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| Dolly |
One of the best discoveries of Fantastic Fest and now screening as part of Halloween Frightfest, exuberant new slasher film Dolly is on a roll. It has been so successful, in fact, that when I connect with director Rod Blackhurst, he tells me that he’s been working on the prequel that very day. He’s now looking after an ailing child, but she seems happy to go and listen to Taylor Swift whilst we talk. There’s a poster from the film behind him and his face glows with happiness when he talks about it. I tell him that I just went to check some details on the IMDB and noticed that someone there had described it as ‘completely bonkers’. Is that what he was going for?
“Yes,” he says conclusively, then laughs. “The short answer is yes. The long answer is that it's really hard to get independent films made, and especially really hard in America to get independent films made. And I'll admit every day that every other Western civilisation supports the arts and creative enterprises and all that sort of thing. But really, when we first had the idea for Dolly, we were like, well, how can we tell something that's simple and is manageable to get made?
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| Rod Blackhurst Photo: Erik Tanner |
“That's hard because it's relative to the money you can find, but even back then, we said ‘Well, we've got all this thinking for a massive franchise, and we know exactly what Dolly is, where she comes from – but we'll start small and we'll start contained and simple, and we'll make it feel like a storybook and like this horror fable. And then when we can do this confidently, we'll build upon that.
“Every other piece of feedback we get is ‘Man, we want more. We want to know who Dolly is, where they come from, all these things. ‘ And right now I can just say ‘Don't worry, it's coming.’ I wish we could have done more with Dolly in this first film. But in time.”
We enter the film following young couple Maci and Chase, but true to form for this kind of film, it’s the antagonist who stands out. She could scarcely do otherwise, as she’s not only masked but is over seven feet tall and built to scale. How on Earth did he manage to cast that role?
“We knew we needed a gifted physical performer for Dolly. I live in Nashville, Tennessee, and one of my producing partners, Ross [O’Connor], lives here. One day, Ross saw a flyer at a business for a wrestling promotion for the National Wrestling Association, and there was this arresting image of a wrestler named Max the Impaler. And Max's wrestling persona, well, I mean, I don't know where one ends and the other begins, but it was so striking. I went online and said ‘Oh my gosh. This is who Dolly needs to be’
“I started trying to track Max down on all their social media, and they were not replying, and I kept badgering them. Eventually Max wrote back and I drove up to Kentucky to have lunch with them on a Sunday. We met at this pub in downtown Louisville, Kentucky. And Max said to me that their lifelong dream had been to be a villain in a horror movie. It was just kismet, right? This is what they wanted and this is what I wanted, and nothing else mattered at that point. We were just going to make Dolly together.
“Now Dolly is Max's character, and it makes me so happy. Like, truly. It's selfish in some ways. People that know me, and my friends and my wife, they know that all I want to do is take care of other people, maybe to my own detriment sometimes. I just want everyone to be happy and to get what they want. And it made me so happy when Dolly started screening at Fantastic Fest here in the States back in September in Texas, that I could just smile like a father in some ways, at the love that Max was receiving. It made me happy that I could do that, to feel that I helped this thing happen, that I could be the wish fulfiller.”
Max’s performance is more than just physically impressive, I stress. Although we see very little from Dolly’s point of view, we get a strong sense of who she is, and as in old monster movies, despite the awful things she does, there’s a sort of innocence about her. It’s easy to feel some sympathy.
“Yeah. Dolly earns your sympathy, right? And at the same time, you can also understand how you have two characters that have completely different goals and desires for what they're encountering. You have two people that are never going to be on the same page. Maci – Fabianne Therese's character – and Dolly. And then even inside of Dolly, without spoiling it, there is a very real big bad. There is a monster. The hope was that we could do something different at a base level. People started talking about Dolly – and I love it – as a new iconic slasher. And yes, that is a part of it, but there's also this other. There's something different here.
