As creature creator, director, and member of Canadian film production company Astron-6, Steven Kostanski is on a quest to bring nostalgia back to the hearts of ’80s and ’90s kids with his films. He meets with Horror Geek Life to discuss his experiences behind the scenes, and his new film, PG: Psycho Goreman.
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Horror Geek Life: Let’s start off with talking about Manborg, a super-solid low-budget adventure sci-fi film, and also your first feature film. When making Manborg, were you focused on eventually breaking into the horror genre from the sci-fi/adventure genre, or was that something that came later?
Steven Kostanski: I feel like working my way into the horror genre came more from working with Astron-6 in general, because I wouldn’t really consider Manborg in any way as a horror movie. I feel like there’s a lot of cross-pollination in the work that I do. I like all kinds of genres of movies. I love sci-fi, horror, and fantasy, and I love mixing and matching between those. My intention wasn’t really to break into anything, but to make my kind of throwback Empire Pictures-style movie and see what happens after that. With each movie, I find that by the time I’m done, I’m usually sick of that genre for a little while, then I go and do something totally different. After Manborg was when I dove into The Void with Jeremy Gillespie, then after The Void I moved on to Leprechaun Returns to do something a little bit lighter, and PG is its own thing too. I want variety. That’s my main thing.
HGL: I’ve got a funny story about Manborg. I had ordered the DVD from Astron-6 back in the day and was watching it on my old XBOX 360. Well, the system gave me the “Red Ring of Death,” and I couldn’t open the tray. I sent the system back with a note that said, “I don’t care if you have to replace the system entirely, but I want my copy of Manborg back. They ended up sending me a new system, and Manborg in a little envelope that said, “Here’s your Manborg back.”
SK: Haha, that’s amazing. I appreciate your concern over your DVD copy of Manborg. That’s very nice of you.
HGL: When I watched PG: Psycho Goreman, I thought we were getting a Bio-Cop origin story in there, but after going back and watching the short, that’s not the case. Being a fan-favorite short film of yours, is there any chance we’ll get a Bio-Cop feature film?
SK: Well, Bio-Cop IS in PG, right? So, there is that. As far as solo adventures of Bio-Cop, I would gladly do it. It’s definitely something I’ve been working on for a while, trying to crack what that would even be, but just getting distracted with other projects. It’s tough to really commit to that. As I’ve always said about that shorts, I didn’t want it to turn into an SNL movie where you realize after fifteen minutes, “Oh, this is the joke,” and that’s it and there’s no movie here. That’s why I put him into PG. I prefer him as a supporting character that just comes in and out, and I feel like I’ll continue to do that with him. I like the idea of just throwing that character into movies randomly. As far as a solo character, I don’t really know at this point, but anything is possible.
HGL: Astron-6 seems like a tightly knit production company. Does it feel more like a business or a family?
SK: I mean, it’s just a bunch of misfits who make movies. There is no rhyme or reason to any of it. No structure whatsoever. It’s not a business machine in any way. We’re just five guys that love making movies and we kind of just take opportunities as they happen. Chowboys was something we dreamt up one day and decided we had to go make a short film out in the woods together, so we went and did that. I don’t really know what the future holds for us. I’m certainly going to keep casting everyone in Astron-6 in all of my movies, and PG certainly has a lot of that flavor to it. It’s kind of just comes down to when we can do it.
HGL: Moving on to The Void, this movie constantly comes up when discussing the best practical effects in modern horror films. There is some truly terrifying stuff in there. How does it make you feel to be part of the elite in that area of horror?
SK: Haha, I mean it certainly is flattering to hear that. I speak for everyone on that team, we all had our own anxieties about the stuff in that movie. We were operating on a very low budget, so a lot of it came down to how well it was shot. It was a real testament to the team as well, and their ingenuity with not having a lot of resources to work with. Just because it was such a troubled production, I’m impressed that it resonated so well with people, and that the movie seems to be considered as pretty decent coming out of the other end of the hell that we went through to make it. So that certainly makes me happy. It’s a love letter to those types of effects-heavy movies, so the fact that people put it on the same pedestal as other true classics really means a lot to me.
HGL: I also want to bring up Leprechaun Returns. This is the only in-canon sequel to the original Leprechaun. Was it fun to get to continue the story, and was it weird to not have Warwick Davis there for the part?
SK: Definitely. When I first signed on to it, that was the first question I asked, “Is Warwick going to be there?” and they straight up said no, that they had asked him, and he said he wasn’t available. I could have bailed right at that moment, but I saw it as a challenge and an opportunity to make something work that my instincts were telling me shouldn’t work. Honestly, I had a ton of fun making that movie, and it really made me appreciate the Leprechaun movies even more. Not that I didn’t like them before, but it really opened my eyes to how big the fanbase is for those movies and being able to take a franchise like that and try to make something that respects the original while giving us a new adventure. I just wanted to take people back to the ’90s when we were just getting slammed with straight- to-video sequels all the time. That era of movies where every couple of years you had a new Hellraiser, a new Prophecy, a new Leprechaun. All I wanted to do was create a movie that I felt could sit on the shelf next to those other horror sequels, and I think I accomplished that for the most part.
