MARCUS
KOCH

Like most people, Marcus Koch hates clowns, so it was only fitting that this fear of clowns be the subject of his first directorial feature.

Growing up a fan of 1980s gore specials, Marcus has created a nice career as a special effects artist, however it was upon meeting Joe Davison and collaborating on 100 TEARS where Marcus decided to go at it with directing. Telling the story of a maniacal clown wielding a large meat cleaver, the result is one of the bloodiest independent films released this year.

With the film recently completed and on its way to several festivals, Marcus took time to talk to the Crypt about making this film, collaborating with Joe Davison and Raine Brown, the challenges of both directing and providing special effects, working on the infamous NIKOS THE IMPALER, and why the giant meat cleaver in this Colonel's Crypt exclusive.

COLONEL’S CRYPT: What was it about 100 TEARS that interested you as a filmmaker to make this project?

MARCUS KOCH: I always wanted to do a clown movie. There’s something twisted and wrong about clowns. There’s a handful of clown movies out nowadays that I thought weren’t the way they should be done, so I felt “OK, I gotta do a clown movie.” I think they’re creepy as hell.

CC: How did you meet Joe Davison and what was it about his script that appealed to you?

MK: Joe and I had worked together with a friend of mine Chris Polidoro, who’s a special effects artist. He had brought me in on a zombie film called AFTER LIFE, a short film which was written by Joe wrote and he starred in it as well. That was seven years ago and over the course of the past seven years we’ve crossed paths, working on feature films that he’s acted in and I did the effects on. So we decided to band together to see what we could do. When Joe wrote the script, we hashed out some ideas back and forth and decided on a clown film. He literally sat down and wrote the script in four days and we collaborated. He would go “What do you think about this” and I’d say “No” but on something else I’d go “That’s awesome, let’s do this.” So after four days we worked out the first draft of the script.

CC: What was the budget on the film?

MK: Probably overall budget is now just pushing the hundred thousand dollar mark but we shot it for around seventy five thousand.

CC: How much of that was spent on the special effects?

MK: Probably about ten grand went to the effects. I grew up on horror films and gore films in particular, so I felt if you want to make horror you have to put the right amount of money in the gore.

CC: It’s a very gory film but I felt it was more of an over the top style of gore, especially with Gurdy the Clown holding a giant meat cleaver. Was that your intention?

MK: Definitely we wanted to do something over the top without it getting into comedy or slapstick. We knew from the get go that we wanted a clown. We didn’t want a rainbow wig or anything classic looking. So we thought OK what could a clown have that was scary as shit. We saw a Japanese cooking show where they had meat cleavers literally giant sized and we weren’t sure what exactly they were used for, maybe cutting a cow in half with one fell swoop. Imagine a clown running after you with that? So we intentionally went over the top in that aspect, with a lot of murder and mayhem thrown in.

CC: Was filmmaking your main desire or working on special effects?

MK: I had always wanted to be involved with horror films. As a kid I started making my own little short films mainly just to experiment with new special effects. I was blown away by some of the films I had seen and I felt it was fore me, I focused on special effects. I kind of became a filmmaker from the short films I had done.  The last film I had directed was ROT when I was 18. I just had this crazy idea with some gore moments, and from there on in I was focused on doing special effects for films. Ten years later I wanted to see what would happen as a director again with 100 TEARS, and in also handling the special effects, wanted to make something that was balls out gory.

CC: What were some of the films that inspired you as a kid?

MK: More fucked up films than horror to be honest. PINK FLAMINGOS, DESPERATE LIVING, a lot of John Waters stuff. Frank Henenlotter’s films also really got me because they were always funny with a tongue in cheek type of humor but there was that over the top gore, like BASKET CASE.

CC: Being a Long Island native, I’ve heard a lot about a film you worked on called NIKOS THE IMPALER.

MK: Oh my God. Have you seen it?

CC: I haven’t but I almost feel like I have because I’ve heard so much about it. How was it working on the film and how was it working on Long Island?

MK: Well working in New York was fun because the hotel we got put in was a strange experience. We got into the hotel late at night and we wake up the next morning and put the drapes open and we realized that we were right next to a cemetery. I felt that this was going to be an interesting two months and it was. Two months to shoot, Andreas Schnaas who did the VIOLENT SHIT films, and he’s like the German gore king, really over the top stuff. It’s low budget but it’s really crazy stuff. Probably the most hellacious, grueling, terrible, non sleep inducing two months I’ve ever taken. Really low budget but we had fifteen death scenes in the film ranging from cuts and bruises on someone’s face to full on bodies being cut entirely in half and heads were being removed in different directions. The many different ways you could cut a person’s face, we did. NIKOS ultimately the way it came out it’s like a really a tongue in cheek film. About halfway through the film it’s no holds barred. It goes from one thing to the next to the next filled with gore. Definitely have your friends over and watch it with a beer. I think you can rent it at 112 Video.

CC: Best video store on Long Island.

MK: We shot a few scenes there.

CC: Yeah, they are very lenient with allowing you to shoot. There’s quite a few films you’ve done effects work recently.

MK: I just completed a film called BURIAL AT SEA which should be out soon.

CC: LIVE EVIL?

MK: Ahh, LIVE EVIL. Jay Woelfel, the director, I had worked with him about five years ago on GHOST LAKE and did the corpse makeup for his film. A friend of mine who wrote it, Mark Terry, I went to high school with and he went to Los Angeles. Small world we live in, he hooked up with Jay and presented the script to him. I guess over the last year they’ve been shooting. They had come to the end and Mark wanted to add a few things to amp up the gore and had heard about 100 TEARS, and asked Jay if he could bring me out. Jay agreed and they flew me out. There’s a whole bunch of blood sprays, a couple of decapitations, a vampire gets his head cut off at the jaw line. I went out there for five days and just pretty much made a mess of everything. It was a great time.