“I know that slashers historically have earned your sympathy. I mean, I'm not even going back to monster movies, but, you know, even Freddy and Michael and Jason – these are victims themselves in a lot of ways. Of course, the idea that hurt people is not new, but I really hoped that we could do something different inside of this and that you could still have all of these things that we love about the genre, but if we can make sure that you care about Dolly and you feel it, then we're going to be carving out our own lane. And that was always the goal.
“ Just wait till Dolly 2. Dolly 2 is a prequel. It’s all the mythology. Dolly's origins are something that is from a storybook and is wish fulfillment and is not like any of these other characters.
“I truly can't wait, because I'm a movie lover. I'm just a kid that got to make movies or. I grew up without a tv, but I loved movies and I love them now, and all I want to do is make them. And for the first time in my life, at 44 – I'm almost 45 – I've figured out a way to apply all these things that I love about stuff. Stories and books and literature and fables and nightmares and dreams and wishes and desires. And I've been finally able to figure out a creative thing that I can do to put that together. And it's the Dollyverse.”
We talk about the early scenes of the film, and a sign that the couple walk past when first entering the woods.
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| Dolly Photo: Fantastic Fest |
“I love the genre of horror movies and grindhouse,” Rod says. “We've put a couple details in Dolly that are a tip of the hat to a film that wrecked us all as filmmakers and as film lovers, which is, you know, Tobe Hooper's Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Ethan Suplee's character is called Tobe, spelled like Tobe Hooper. And right early on in the film, Chase and Maci, when they're going on this hike into the woods, they pass a sign that says ‘Scenic Overlook’ that way and ‘Hooper Mine’ that way. And this is the tip of the hat to Tobe Hooper, but also, I grew up near a mine in upstate New York that was called Hooper Mine.
“It was an old garnet mine. It had all these old cabins that were miner cottages, and as a kid I was terrified. I mean, I wanted to go there. and I was also equally terrified by it because it was like a ghost town. But all these details, all these breadcrumbs, all the dolls in the woods are part of the litany of breadcrumbs that I've left behind. These are little details that we'll pick up on later when we can. Sometimes we will connect a dot or two, but they're all there so we can come back to them and people will go ‘Holy smokes, they were future thinking filmmakers!’ I think if we do our job right as storytellers, we will have laid the groundwork here and we'll pick up on it later.”
There's a wonderful house that we find in the woods. Where did it come from?
“In the spirit of no money, no time, we built the interior of that house in an old perfume factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee,” he says. “And it's not real, it doesn't exist. But really the house looks incredible because of our production designer, Kyra [Boselli]. It's not a real place, but it's also untethered from time. Really, Dolly is going deeper into the woods to this otherworldly place. It's like a Grimm's fairy tale meets your nightmare. The house should feel like it's not real, but it looks real. I think that also helps explain to people that when they watch it, once they realise that, they go ‘Oh, that explains how some of this is possible.’ It's over the hills to grandmother's house we go. It's where Goldilocks is eating the food in the bears’ house. And that is Dolly.”
At first it seems like the couple are going to a cabin in the woods and something is going to happen there, I suggest. And that's one set of lore. But then we seem to shift into fairy tale lore because we are looking at an older set of stories that takes place in the woods where things are not tame and not understandable.
“Yes. That's exactly it. Our imaginations go to work there. It's otherworldly. I hope that's clear.”
We pause for a moment as his daughter comes through to get help with her earrings, and he explains that her older sister plays the child whom Maci and Chase drop off in daycare at the start of the film. Both girls are used to seeing Dolly’s image everywhere, he says. “There's a Dolly mannequin in my garage that we brought to a film festival recently, and they go down there and they say, ‘Why that Dolly down here?’”
Going back to what he was saying about parts of the film looking otherworldly, i ask about his lensing choices.
“The woods are disorienting generally,” he says. “And I think again, the inception of this idea was that scary things can happen during the daylight as well. It doesn't need to always be in the dark. And the woods feel like a labyrinth generally when you're off piste. Everything we did outside was just trying to lean into that and use that to our advantage.
