was] limited to what he could do with his synthesizers and everything, but they sound really good.
And yes, it combines these symphonic, Wagnerian moments with this very minimalistic kind of thing, and then with some more sci-fi strings and sounds… I’m glad you appreciate that, and I wish I even just had a clean version of both that and the Body Chemistry 2 score that he did, because they’re beautiful.
DC: One of these boutique [physical media] companies has got to get on it somehow. They got to contact the estate.
AS: One of these guys.
DC: [Carnosaur’s] score is fantastic. Love it. It lives in my mind rent-free. I have not heard anything like it since. Nigel Holton really had an ear for making very unique music.
AS: He really did. The fact that he could make scary music and really beautiful [music]. Like I said, I really thought he had a Morricone kind [of sound].
DC: For sure!
AS: He really could have done anything.
DC: I could see the Carnosaur theme next to The Thing’s [theme], or something like that.
AS: Yeah, you could!
There’s plenty more to digest in the upcoming PART TWO of this interview, so be sure to keep watch over that dinosaur highway! Coming soon!
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