CC: How did you get Raine Brown for 100 TEARS and what was it like working with her?

MK: Our executive producer Elmar Berger had suggested her because he lives in Germany and is part of Timo Rose’s group. They had just shot BARRICADE and he just said “We need Raine.” I hadn’t seen her in anything yet. Timo Rose sent me a copy of BARRICADE and after seeing her in it, I agreed with Elmar and went “OK, we have to have her in it.” She’s just amazing, she’s a little firecracker. She knows her stuff, knows her craft. She’s not a diva at all, she’s a total sweetheart on set. She’ll help out on everything, she’s really cool.

CC: How was working with Joe as an actor?

MK: It’s weird because we’ve become such close friends that we butt heads a lot because in this industry that happens, conflicting ideas. He wrote it and I’m directing it. I have my own vision and he has his own vision and occasionally we clash. We would have a couple of screaming matches where we hit middle ground and go “OK, we do it both ways.” Acting wise, he’s way more of an improv, he comes from a comedy background. As far as writing it and starring it, he’s not the best at learning lines. But as soon as you can get him to forget about following the script and just run with it, as soon as he does that, he’s really awesome. He pulled off some really funny stuff. He and Georgia together, she doesn’t come much from a comedy background as Joe does, but the two of them together have this instant chemistry. A lot of what you see, that interaction, that all just came about on set. I liked that ten times better than what was written on the script. It had a better feel, a better flow, and they were bantering back and forth about things.

CC: Their relationship was strictly professional, not personal?

MK: We decided early on we didn’t want to make them lovers. You can tell they love each other but they’ve been together for a number of years and they know each other’s habits. It’s kind of weird because you never have to go into “Are they together?” and they could be I didn’t feel it was important enough to bring into the storyline. Here’s two people who live together, work together, possibly have a relationship but they love each other and care for each other. They are more of a team.

CC: Being you shot 100 TEARS in High Definition, where do you see this technology within the next five years as an independent filmmaker?

MK: I think the line between film and video are blurring. There’s a new camera coming out that’s called “The Red” that’s supposedly the end all, be all camera for independent filmmakers. It’s not a cheap camera but it’s the closest you can get the film look on a video system. Five years from now, the cameras will only get better, but I think they’ll never get rid of film, because more than 90% of filmmakers are film purists so they’ll stick with the 35mm and 16mm films so I don’t think film is going to go away. I do think that video will be more widely accepted. It already has. If you look back to the mid to late 90s, all the home grown, shot on video films were really put down because of how they looked. Now, HD is more accessible for the independent filmmaker and getting more wide releases. The audiences are starting to accept it because television shows now are being shot on HD. People are OK with it and you’re not hearing “This is shit because it was shot on video” that much anymore.

CC: Where do you see the horror genre in the next few years?

MK: I think in the next couple of years, I came to this conclusion early on, and am happy to note that other people whether they’re talking about music, fashion, or in our case horror movies, things tend to move in a 30 year cycle. If you kind of pick up on it and think back 30 years, what was the big film trend of the mid to late 1970s, and it was the hardcore, gritty, real life, brutal filmmaking that was THE HILLS HAVE EYES, LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, LAST HOUSE ON DEAD END STREET, really violent, true life horror films. Thirty year cycle that’s back to what’s popular now, scenarios that can really happen. I was born in 1977 so I’m a little later and kind of missed that and I grew up with films in the 80s, where films were a little more wild, silly, weird, over the top, and those are the films I want to make. We’re coming onto the year 2010 and I think everything’s going to be right on target where that style of filmmaking will be back. I grew up on films like NIGHT OF THE DEMONS and FRANKENHOOKER, NIGHT OF THE CREEPS, that sort of fun style of filmmaking. Torture porn seems to be dying out. Monsters are fun, I’d like to see them come back, but one trend that I’m glad is gone is the Japanese ghost films. They were fun at first but after a while, just how many more little girls with black, stringy hair covering half their face walking around like they have Parkinsons can you make?

CC: What is next for Marcus Koch?

MK: I’m currently trying to get into pre-production on a film that I’ve been trying to make for a long time called BABY DOLL. It’s a horror comedy but very black, tongue in cheek comedy going back to FRANKENHOOKER and RETURN OF THE LIVING. It’s a movie about a dead punk girl, the afterlife and misadventures of a dead punk girl, and her crossing paths with the mob. Hopefully by spring I should get that rolling. It’s very gory but a lot of mortuary humor. If you mix SIX FEET UNDER, THE SOPRANOS, RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD, and SID & NANCY, you would get BABY DOLL. This week I’ve got to make a giant maggot for a music video in New York, a band called Technocult of Flesh. That’s this week’s project. I’m working on another film in New Jersey shot with Raine Brown called SCULPTURE. It’s about an art school girl and she plays the lead in it. I guess she’s trying to sculpt the perfect male, and little by little, she’s killing men and building the perfect sculpture. I just completed a music video for a band called Soulidium for the SAW IV soundtrack which is the biggest thing we’ve gotten to work on. The video should be appearing on the SAW IV DVD when it’s released.

CC: What do you hope audiences get out of 100 TEARS?

MK: Just a fun launch, gag at the gore. I wanted to do something different and tried to break the number one horror rule. I caught a lot of flak over this but whatever, it was an experiment.

CC: Was that revealing the clown very early?

MK: Yeah but there wasn’t really much to hide. You know, it’s a clown with a big knife, where do you go from this? I decided to open the film with showing exactly who your killer is and what he’s capable of doing. In the first fifteen minutes, about ten people die, and that sets the tone for the rest of the film.

CC: Thanks for your time and good luck with 100 TEARS.

MK: Thank you.

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