“The camera language generally is awesome because of Justin Derry, our cinematographer. I can't take credit for the things he's doing. And generally I can't take credit for the things that most of my collaborators are doing. My job as a director is, you know, you have an idea, you know what you want to do and you communicate that to all these people who then are additive. They're making choices and doing things that I can't do. I'm not a production designer, I'm not a cinematographer. I'm not an actor. If an actor makes an incredible choice, that's them. I can give them my sense of something, or some framework and some guidance, but I can't make that choice for them. And the reason why they're there is because they're going to make it better than me.
“The camera language and the cinematography is that as well. It's Justin Derry, it's our gaffer, David Ryzner. They're doing things that I can't do.”
The same team will be with him on the sequel, and always, he says.
“We've now made so many movies together. We’re a band of weirdos, so I think we'll just keep it going. I've said this for a long time: find your friends and hold them tight. Right? It's like family, you know. The people that show up for you time and time again and realise that you care about them and want them around, it becomes a family. And creativity has always been that for me and filmmaking has always been that for me.”
It would be emiss to close this part of the discussion w8thout talking about the effects in the film, as there are some startling displays of violence, in particular, which viewers are unlikely t forget in a hurry.
“All the special effects make up is practical work that's done by Ashley Thomas and her partner Al [Solorzano],” he says. “They're just incredible. But the mask was created by Dan Martin, who is a legendary special effects mask creator in the UK. He's done. I mean, his filmography is insane. Again, it's a case of where you have something on the page, you write it, and then you give it to these collaborators and you talk about it, and then they come back to you with ideas and you go, ‘Yes, this fits in. Let's do that.
“Dolly had these guardrails of time and money. No time, no money. And I think one of the things we realised how to do is achieve all these practical effects at a very high level and make them satisfying. Now we know that, we can do so much more of them. So part of the challenge now is going well inside of the Dollyverse. We know we've got a vibe. We are a storybook. We're a fable. We're a horror fable. We have some base level human needs, desires and goals, obstacles to our characters. And now we know that, we need to make it funnier.
“Dolly's got something. Laughs and also gore. And it's got the fear and the dread. But we go ‘Man, we did that well. Let's just do it 500% in the next one.’ I have to give credit to our incredible special effects team. Not just Ashley now and the physical effects, but we had this VFX team, these three awesome guys in California that are just a small operation. They did a lot of things in the film to augment or clean things up, and you can't even see where one thing ends and the next thing begins. And that's just because they're awesome. Timothy [Hendrix], Adam [Miller] and Ethan [Feldbau], and they did all this incredible work on Everything Everywhere All At Once.”
He loves the fact that they were willing to work so hard on Dolly for results that became invisible, he says. It’s more impressive because of that, but tough to miss out on the praise that more obvious achievements attract.
We discuss the fact that his team seems to have made a breakthrough with Dolly, attracting a level of attention that their previous films haven’t got. He’s clearly delighted by this, but says that he doesn’t think of this film differently – they are all his children.
“You want to be a good parent and shepherd them and help them figure out their way. And some films have easier times and easier paths and connect differently with people, and I love them all the same. The thing I'm most excited about with Dolly is that I feel like some of these other movies that I've made, they're kids that you sent off into the world, and some of them ended up in toxic relationships and don't communicate with Mom and Dad at all. Some of them are too famous to remember to call or come back for the holidays. But Dolly is somebody that I can already tell is going to always answer my calls, always come back home to visit, and I'm going to know for a long time as they grow up.
“I couldn't be more excited because I've made a bunch of films and TV and produced a bunch of other movies, and I feel like there's a hole in my heart when they don't come back around or I don't get to know them again and again. Every other film has been like, you know, they get to 18-years-old and now they're out there in the world and I don't know them well anymore. Not in a negative way. Just like they're kind of not mine anymore. Well, Dolly is ours forever. And I think that we've really done a good job as a band of weirdo filmmakers to make sure that we'll get to know Dolly forever. As a fan, I'm just giddy that I get to engage with it more and I get to make more of these.”