HGL: Coming back to PG: Psycho Goreman, that movie was such a BLAST. How did you come up with that character and the story?
SK: I had the story bouncing around in my head for the longest time. So, I was watching Rawhead Rex and I started riffing on the idea of “What if you mashed the concept of this ancient evil monster being resurrected, with tropes of a kid’s adventure movie?” Once I settled on that, I started playing with these ideas and seeing how those two genres were at odds with each other, and how that juxtaposition was a good source of comedy and telling the story in an interesting way. It was kind of satisfying all my horror, sci-fi, and fantasy urges, but also bringing humor and heart to it. That’s basically where the idea came from.
HGL: It made us feel like kids again. It was like all the Power Rangers, Krull, and Masters of the Universe monsters all coming out at once. Did you do the monster designing and were there inspirations behind them?
SK: Yes! My main inspirations were Japanese Sentai shows, so Power Rangers would be kind of the starting point of that but building onto it with stuff like Kamen Rider or movies like Mechanical Violator Hakaider, which were big inspirations for me. I just really love that style of creature design, and the way those suits look in Japanese cinema and TV, where it’s not so much about realism, but having a certain style and quality to them that I really like. So, a lot of the creatures in PG that have that style. I wasn’t worried about making them look hyper-realistic, but more about making them interesting and giving them as much personality in their aesthetic as possible. If you see still pictures of every one of the creatures, you can kind of feel what their vibe is. This was a departure from something like The Void, where I feel like those creatures and all the movement and transformation with them lost that. With this, I wanted to take a step back and make something standing right in front of you that invokes a certain feeling of alluring, enticing, cool, and interesting sci-fi creatures, but also making them unsettling and make some of them a little creepier looking, too. I wanted to straddle the line between horror and fantasy-science fiction.
HGL: There were so many cool looking characters. We were very impressed with them!
SK: Thank you! It was a lot of me pulling ideas from the back of my brain that I had set aside for other things that I didn’t see happening any time soon. That’s what gave the movie an eclectic quality, is there’s no real consistency with the characters. All the characters are wholly different than the others. That to me is what invokes those Sentai shows where they always have these creatures where every week is a new thing and is different from the last one. I just wanted every monster to have its own vibe and personality.
HGL: Did you do the filming during Covid? What have the challenges been there?
SK: No, actually, we finished filming right before Covid. I think the date was March 13th, 2020, when everything pretty much fell apart. Unfortunately, the premiere was canceled, and we had to regroup and figure out what we were going to do. So here we are, finally releasing it.
HGL: With it coming to VOD and Shudder, we have a feeling it’s going to take off like Turbo Kid did when it hit Netflix.
SK: Yeah, I’m hoping it reaches a big audience and finds the right people and invokes the feeling in them that they’re watching a movie from the late ’80s or ’90s. It’s very much a video store movie. I want it to be something that would sit on the shelf next to Krull. I feel like there’s an audience for that right now. I’m trying to fill a hole in the movie landscape right now that I don’t think anybody is filling, which is this kind of sci-fi-fantasy-horror-adventure type of movie. It’s a type of movie I’m not seeing anyone else do right now.
HGL: Well, you’re doing a great job of it. While watching all your films, they bring us back to being kids again and watching films like Krull and Neverending Story, and even though those films aren’t the most amazing Academy Award-winning films, they were just so fun.
SK: Yeah, and they were iconic! That’s another thing I feel like we’re losing. Iconography in movies is so important. The one I always use as an example is Phantasm. Those movies have such iconic imagery that everyone easily remembers them. I think it speaks a lot to the horror genre specifically. It’s all about these characters like Freddy Krueger or Michael Myers…
HGL: Or Leprechaun!
SK: Yes! Totally Leprechaun! It’s like these images are burned into your brain that you carry with you forever. So, I wanted to try and invoke that. Something you’ve never seen before, even though it has familiar flavors to it, but it’s still a new thing and something that stands on it’s own in the genre landscape. That’s all I want to do with my movies, is just make stuff that can sit proudly on the shelf next to these other franchises and other movies in these genres and is included with them like this was a video store in the mid-’90s.
HGL: Alright Steve, thank you for taking the time to meet with us today. We really appreciate it!
SK: Awesome! It was great talking to you. I hope we talk again soon!
PG:Psycho Goreman will be available on VOD and Digital on January 22nd, 2021, and will be available on Shudder. You can follow Psycho Goreman on Twitter @PsychoGoreman and Astron-6 films @Astron6. You can also follow Steven Kostanski on Instagram @kill_kostanski.
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