Carnies – Exclusive Interview

Staci Layne Wilson / Horror.com: I just love the title of this movie. It seems to say it all, but what's it really about?

Reggie Bannister: Well, Carnies is a 1936 period piece and we’ve been very fortunate because all our set stuff came from HBO's Carnivale.

Who would have thought, you know? And we have a costumer who is really great. Basically, it’s about a carnival that comes to town in this little dust bowl kind of town. I actually play a pretty hard assed cop/detective and generally when the carnivals came to town they would have to buy off the authorities, so I take a disgusting sum of money from them to look the other way… so that like their cooch girls and stuff can do a little bit more and basically all I’m trying to do is make sure that all the carnie stuff doesn’t spill over into my town. That’s all I’m really caring about. But what really happens is, these carnies start dying horrible deaths. So it’s kind of a thriller, mystery, and horror.

Staci Layne Wilson: How did this idea come to you, Brian?

Brian Corder: I actually did a music video about five years back and it had a circus theme to it so we kind of knew a lot of circus kind of people and as Reggie was saying, the set dressings came from Carnivale or they came from a woman who supplies a lot of circus type stuff and she was a friend of a friend so we had everything lined up and we thought, “What the hell, let’s make a full feature on something carnival related. ” So that’s it, I met Reggie Bannister and his wife, we worked on a film called Zombie Hunter, so we just got together [on this].

Staci Layne Wilson: And your wife is in this movie, Reg?

Reggie Bannister: Yes, she is. We all just kind of threw in, you know, I assisted Brian in directing and of course I’m in it with this Conrad Ellison character and then GiGi, my wife, she does special effects makeup. She’s a killer, literally. She did all the special effects makeup, and then she also was cast as the bearded lady.

Brian Corder: That’s great. That’s a hard one to play.

Reggie Bannister: It was tough. What was funny was she was sexy as the bearded lady. It was totally amazing. I thought Lee was going to go bonkers on her, that’s Lee Perkins This has been one of the most fortunate productions that I’ve really ever been involved with. We’ve got Doug Jones in there. We have Lee Perkins, myself, Dennis Gossett, Dave Markham who’s a sword swallower extraordinaire’ He’s a juggler, he throws knives, he’s a ventriloquist as well. He can blow fire. We have Mighty Mike Murga and he’s a fire eater thrower and he’s a little person, so he’s really heavy in this picture. We just got really fortunate. We’ve got snakes.

Staci Layne Wilson: There are a lot of dangerous things going on in this film obviously, so as the director, were you biting your nails to the quick every single day?

Brian Corder: No!

Reggie Bannister: No, actually he was trying to catch it on camera.

Brian Corder: I’m bad like that. We had a wrangler for the snakes so I wasn’t too worried about it they were so docile. And the fire, I’ve worked with Mighty Mike on many occasions and he’s a professional. He just got off a tour with Motley Crue so and that’s what he was doing five days a week. I felt pretty confident that nothing bad was going to happen.

Staci Layne Wilson: What's "bad" fictionally, in the movie?

Brian Corder: I don’t know if I want to tell you that. A guy gets his ear ripped off. That’s pretty grizzly and his throat cut. I won’t tell you who but that one’s pretty grizzly.

Reggie Bannister: Yeah, it’s pretty radical. Well, I got to tell ya that we would have a minor accident per day because we were out on uneven ground and there was always somebody that twisted an ankle going from point A to point B or they fell down at night because you had to have a light out there because it was really dark and as a matter of fact, your dad, who is a producer on the film, John Corder got a new leatherman. A leatherman is a tool that you really need on a set, it opens up and it turns into a knife, it turns into a like a pair of pliers, it turns into like an awl. It’s does all this stuff It’s got all this stuff It folds together like a Swiss army knife and John had just gotten his new leatherman, brand new and he was really proud of it man and he was showing it around to everybody and he was like working it and all of a sudden I see people running somewhere and I was like “what’s going in and they were like “John cut himself with his leatherman" and so we had to take John to the hospital and his hand is good now. But he had a pretty good cut. Seven stitches.

Staci Layne Wilson: That’s a memory that lasts forever.

Reggie Bannister: That’s a memory, yeah, absolutely.

Staci Layne Wilson: So what can you tell horror fans about this movie, because we don’t get too many carnival themed horror movies — I mean, there was Carnival of Souls of course, and there was the Vampire Circus.

Brian Corder: Well, Doug Jones calls it a relationship drama with a horror element and that’s the best way he can describe it. So its very character driven and it’s all set in a period time and the characters are all very colorful and then there’s grizzly deaths so you got horror element also.

Staci Layne Wilson: He’s not here today, but I hope you don’t mind my asking about Doug, because he’s such an animated person. What was it like to work with him on a daily basis?

Reggie Bannister: Oh he’s terrific. He’s just a wonderful loving guy. Funny story, when you see Doug with this snake. We put Doug through a couple of things that he wasn’t sure he could get down with you know. For one thing his name is Rattie and the reason his name is Rattie is because he catches rats for his snakes and he has one special snake named Queenie and he just loves her and he feeds her and he tries to find the biggest fattest rats for her.

Well, he doesn’t really like rats and he didn’t really want to have to deal with snakes, and so he actually thought that he was going to be able to play this character where he knew that he was going to have to deal with a rat because that was part of the script but he didn’t know that he was going to have to actually physically deal with snakes and he threw in and he found out that rats are okay and he really got to know this rat that we used and she was cool and then he really got to know the boa’s and the pythons and as you can see they loved him. [points to publicity photo] Yeah, they loved Doug.

Brian Corder: We actually finished filming this part and I turned around and Doug had the snake on his lap and so he got very comfortable with him and I was like “Okay Doug, we’re done with the snake,” and he’s like, “Oh, I’m okay.” I think he actually fell asleep.

Reggie Bannister: Yeah, he did. It was really far out.

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Visit the Official Carnies Movie Website here